The night he accepted the Republican nomination for President, Barry Goldwater shocked mainstream political America by defiantly declaring “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
That was seen as shocking. Moderate Republicans like George Romney, then governor of Michigan, refused to support their party’s nominee.
They were even more shocked by Goldwater’s refusal to support the Civil Rights act of 1964. Goldwater said he was not a racist, but that he didn’t think the government had any right to tell other people that they had to rent housing or hire people they didn’t want to.
Most of his fellow Republican senators disagreed, and backed civil rights. That was a different era. Goldwater lost in a massive landslide, becoming the only Republican in history to lose Michigan by more than two to one. The lessons seemed clear: Americans wanted moderate politicians capable of working together for the good of the country.
Ten years later, Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill and Presidents Gerald Ford and later Ronald Reagan were good friends who bashed each other over politics during the day and then would have a drink together and play cards or talk after six pm.
They were gentlemen who saw nothing wrong with that.
Today, we are in a very different world. For many years, politicians of both parties said their first priority was the national interest, whether they really meant it or not. You had to at least say you would put the interests of the people and the country ahead of politics.
Few Republicans even pretend to do that anymore. Egged on by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Republican leaders openly said their first priority was to discredit President Obama and make him a one-term President. Obama tried for months to get a single Republican vote for the Affordable Care Act, and failed. Today’s Republicans don’t believe in bipartisan cooperation.
We saw much the same thing in Michigan during the Granholm administration, when the state twice went through brief shutdowns because Republicans in the state senate refused to compromise on passing a budget. Today, Democrats control nothing in either Lansing or Washington, and except on rare occasions, there isn’t even a pretense at bipartisanship.
I don’t see how this can be healthy for the country. But what’s worse is that today’s Republican leadership seems to lack both ideological consistency and any sense of integrity.
They seem mostly unwilling to confront a president who lies constantly, and belittles people and calls them schoolyard names, including Republicans like Senator John McCain.
This is not how leaders are supposed to behave. I will never forget the day when a group of elder Republican statesmen, including Barry Goldwater, went to see Richard Nixon and told him he had lost the support of Congress and that he needed to resign,
That was a brave, risky and principled thing to do.
During World War II U.S. Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan announced that his earlier isolationist views had been wrong, and at a conference on Mackinac Island, helped national Republican leaders see that they couldn’t escape dealing with international affairs.
That was true leadership and statesmanship, something that is in far too short supply in both parties today. For Superstation 910 AM, I’m Jack Lessenberry.
