#36
View attachment 440634
Fall, 1983
Bob Dole’s chief aid knows his boss wouldn’t want to have this conversation on the Hill. He's asked the senator to join him for a walk instead. The trees are lovely this year.
“Senator, we can do this.”
“No, Walt.”
“Anderson is weak where we’re strong. We could beat him.”
“And he’s strong where we’re weak. It’s not in the cards.”
“The party has gone off the rails.”
“The whole damn country’s gone off the rails, is what it is, Walt. Anderson’s not at fault.”
“If you were to run, the Conservatives would follow you back home. We could end this whole mess.”
“They made their bed, let ‘em lie in it.”
“Even if it’s bad for the country?”
“People like that don’t deserve to be in power. Normalizing that kind of behavior would be worse for the country than a few years of chaos. Besides, I’ve come to appreciate the market approach to some of his methods. He's really something of a stealth-capitalist, you know.”
“Capitalist?! Where in god’s name do you see capitalism in this mess? Education, housing, the environment...these are the largest scale social experiments seen since FDR.”
“FDR created layer upon layer of new bureaucracy. Anderson’s found a way to let the market talk. Look at what he’s done: there’s an evil in society; you put a dollar value on it. If people want to pay, you let them pay, they keep living how they want to live. Then you use that money to try to fix the evil another way. People willingly funding simple, streamlined, and usually state-run rather than federal programs to fix things. Less federal bureaucracy, more of the market talking and people listening. I’m starting to think the man is some species of genius.”
“He’s ruining the party! We’re nowhere close to where we want to be, sir. Federal spending is at an all-time high-”
“And every dollar paid for. The deficit is down.”
“Only because we failed on tax relief.”
“We gutted the code and put it back together again; you helped as much as any aid in the Senate. They weren't my kind of reforms, I'll admit, but I can see the result. We're revitalizing small town America, for god's sake. And don’t forget this president has simplified the tax code to a level not seen in decades. Loopholes closed by the dozen, everything clean and clear.”
“So we’re in favor of taxes now?”
He sighs. “No, Walt, I’m just playing devil’s advocate. We might rail against tax rates, but the new structure is doing what it's supposed to do. We might rail against increased social spending, but Anderson’s found the money in the budget and improved a lot of lives along the way. We can’t beat him with the base, anymore. Not in the primaries. Not with the conservatives voting elsewhere and Professor Harold Hill / George Christopher turning the whole party on its side. But even beyond that, you’re asking me to do something I could never do. I will not betray this president.”
----
Late summer, 1984
CBS Evening News.
“Welcome back to our coverage of the 1984 Republican National Convention. It’s been an interesting week here in Dallas so far, almost like seeing a new Republican Party emerge for the first time. One of our correspondents likened the experience to watching the opening credits of the Six Million Dollar Man.
“In many ways, the convention is trying to tell the country a story; a story of a party that lost its way, took some desperate shocks, and has emerged, within the context of the Anderson presidency, humble and ready to serve, in the process of proving their trustworthiness to the American people.
“But it’s a story of a party remaking itself in another way. Between the Conservative defections in 1980, the election whirlwind of 1982 that saw so many incumbents lose their seats, and more than three years of the liberal Chairman George Christopher managing the national party, this is a Republican Party that looks and talks very differently from that of just a few short years ago. The new center of gravity is squarely in the middle of the political spectrum, with an increasingly anemic conservative wing remaining.
“A CBS poll of the delegates finds that fully one-third joined the party since 1978, when many political scientists say that leftward drift of the past 20 years began to really pick up steam. And one in four delegates admitted to having previously voted outside the party at least once in the last ten years.
“One thing’s for certain: if the president is going to win in November, he’s going to need those moderates who crossed party lines to join him as members of the new GOP.
“We’ll be back with more coverage, including tonight’s keynote address, right after these messages.”