Well of course.
The news arrives as follows, this headline from Fox News:
Over 200 former Bush, McCain, Romney staffers endorse Harris: ‘The alternative … is simply untenable’
An open letter calls on ‘moderate Republicans and conservative independents’ to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris
The story reports:
More than 200 Republicans who previously worked for former President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., or Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, penned an open letter Monday endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
The cohort of Republican officials, which also includes a handful of aides to former President George H.W. Bush, previously sought to rally voters against former President Donald Trump in 2020. In their letter, the GOP officials singled out “moderate Republicans and conservative independents,” calling on them to vote for Harris.
“Four years ago, President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, and then-Gov. Mitt Romney alumni came together to warn fellow Republicans that re-electing President Trump would be a disaster for our nation. In those declarations we stated the plain truth, each predicting that another four years of a Trump presidency would irreparably damage our beloved democracy,” stated the letter, published Monday by USA Today.
In other words? There is not a conservative to be found in this group — or they would never come close to signing this letter in the first place.
Know this.
The Republican Party has been here before.
In 1964, the GOP political ancestors of these 200 abandoned the GOP nominee — Arizona’s Sen. Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative. Goldwater wrote of these GOP deserters in his memoirs, saying they were a “pale imitation of the Democratic Party.” He added:
It’s important to understand who and what constituted this network. The establishment was centered in the boardrooms of virtually all major companies and businesses-banks, insurance firms, financial institutions, steel and auto companies, the works. If you were a chief executive officer, trustee, or board member of one of these companies, it was generally assumed you were a Republican.
The biggest movers and shakers were an East Coast elite.… On the social side, Republicans were club members — country clubs and other exclusive private groups.”
Goldwater added that those anti-Establishment Republicans supporting him really “represented our new populist movement.” And so they did.
It has been 60 full years since that conservative revolution. And as noted, that conservative revolution has been opposed at every turn across those 60 years by those loyal not to conservatism but rather to, as this letter states, the GOP establishment — in this case the campaigns of “President George W. Bush, the late Sen. John McCain, and then-Gov. Mitt Romney.”
In 1980, the political ancestors of these signers made it a point to oppose former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, rallying to the left-leaning GOP Illinois Rep. John Anderson. The latter was so vehemently anti-Reagan that after losing the 1980 nomination to Reagan, Anderson kept running as an anti-conservative, third-party “Independent” in the Reagan–Carter race. Suffice it to say that Anderson lost, carrying a pathetic 6.6 percentage of the vote, to Reagan’s 50.7 percent and Carter’s 41 percent.
In today’s election, the signers of this letter boast of working for losing GOP nominees McCain and Romney. Which, in a telling sign of a lack of self-awareness, says everything one needs to know about them. This letter and they themselves are exactly the sign of what is wrong with the GOP establishment, as Barry Goldwater noted a full 60 years ago.
Their letter is a flashing light that tells conservatives these folks should never hold any office in any GOP administration, not to mention a second Trump administration, ever again.
The former president, a newcomer to the Swamp Wars in Washington when he took office in 2017, is a wiser man. Assuming he wins, he will not be — and decidedly should not be — staffing his White House and administration with those whose first, last, and always loyalty is to the Swamp and the GOP establishment — and not to those millions of Americans who will have voted for Donald Trump.
And a very good thing indeed is that.