Nothing new about this tactic

By: Phil Brennan

In their best let’s-you-and-them-fight mode, the bought-and-sold Obama worshipping mainstream media is advising the Republican Party to surrender to its tiny left-leaning wing they call the moderates and allow them to set the GOP’s agenda.

This would render the majority of Republicans who are firmly in the conservative camp powerless and without a voice which is the mainstream media’s goal. A united GOP in fighting mode is their worst nightmare. Splintering the Republican Party is what the argument is all about.

There is nothing new about this tactic and the moderate’s use of it. They used it back in the 60s when the moderates of the day were identified as the Rockefeller wing – a small minority confined mainly to the East Coast and headquartered in the governor’s office in Albany.

They were a tiny segment within the national GOP, seeking to use the Congress as the arena where they could have the most effect. In the House a small clique led by New York Representative Charles Goodell – a Rockefeller flunky – set their sights on Indiana’s Charles Halleck, the hard drinking minority leader, and a conservative who drunk or sober made life miserable for the Democrats majority, carefully choosing his targets and killing or drastically altering some of the worst Democrat-backed measures.

Coming off the loss of the 1964 presidential election and the feeling that the GOP needed a face lift, Goodell and his small coterie odd liberal malcontents drafted Michigan’s Jerry Ford, one of the most popular members of Congress as their candidate to replace Helleck. Clueless as to what it was all about, he allowed them to use him and they won and then took aim at the rest of the conservative leadership. That proved to be a step too far – the leadership was solidly entrenched.

So Goodell, at Rocky’s urging took aim at the staff level, seeking to put moderates into staff jobs and among other things demanded that I be fired. My boss, Rep. John Rhodes told them to go to hell but in the end they prevailed. I quit rather than participate in their agenda. Rockefeller stooges got key staff jobs And Goodell and company went on to set the party’s moderate agenda and allowed Lyndon Johnson to run circles around them. They forgot that you can’t fight something with nothing and the moderate agenda amounted to one big nothing.

In the wake of Nixon’s defeat in 1960 even though the GOP picked up 20 seats, the GOP presence in the House was vastly outnumbered with 263 Democrats and 174 Republicans. We were powerless. Or should have been. John Rhodes brought me on board to serve on the House Republican Policy Committee ’s staff of three and more or less turned us loose to do battle with the majority. For the next two years we were the voice of the GOP in the House and we saw to it that our voice was heard.

Using every tool we had to keep the majority on the defensive we used the weekly Policy Committee meetings as a platform to issue pre-written hard hitting attacks on pending Democrat legislation that got wide coverage. We used such guerilla tactics such as keeping the House in session overnight, keeping the fires burning by focusing on Democrat scandals and keeping them alive despite the media’s attempts to ignore or soft-pedal them. We sent press releases to the media in those districts help by Democrats in danger of being defeated in the next election.

When Bill Buckley offered me the opportunity to write a Washington column under the Cato byline, the leadership allowed me to accept the offer, giving me an opportunity to expose such scandals as the Billie Sold Estes case and later, the sordid Bobby Baker/Lyndon Johnson affair the mainstream media was trying to ignore, as long as I didn’t write under my own name.

I worked closely with the minority staffs of the various House committees, encouraging them to issue strongly worded statements attacking Democrat legislation then before their committees. For two years this badly outnumbered GOP minority exercised for more influence over legislation that their shrunken numbers should have allowed. It worked because we were solidly united despite moderate complaints.

At the staff level we had a group of hard-nosed conservatives in both houses that put their stamp on legislation and issues and finally coalesced to draft a reluctant Barry Goldwater to run for president. During the 1964 GOP convention muckraking liberal columnist Drew Pearson wrote that our group had captured the GOP in Congress and wrested control from the Rockefeller stooges. I’m proud to say he named me as one of their number.

If the Republican Party wants to win in 2012, they had better set their sights on 2010 and the Congressional elections and they must use the time before the congressional elections to savage the Democrats and their socialist agenda instead of playing the toothless moderate game. We did it in the 60s and they can do it again.

And they had better.

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Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Phil Brennan is a regular columnist for Ether Zone.
Phil Brennan can be reached at pvb@pvbr.com
We invite you to visit his website at Wednesday on the Web

Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact.

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