On Wed, 4 Mar 2009, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> But the majority of the party members have been conservative since the
>> Depression, since the party was then essentially everyone who opposed
>> the New Deal, which defines reactionary. They were the majority during
>> the 50s (hence their disaffection which bubbled over into the "new"
>> conservative movements). And of course it only got worse after 1964, as
>> the party gradually incorporated the South, which had been to the right
>> of the Repugs on virtually all issues.
>
> This doesn't really describe Nixon, who was nothing if not an iconic
> Republican.
We'll leave Nixon to one side for the moment. I just want to point out that as far as a political marker was concerned, he was a poster boy for the far right during DDE's years because he was Roy Cohn's sidekick, the attack dog's attack dog. He was chosen by DDE as a sop to the right. He was later disparaged by the Goldwaterites precisely because he's taken that job and thus discredited himself in their eyes. And those Goldwaterites -- people forget this -- were the majority of the Republican party. That's how they got Goldwater nominated. Nixon got himself nominated the next time around by winning them back. As well as by tricky maneuvers in the South.
> Reagan couldn't get the nomination in 1976 - but by 1980, he was dominant in
> the party. He was clearly a rising force in 1976, but Ford still beat him
> (and had beat him in the primaries).
You're leaving out that Reagon not only could have gotten the nomination in the 1968, he was the odds-on favorite. He had an Obama-like launch, a brilliant speech at the convention, which was then later televised, and was nationally very well received.
(Which if anyone listening wants to watch is available at various links here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_for_Choosing)
Back then, a 30 minute TV slot was much more of a big deal than it is now. He had serious people grooming him for the top job. The plan was to win the California governor's job to give him gravitas, and then move on in middle of his first term to be President. He was hugely popular within the party -- very much the fresh new Obama-like face -- and popular outside it for the same reasons. Nixon was a two-time loser -- including losing the California race that Reagan had won; Nixon was anything but fresh; and Nixon had told the country he was retiring from politics after the California loss: "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more." Nobody would have counted on him being nominated.
And Reagan was gulled with everyone else. Nixon won the nomination by making a brilliant inside baseball play, kind of similar to Obama's working of the caucuses: he worked the Deep South. The Deep South hadn't voted Republican in a generation, so all those people were newbies and they had no established allegiances. But according to Republican party rules, states that voted Republican in the last election had much greater weight in nominating the next candidate. In the Goldwater election, these were virtually the only states who had voted Republican so these people no one every paid attention to were suddenly the decisive bloc. Nixon grasped this immediately, and criss-crossed the region for four years charming every last one of them until they solidly in his pocket. When the convention opened, Reagan was stunned to find himself completely boxed out. He was a neophyte who was completely played by a master insider.
But without that trick, the odds are Reagan would have won the 1968 nomination. And, I believe, the election.
As for 1976, you're leaving out that this was a challenge to a sitting president. True, it was an unelected sitting president, but a sitting president nonetheless, and more popular than what he replaced. It's virtually impossible to get a party to throw one over. The most a challenger can do it make a big noise to position himself for next time. Which is exactly what Reagan did. And specifically, he did it by going to the right of William Buckley. Reagan's campaign was badly organized and completely dead in the water until he suddenly decided to seize on the Panama Canal issue, which was a completely nutball issue, the NAFTA highway of its time. (And Buckley told him so. And later said mea culpa.) And it was that issue that resuscitated his campaign. Nobody thought it had legs. It ended up up having so much force after he raised it from the margin to the center that Carter had to use up lots of political capital passing an act that before this had been expected to be routine.
So it was already a right wing groundswell in the party that was powering Reagan in the mid-70s. And if he'd gotten the election in 1968, it would have been the Goldwaterites and the Southerners who gave it to him, just like they did to Nixon.
I think we might be getting hung up on the difference between what views are held by the "majority" of the party and what views rule the party. They are often not the same. If single payer ever becomes the official platform of the Democrats, it won't be because the majority of the party have changed their mind.
Michael