What happened to my Republian Party?
In the spring of 1989, I was a Coast Guard lieutenant commander serving in the White House Military Office. My duties involved serving as the White House interface for several highly classified national security-related programs; including one that was receiving (much deserved) scrutiny from both the Administration and Congress.
President George H.W. Bush’s administration, prudently, appointed a panel of “wise men” comprised of five of America’s most distinguished former public servants to review this program. I was appointed as the panel’s executive secretary.
One of the members was the former Sen. Edmund Muskie, a kind, humble, patriotic, and brilliant man. One day, I was asked to take Muskie to a classified location in the Western United States. Aside from the flight crew, we were the only passengers on the sleek USAF G-3. Flying home that night, Muskie and I faced each other over dinner (and several glasses of wine).
I was a former Democrat who had registered as a Republican in 1980. Ronald Reagan’s candidacy spoke to me, and I never dreamt that one day I would serve in his White House. The child of Boston Democrats, I felt that the Democratic Party had drifted too far from its core principles.
Perhaps it was the wine, but at one point during my dinner discussion with Muskie, I foolishly asked him: “What happened to the Democratic party of my father?”
He was not amused and proceeded to tell me exactly where that party had gone. It was a humbling, yet instructive, dissertation on political parties that I shall never forget and for which I have always been grateful. The late senator gracefully forgave my temerity.
Having served in two Republican administrations and on the presidential campaigns of U.S. Sen. John McCain, I remained a faithful member of the GOP until February 2017.
Looking back at my long-ago disillusionment with the Democrats over mostly policy differences seems quaint when compared to the full-on revulsion I am experiencing with the GOP. This is a party that used to stand for something other than blind loyalty to a twice impeached president who sought to overturn a legitimate election and who was the catalyst for a bloody assault on our Capitol — examples abound.
The once most powerful GOP member of Congress, Sen. Everett Dirksen, joined hands with his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Mike Mansfield and co-sponsored the Voting Rights Act. Richard Nixon created the EPA. George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Presidents of both parties have been extraordinarily effective in comforting the nation during periods of tragedy and loss. Reagan’s pitch-perfect remarks following the loss of Space Shuttle Challenger, Barack Obama following the Sandy Hook shootings, and George W. Bush “on the pile” at Ground Zero spring to mind.
Donald Trump made no such effort with COVID.
Today’s GOP wants to “paper-over” the malfeasance and nonfeasance of a president who repeatedly lied to us about a pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 Americans and who created a culture among many of his followers that made a mockery of sound public health policies such as mask-wearing and social distancing.
The GOP once stood for strong national defense and respect for the rule of law. Today, party leaders make a pilgrimage to Mar a Lago to curry favor with a former president who ridiculed our intelligence community, abused our FBI, abandoned our Kurdish allies in Syria, and defended Vladimir Putin’s interference in the 2016 election.
President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan is far from perfect. However, it is a good first step in helping our nation return to something approximating normalcy. More than 76% of Americans support it. Yet, it passed in the Senate without a single GOP vote.
I wonder if there are lifelong, indeed generations-long, Republicans who are now asking “What happened to my Dad’s GOP?”
I wonder what happened to the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Reagan, Dirksen, McCain, and the Bushes. Today’s GOP is a shadow of its former self and continues to cleave to an orthodoxy of simple blind loyalty to one man and to his intractable base. Some of its leaders still refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 election and attempt to trivialize the atrocities of Jan. 6.
What happened to that party? Unfortunately, there is no Ed Muskie around to explain what happened.