Republicans: In There Fighting

Republicans, at long last, were really in there fighting with tooth and nail.

There was only one problem: in all too typical, traditional style, they were doing all the righting among themselves, not against the Democrats.

In the depths of disaster, the big pitch of the party consensus was to remove not only Barry Goldwater but all of his henchmen from any position of power in the Republican hierarchy.

“This Goldwater ideology, the thing he called conservatism was beaten,” cried Kansas’ outgoing Republican Governor John Anderson, who did not stand for reelection. “It lost in every state. In the South, prejudice voted, not his philosophy, and in Arizona they voted hometown. These Goldwater people have got to roll over. They’re beaten.” Kentucky’s Senator Thruston Morton, a former Republican National Committee chairman who paid loyal lip service to Barry during the presidential campaign, said that if the Goldwaterites don’t get out of the way, “there probably will be some blood spattered around.” Avoiding Labels. Barry Goldwater did not appear to be at all anxious to remove himself from the pinnacle of G.O.P. leadership and influence. In a post-election statement, he made the point that “more than 25 million people” had voted “not necessarily for me, but for a philosophy that I represent, a Republican philosophy that I believe the Republican Party must cling to and strengthen in the years ahead.” Concluded Barry: “Being unemployed as of January 3 or thereabouts, I’ll have a lot of time to devote to this party, to its leadership, and to the strengthening of the party, and I have every intention of so doing.” Among moderate Republicans, there were all sorts of plans and plots to take over once again control of the party machinery -and philosophy. At the instigation of Idaho’s Governor Robert Smylie, Michigan’s George Romney, and Rhode Island’s John Chafee, the 17 Republican Governors and Governors-elect have tentatively scheduled an early December meeting to talk over ways of revitalizing the G.O.P. as a party of moderation, dedicated to peace, prosperity, private enterprise and individual initiative.

But there seemed to be no great degree of agreement even among the moderates themselves as to how all this revitalization should be accomplished. The reason was simple enough: the Republican Party no longer has any real sense of itself as a party; it is, rather, a conflicting conglomeration of ideas, ideals, factions, and personal ambitions. George Romney won in Michigan; but he not only refused to endorse Barry Goldwater, he refrained insofar as it was possible for him to do it from using the word “Republican” in any way. In a post-election statement, Romney called for “unity” and declared that he did not want to be known as a liberal-moderate. “I have undertaken to avoid labels,” he said. “I would like to have people judge me by what I stand for on specific issues. I would like to be as conservative as the Constitution of the United States, as progressive as Theodore Roosevelt, and as liberal as Abraham Lincoln.”

Spitting Match. Before Republican moderates undertake the bruising task of kicking Goldwaterites out of the party, they ought to reach some consensus on where they themselves stand. In the days immediately following the election, such a consensus was obviously lacking. One result was an unseemly longdistance spitting match between former Vice President Richard Nixon and New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller. In Manhattan, Nixon held a press conference, called for party unity and a moratorium on intraparty “backbiting,” then lashed out at Rocky for having given

Goldwater less than enthusiastic support, describing Rockefeller as a “spoilsport” and the Republican Party’s “principal divider.” Rockefeller was vacationing in Madrid, and the rain in Spain fell lightly on his pain. Nixon’s “peevish post-election utterance,” he replied, was “hardly calculated to advance” Republican Party unity. But Rocky also managed to put his finger squarely on the real Republican problem. “We don’t have a Republican Party right now,” he said. “We have 50 Republican parties.” Diddley-Do. The distance between the extremes of the Republican Party is no greater than it is in the Democratic Party. But Democrats have always been able to reconcile their differences in the name of the party-partly because those Democrats with some of the most backward principles have been the very ones who have continually won at the polls and provided the party with a power base for 100 years. Why Republicans don’t have this similar sense of party feeling has been debated for the better part of a century. One recent reason is that the only President the G.O.P. has had in the last 32 years, Dwight Eisenhower, was a great popular leader with very little sense of party organization.

As Alf Landon said last week, he was “a war hero who didn’t know diddley-do about politics.” At the moment, the G.O.P. is adrift, shorn of power and torn from its philosophical moorings. If it is to recapture power in Congress and the White House, it can do one of two things. It can permit itself to be captured by a magnetic leader who will sweep all before him, and pull a lot of Republicans in with him. Or it can develop, train and inspire thousands of candidates for all offices-local, state and national-who can honestly and conscientiously make “the party” a vital part of a trinity that includes principles and country.