Washington's other newspaper can't even line a birdcage right.

At the Washington Post, history ends in 1964

By Richard A. Viguerie | 3/5/12

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza is a smart guy, so when he misfires as badly as he did in his March 5, 2012 column, “In GOP circles, some wonder whether the party needs to lose big to eventually win [1]” one can’t help but wonder whether if inside the liberal bubble of The Post’s newsroom, history has died, or if Cillizza intentionally chose to ignore the facts in order to manage a result – namely the nomination of moderate establishment Republican Mitt Romney.

Cillizza’s premise in the column is that when Republicans nationalize presidential campaigns and run as conservatives they are foreordained to lose -- because in 1964, Barry Goldwater ran as a conservative and lost.

The support for this argument seems to be the self-serving comment of an unnamed establishment Republican figure who warns against nominating a strictly conservative candidate (like former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum), and the assumption on Cillizza’s part that Goldwater’s opponent at the 1964 Republican convention -- New York’s liberal Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller -- would have done better against Lyndon Johnson in the ’64 general election.

Neither of those points is borne out by Republican success or failure in campaigns since 1964 or the dynamics of the present campaign.

As I pointed out in a recent column, since 1964, social conservatism has a winning track record for the GOP.

Just as a reminder to the history challenged writers at The Washington Post, as conservative writer and former Reagan official Jeffery Bell noted, social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964. The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. When social issues came into the mix (starting with the 1968 election), the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.

Cillizza’s claim that Republicans showed they learned their lesson and “nominated establishment favorite and political pragmatist Richard Nixon” in 1968 flies in the face of history and Nixon’s central campaign theme (that he represented the “silent majority” of socially conservative Americans of whatever economic circumstance).

Far from running as an establishment-type Republican in the 1968 campaign, Nixon praised the “forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators” [2] -- hard-working, tax-paying Americans whose values were under siege by antiwar protesters, urban rioters, criminals and antipoverty liberals.”

Even more egregiously, Cillizza ignores the two victories of Ronald Reagan (the first against determined establishment Republican resistance in the primaries) that proved the viability of establishing a conservative governing majority in this country.

But one need not go back to Reagan to find elections that show the faults in Cillizza's logic. In 1994, the GOP took control of Congress for the first time in 40 years, campaigning as conservatives opposed to Bill Clinton's big government policies.

And more recently, the 2010 “Tea Party election” was run on a platform of small government constitutional conservatism--the core principles of the Tea Party and modern movement conservatives.

That election saw Republicans running on a conservative agenda gaining 63 seats in the House (the largest turnover of the House since 1948) and six seats in the United States Senate. Perhaps even more importantly, a stunning 721 seats in the various state legislatures shifted into Republican hands, the largest turnover in U.S. history, granting Republicans control of 25 of this country's legislatures (compared to the 15 controlled by Democrats, and the remaining being split). After the 2010 Tea Party election, Republicans also held 29 governors' mansions [3].

As one might expect, the column also ignores the abject failures of establishment Republican candidates for president (such as Jerry Ford, Bob Dole and John McCain) to win election by uniting the mythical centrist coalition that Cillizza believes decides elections in response to content-free campaigns.

In the present campaign, the candidates have all striven to sell the public on their conservative bona fides. Mitt Romney struggles to close the deal with Republican primary voters this cycle because of his record as a moderate Governor of Massachusetts, not because he is too conservative. If the appeal of moderate establishment Republicans (like Mitt Romney) is so compelling, why the struggle to remake Romney into a conservative?

As I have noted many times, contrary to Chris Cillizza’s revisionist view of history and the wishful thinking of establishment Republicans, history proves that when Republicans run content-free establishment campaigns they lose. When they nationalize the election and run on the conservative agenda, they win.