GOP Establishment attacks Senators Lee and Cruz

Ronald Reagan governed with bold colors, pointing out the differences between Republican and Democrat visions, and liberty versus Communism visions. Jeffrey Lord writes:

Reagan politics are nothing but the politics of the happy warrior – optimistic, upbeat and determined.

Lord points out that we are now seeing

the opening round in the next two years’ worth of assaults on Reagan Republicans by status quo Ford/Bush Republicans. These are the representatives of what Reagan used to call the “fraternal order” Republicans, the people who prefer for reasons as much social as political to advocate for the Democrat-lite position that has wound up over the decades proving itself to be both a governmental and political disaster.

He shows how defeated Republican moderate Senators Sununu and Bennett are attacking Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee:

The Cruz action last year that led to the Obama shutdown was, claimed one Establishment Republican after another, a disaster from which the GOP would not recover. Yet this fall conservatives swarmed to the polls electing the biggest House GOP majority since 1928 and re-taking the Senate with nine new GOP senators. The Reagan-style message Ted Cruz has been sending was received by voters. But not by John Sununu.

This is the exactly the same mentality that Ronald Reagan himself challenged throughout his political career. In the day, as with Ted Cruz and Mike Lee now, Reagan was pilloried as an extremist. As late as March of 1980, ex-GOP President Gerald Ford, the epitome of the Establishment Republican, was telling the New York Times Reagan was too extreme ever to be elected president. Suffice to say, he was not just wrong but humiliatingly wrong. It stung, too. Ford insisted in 1976 only a GOP moderate like himself could defeat Jimmy Carter. Ford lost. Four years later in 1980 Reagan conservatism carried 44 states. As would later surface in a posthumous book of interviews with Ford by former Newsweek reporter Tom DeFrank, Ford had “contempt” for Reagan. Shades of Jon Huntsman Sr.’s feelings for Mike Lee.

So as America heads into the Christmas holidays, here we go again with attacks on Reagan conservatives like Ted Cruz and Mike Lee by the GOP Establishment. One would think that by now the Sununus, Bennetts and Huntsman Srs. of the world would have learned that the politics of timidity and defending the status quo are, as mentioned, not merely political losers but devastatingly bad government. Embarrassingly, apparently not.

Read more here.
Thanks to Christopher Buckley