Posted on 09/15/2012 10:03:20 AM PDT by Uncle Chip
My memory was different -- people I knew who voted for Weicker were usually Democrats or Independents or long-time ex-Republicans -- but it sounds like you know more about it than I do.
In any case, supporting a long-standing Republican Senator like Dick Lugar in a primary was very different from voting for an ex-Republican third-party interloper like Weicker in a general election. People form loyalties to somebody who's in office for a long time and they aren't inclined to throw him out because some newcomer claims to be more ideologically pure. The Murkowski case falls in between, as she bolted from the party after losing the primary.
Why would we want to say such an unkind thing about Dick Cheney?
That's what got me started. Making Cheney, who really was and is as much a part of the Republican establishment as Karl Rove or anybody else into some kind of maverick set off some alarm bells. Nobody disliked Cheney or looked down on him because of where he went to school. They had plenty of other reasons to dislike him. You may like Cheney because people you didn't like hated him, but that doesn't make him any less a "government guy" or GOP-elite man or any more of a populist or small government conservative. In any case, Rove of UUtah certainly isn't an Ivy Leaguer.
CT still has regular guys making jet engines at Pratt & Whitney, working rail yards in New Haven, sticking warehouses in Bridgeport. They would vote for a Ronald Reagan, but not a Mitt Romney.
Okay, but in the quarter century since Reagan left the scene there hasn't been anybody like him in politics. Every election, the real existing Republican candidates are measured against some non-existent hypothetical Reagan II and found wanting. You can dwell on the deficiencies of the actual candidates, but the fact that that ideal candidate never seems to show up is at least as important as the failings of the politicians who do.
Palin? Well, nominate her. If she wants to run. We'll see how she does and one way or another we'll get beyond some long-lived myths.
Richard Lugar, who was in politics my whole life and had a lifetime ACU rating of 77 was the kind of Republican I grew up with. If I lived in his state I probably wouldn't have bailed on him, certainly not over the long-ago Panama Canal treaty.
As for the "Law of the Sea" Treaty, isn't that like the "Kyoto Accords" -- something newspapers talk about that will never get passed by Congress? Voting for Lugar in the primary would have been a far cry from supporting a third party candidate against a Republican in a general election.
I didn't know all those details about Weicker, though for a while I could get Connecticut television. But maybe you can see some of the problems with the whole "GOP-e" model in John Rowland. Any Republican who could get elected in a state like Connecticut would eventually be a disappointment and a "disgrace" to many conservatives. That's just the way it is. All the criminal stuff was just icing on the cake.
The real limousine liberal Rockefeller Republican elite has either died out or left the party long ago. Any Republican who gets elected to a position like governor of a large liberal state is going to be seen as part of the GOP elite, whatever his or her roots.
As for Cheney, that's why I responded. By any standard Dick Cheney is a paid-up member of the Republican establishment. Certainly more so than Rove or Coulter or a lot of the other targets. But somehow he gets a pass.
My experience with the "fiscal conservative and social liberal" crowd was that they were never wedded to keeping the top tax brackets low, but were willing to see tax increases in the hope that they'd bring the deficit down. Certainly, the Warren Buffett-types, who did have Republican roots however far they strayed from them, do seem more than willing to increase the rates on themselves.
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