Redstate

By Martin A. Knight Posted in ben nighthorse campbell | flip-flops | Mitt Romney | Republicans | Republicans | richard shelby — Comments (22) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

In the aftermath of 1994, in fact the day after the Gingrich/Barbour led Republican Party's recapture of the House and Senate after forty years in the wilderness caused Peter Jennings to chide the American people for having a temper tantrum, an eight year veteran Democratic Senator announced his defection to the GOP. Richard Shelby had been a Democratic Congressman for eight years before he defeated Republican Senator Jeremiah Denton (the very first elected Republican Senator from the state of Alabama since Reconstruction) in the elections of 1986.

In contrast to the way the New York Times would greet the defection of James Jeffords from the GOP to the Democrats i.e. "A Profile in Courage" seven years later, the Gray/Blue (i.e. Democratic) Lady's title for the story of Shelby's move across the aisle was "A Profile in Opportunism."

In March of 1995, another long-term Democratic politician, also a Unites States Senator traveled Shelby's path to the other side of the aisle. Ben Nighthorse Campbell had served four years as a Democratic member of the Colorado General Assembly, six years as a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives and two and a quarter years as a Democratic Senator before becoming a Republican.

Both these men ran for re-election in 1998, the first time for the both of them running under the Republican banner. Richard Shelby was very conservative even as a Democrat so he was more than tolerable to even those Republicans who resented him for defeating the staunchly pro-Reagan war hero that was Senator Denton in 1986. So, despite the Democrats' vow of vengeance for his defection he won re-election with 63% of the vote.

Campbell was another matter altogether. As Vincent Carroll wrote in this National Review article in late 1997;

Campbell voted for the Clinton tax hike of 1993, praised the introduction of ClintonCare, and generally could be counted upon to smear anyone to the right, say, of George Bush [the elder] as a "kook" or "extremist." Indeed, insofar as Campbell has never been identified with any of the pressing concerns of the wave of Republicans who took over the Capitol in 1994 - welfare and tort reform, wholesale budget cuts, devolution of authority to the states, etc. - his decision to switch parties was, and remains, a puzzlement.

And even after his switch, a year later he voted for an increase in the minimum wage, voted in favor of abortions abroad being funded with American foreign aid dollars and expressed some significant support for racial preference policies. But all that said, he had switched, he was the incumbent and he wanted to run for re-election as a Republican. More interestingly, he faced a challenger in the Primaries in the far more Conservative (even if mildly pro-choice) and trustworthy Republican Rep. Scott McInnis.

Ultimately, the party leadership (including quite a few movement conservative leaders) prevailed on McInnis to drop his bid to challenge Campbell, and Nighthorse went on his merry way to trounce his Democratic opponent with an eeriely similar (to Shelby) 62.5%. The logic, as National Review columnist (and former New York Times reporter) Clifford May, then the RNC's Communications Director pointed out;

The big point is that if a guy switches from the Dems to the GOP and then gets kicked in the head in a primary, what does that say to the next guy who may think about switching?

As it turned out Campbell didn't get kicked in the head and it turned out pretty well for the GOP and Conservatives. Campbell's lifetime ACU rating as at his retirement may be an anemic 55%, but that is colored by his eight years in Congress as a Democrat. Despite his remaining something of a moderate (in the Giuliani, not Whitman sense), starting from 1995, his rating went up from an awful 24% in 1994 to the high 50s and onward until it settled into a high 80s average in the last six to seven years of his Senate career. There was even a year where he scored a full 16 points (80% - 64%) above Conservative all-star Wayne Allard.

Well, that's it for the background history lesson. The main point of it is that today I am wondering, how these two defectors from the Democrats to the GOP, especially Campbell, would have fared in the age of YouTube and blogs where Shelby's many statements and ads in his race to displace Reaganite Jerry Denton, and Campbell's pre-Republican heresies against conservatism and attacks on Republicans, could have been disseminated throughout the Dextrosphere for our outrage, shock and horror.

I guess I am a little non-plussed at how these two gentlemen were welcomed with open arms by the Party leadership and the rank and file (judging from their general election victory margins in a year in which Republicans posted up net losses), despite years of being actively (in both word and deed) on the other side, defeating good Conservative candidates and voting for liberal legislation. Arguably more deserving conservative Republicans of long and good standing were available to run for those two seats. And furthermore, the timing of their defections could not have possibly been more arousing of suspicion. Yet they were accepted.

Contrast this with the unrelenting vituperation and outright hostility that greeted and continues to attend the candidacy of a man whose every foray in electoral politics was as a Republican in a state where Ted Kennedy's victory margin would only go down by a maximum of three points if he was caught in bed with both a live boy and a dead girl because the alternative is a {gasp!} Republican. Not that it matters, but not only has this man spent his entire political career as a Republican, every single politically inclined member of his family, father, mother and sister have only ever been Republicans.

Personally, I don't really believe that there's any significant number of base Republicans whose opposition to Romney is based on an anti-Mormon animus. I choose to believe that the reason given by most is the actual reason; he's a "flip-flopper™" and they don't "trust" him. That's all well and good. But that still does not explain the seething antipathy that characterizes anti-Romney posters on this and other sites where conservatives gather. The idea that a person is to be reviled because he has loudly and openly adopted positions you are in favor of at a "too convenient" time is not exactly a recipe for encouraging more people to make the same journey at any time.

To those who say that this hostility (distinct from warranted suspicion) is warranted because Mitt Romney's positions on one or two issues were different in 1994 and 2002 (when he ran a more conservative campaign), I point to Senators Shelby and Campbell - there's no "flip-flop™" more profound than defections, and both of these men did make that leap, and yet less than four years later faced not 5% of the ever-present and unrelenting hostility from the base as Romney has faced since the moment he announced his candidacy nearly eighteen months ago. No large groundswell of the Alabama Republican rank and file stood up in arms citing the Democrat's very own New York Times' bitter "Profiles in Opportunism" article as a pillar upon which to oppose Richard Shelby the way so many Republicans have taken to heart material from the Massachusetts Democratic Party's Office of Opposition Research i.e. the Boston Globe.

Now a lot of people would point out that this is the Presidency, not the Senate where one would be one of a hundred, and that Romney should spend more than three years as a full spectrum conservative before aiming for the White House. I don't particularly find this that convincing - particularly since a lot of the people who make this argument are numbered among the very same people who expected Republicans of all stripes to mourn the loss of Lincoln Chafee since his victory would supposedly (unwisely assuming he would not defect) have allowed the GOP to retain control of the Senate. After Jim Jeffords' jump, and the losses of 2006, we all know how important just one Senator can be.

On this same track of thought is that many of these same people have argued that conservatives should be more tolerant of those Republicans who so often fail to toe the party line, both while campaigning and in office, if they happened to represent the Bluer states and districts in Congress. So where's this same tolerance now for a guy who ran in a Blue state, and is toeing the line? Romney ran both of his races in Massachusetts - not Colorado, not Alabama, not even New York - Massa-freakin'-chusetts. As a Republican in a state where being a Republican ranks not much higher than being a pedophile. If he was truly the politically unprincipled power-hungry opportunist so many of his Boston Globe quoting critics claim he must be (supposedly much more so than Senators Shelby and Campbell), why did he not take the much easier path and run as a Democrat?

What is striking here is that the tolerance and understanding the base is often urged to extend towards Republicans like Snowe, Specter, Collins and even Chafee is so well nigh absent in the case of Romney. More interesting is the ignoring of the fact that not even Reagan, facing a near uniformly hostile state Fourth Estate, a 137D to 19R State House, a 35D to 5R State Senate, a 7D to 1R "Governor's Council" to assent to every nomination before it proceeds to the 87%D Senate for confirmation, and a State Supreme Court with a long standing very liberal judicial activist majority, could have produced a more conservative record as Governor.

Instead, a lot of people that I'm reasonably certain can without any trouble point out the distinction between a broad based tax hike and the raising of service fees to bring them in line with inflation and the cost of providing and administering those services are now completely unable to figure out the difference. Romney signs a law abolishing/easing three of the toughest-in-the-nation burdens placed on gun owners in Massachusetts and a guy here (Centerfire, I think) denounces what is a clearly pro-gun action because a majority of General Court Democrats were in favor of it (having such a supermajority by definition means bills only pass with majority party support) - given that Romney's three immediate predecessors as Governor of Massachusetts failed to somehow have this bill sent to their desks, I still don't understand the logic behind it. Romney vetoes a bill that appropriates Massachusetts taxpayer dollars for Embryonic Stem Cell Research and the reaction is that he faked it.

To the pained shrieks and outrage of the Massachusetts and national media, he cajoles and harangues a reluctant Democratic supermajority until they are forced to take the steps as demanded by the Massachusetts Constitution to place the Goodridge decision before the voters, and of course, this is supposedly overshadowed by his campaign for the Senate 14 years ago. He used his veto 800 times, mostly on fiscal grounds and, of course, because his vetoes were overridden (137D to 19R - 35D to 5R), according to the same critics, he is a confirmed fiscal liberal. Another guy here offers the argument that since Romney publicly expressed sympathy (which I believe most have) for the plight of illegal immigrant children, he was in favor of in-state tuition for illegals. That Romney actually vetoed a bill enacted to effect in-state tuition for illegal immigrants was not enough to prove the opposite.

On immigration, Romney is reported as having said that the stated goals of John McCain's immigration reform plan "sounds reasonable." But this was before Ted Kennedy and McCain went crazy and added in so many happy fun Left-Wing goodies; in-state tuition, family re-unification, *wink* fines *wink*, Z-visas (to be issued without fail in 24 hours even if a background check is not yet complete), etc. The bill acquired so many unsavory features as it made its way to the Senate floor that it was an entirely different from what it started as. But of course, since Romney is Romney, his support for one bill and opposition to another is a "flip-flop!™."

The thing one notices is that practically all of Romney's supposed wrongs and heresies are no more than rhetoric from his campaigns in 1994 and 2002. But when you look at his deeds as Governor, I repeat that I doubt anyone would say that even Reagan could have done better in a state as Blue as Massachusetts. What makes this even more interesting is that Romney ran in 1994 on much of the same agenda items, holding the same positions as Newt Gingrich's Contract With America, only stripped and shorn of its Republican identity and origins as is generally necessary for a Republican to remain a viable candidate in Massachusetts. The infamous 1994 flyer is here ... note that the only place where he deviates from the standard issue conservative is abortion - and note that he was already talking tough on illegal immigration in freakin' 1994.

This is why I continue to wonder if Richard Shelby and Ben Nighthorse Campbell would have survived their party switches if YouTube and blogs were around in 1998. Shelby and most especially Campbell were not known for the lack of purple prose they leveled at Republicans in both the House and Senate as Democrats. Campbell even voted for HillaryCare. In 1998, both had been Republicans for less than four years, after we had won the majority. I doubt the Romney critics who go back fourteen years to look for reasons to attack Mitt Romney as the greatest "flip-flopper" in the history of mankind would have thought anything of going back just four in search of material so they can say to much fanfare that "I can't trust Nighthorse/Shelby. I have no idea what he really truly believes."

What I am saying here after all this verbiage is that I believe that the vast majority of the anti-Romney folks on this site (and others) were never open to him in the first place. And this includes most of those who claim that he "lost" them over this or that issue since the start of the current campaign - they were in reality waiting for the slightest misstep or imperfection to support an already held conviction.

Ultimately, while Romney has more than his share of faults (especially in the negativity of his campaign earlier on), for his critics it was more of a case of giving a dog a bad name and hanging him. Consequently nothing the man did was ever not for some nefarious reason, everything he said was pre-concluded as false. His chances as a general election candidate have been rubbished each and every single day based on the same type of too-early polls that in 1980 showed Reagan losing to Carter by double digits. Any minor change of emphasis or non-substantial difference from one speech to another was designated a "flip-flop!" and highlighted as another example of why Mitt was the slimiest thing since toad [expletive deleted].

Quite frankly, I think the hyperbole (e.g. "to the Left of Kennedy") crossed the line into falsehood all too often. We had people accusing him of running on positions he never held, changes in positions ("flip-flops™") he's never changed, interpreting the most innocuous statements specifically to divine whatever meaning necessary to effect the discovery of another "flip-flop!™" Worse is that the newer McCainiacs are no longer content to attack Romney - they're (especially this Moby numbskull) going after his family. Almost as bad is seeing Republicans denigrating a business career that is everything we supporters of free markets have always claimed to admire.

Call this whining or whatever. This is not going to have any effect on tomorrow's voting. I just want to highlight the fact that we once treated two defectors, who came to us in more suspicious circumstances, a great deal better than a person who was with us and carried our banner when they were still Democrats, and in a state that was a great deal more hostile territory than Alabama or Colorado.

I blame YouTube ;-)