Republicans to the Right
SANDOZ, ROBERT
PREPARING FOR '76 Republicans to the Right BY ROBERT SANDOZ Washington The moderate (their definition) wing of the Republican party apparently is about to do what it customarily does at the...
...When it comes to pursuing Presidential nominations, the GOP moderates always live up to their name...
...Given half a chance, the moderates might yet line up behind a '76 Rockefeller Presidential candidacy...
...Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland has been sniffing in that direction lately...
...PREPARING FOR '76 Republicans to the Right BY ROBERT SANDOZ Washington The moderate (their definition) wing of the Republican party apparently is about to do what it customarily does at the approach of a Presidential election...
...What they are most unlikely to do is put their considerable popularity, prestige and political skills behind the candidacy of a single clearly liberal Republican...
...Besides, GOP progressives would not soon rally "round a Mathias candidacy...
...No matter that he has botched each of his Presidential runs, stretching back, it sometimes seems, to the early days of the Republic...
...In terms of electability, performance and Presidential potential, a handful are at least in the same league with Ford, Reagan, Henry Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, et al...
...The prospects include several governors and U.S...
...So influential, office-holding mods may belatedly latch onto Rockefeller or—depending on the polls and early primaries—they may go through the motions of recommending four more years of President Ford to the voters...
...The moderates are an even smaller minority among GOP politicians: To have any chance at all to elect a President of their choice, most of them would soon Robert Sandoz, a previous contributor, is a Washington-based writer...
...But Mathias, an admirable public servant, is not known for the brand of energy, ambition or tenacity a long-shot Presidential campaign requires...
...he first likes to test the wind, and test it, and test it While the moderates wait for Rockefeller, who is waiting for Ford's political base to further erode, Ronald Reagan will be out picking up convention delegates...
...Nevertheless, the Left side of the Republican party still claims and clings to him...
...Vietnam, Attica and New York's fiscal state are among the badges of Nelson Rockefeller's moderation...
...senators whose appeal to all kinds of voters has been demonstrated repeatedly...
...Anything before then resembling collective moderate action would be a historic event...
...The moderates are distressed to discover that the Gerald Ford in the White House is exactly the same Gerald Ford who was traveling the GOP fried chicken circuit all those years, preaching the gospel according to Grand Rapids, Barry Gold-water, Everett McKinley Dirksen, and Richard M. Nixon...
...Why anyone should be taken by surprise is a mystery...
...As long as Ford kept Nelson Rockefeller around, the mods could imagine that they were somehow represented at the top of the party and in the governmental decisionmaking process...
...It's called "Rockefeller to the Rescue...
...Why is Harold Stassen the joke...
...Rockefeller's withdrawal under pressure from the Republican Right kills that fantasy, but the mods are likely to replace it with an old favorite of theirs...
...Collapse...
...Rockefeller called the conservatives who forced his ouster from next year's ticket a minority within a minority...
...and perhaps one or two of them will enter the '76 race...
...Reluctant to directly challenge an incumbent President of their own party, unwilling to transcend their individual ambitions for higher office, the mods can be expected to fret and fume and flail away right up to the moment next August when Ford or Reagan is nominated for President...
...have to get together behind someone —some one...
...Rockefeller doesn't like to hurry things...
...They'll probably get that chance, but too late...
Vol. 58 • September 1975 • No. 23
