Reply #98: It is amazing that we even have to discuss bashing a dead man.

[DaveT]

It is like a time warp.

Ford is a link back to the Eisenhower Era for the GOP.

In those salad days for William F. Buckley's National Review, the modern "conservative" movement was born in frustration with the intellectual surrender to the New Deal that the Eisenhower Administration represented. Ike and Republicans like Ford believed that the "liberal" initiatives that were enacted in response to the Great Depression were a fait accompli, an aspect of a new national consensus about what kind of country we are. They regarded Republicanism as a better and more frugal way to manage the new Big Government and as a way to question and limit new Government programs.

Buckley and politicians like Barry Goldwater considered this an abject surrender of Republican principles. For more than two decades, they built their political strength and by 1976, the "conservative" movement came within a handful of delegates of tossing Ford out on his ass at the GOP Convention.

Since then, the nature of American politics has turned toward the virulent and the irrational -- a direct result of the right wing's contempt for the idea of compromise and consensus.



Ford's career in Congress included some cheap bullshit like his campaign to impeach William Douglas off the Supreme Court, but, in general, he was a guy who worked within the old Congressional system to pass legislation through the committee system of compromise and deal making. As his later public pronouncements indicate, he had no use for Slash and Burn politics -- for trying to destroy the opposition with accusation and invective.

That base line attitude about politics was banished from the GOP when Newt Gingrich woke up one morning to find himself the Speaker of the House of Representatives -- the position that Ford wanted, but could never attain playing by his gentlemanly rules.

Democracy absolutely demands the idea that we can disagree with each other without condemning each other as scoundrels, liars or traitors. Ford represents a GOP tradition that I sincerely hope can be revived -- he is a man you could respect while disagreeing with him

The unfortunate noise we are hearing that heaps invective on this dead man is an echo of the Gingrich game plan, which grew out of the Nixon campaigns, which drew their inspiration from Joe McCarthy. We can find fault with Ike and Ford for not smacking down Tailgunner Joe, Tricky Dick and Newtie within their own party. But their own record in public life shows that they really were different.

If we refuse to respect people we disagree with, we will suffer the same fate as Newt Gingrich -- who is now campaigning in New Hampshire on the premise that Bush just isn't tough enough on "terror."

To respect a centrist is not to become a centrist or to agree with a centrist. It is just the way democracy has to work.