The one-time Reagan speechwriter, longtime GOP supporter and Wall Street Journal columnist has over the years been many things for the Republican Party — apparatchik, cheerleader, gently guiding hand — and now, over a series of columns, she’s been forced to speak truth to power on how the GOP is no longer a “conservative” party. It serves some new god, but certainly it is no longer the party of Lincoln or Reagan. Or Nixon for that matter.
She keeps the pressure on the party she loves with today’s column.
Some excerpts:
The Democrats aren’t the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they’re finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They’re busy being born.
The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.
And,
“This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.