Bob Dole tells Romney to head left: advice about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit

Bob Dole, the Republican senator who lost to Bill Clinton following an appallingly anaemic presidential campaign in 1996, and lost to Jimmy Carter as Gerald Ford’s vice-presidential running-mate twenty years’ earlier, has been urging Mitt Romney to stand up to all those horrible right-wingers in the GOP and instead adopt the sort of wishy-washy “mainstream” (i.e. defeatist) conservatism that he imagines will appeal to ethnic minorities and young people.

Won’t these "third way" idiots ever learn?

In a rich display of hypocrisy, Dole warned Republicans against misidentifying the cause of Ronald Reagan’s success – the Gipper, he assures us, was a pragmatic (i.e. moderate) president. Well, Dole should know, as he did his level best to undermine the great man on every issue when he was in power – invariably because he felt Reagan was being too right-wing: whenever Reagan failed to cleave to his right-wing principles, it was usually because wets like Dole made it impossible for him to do so.

Over here, Mrs Thatcher won three elections in a row by espousing increasingly right-wing policies, and John Major won in ’92 because the Labour leader was a left-wing Welsh windbag whom even the endlessly tolerant English electorate simply couldn’t abide. Tony Blair got Labour into power in ’97 by dragging his party rightwards. David Cameron failed to win outright power for the Conservatives in 2010 despite running against the worst prime minister in living memory by turning the Tory party into New Labour – i.e. by moving it sharply to the left in order to detoxify the brand and attract young and ethnic voters (same old, same old...). As always when a right-wing party betrays its core voters in order to attract essentially left-wing voters, this ended in a dismal, abject failure, for which we are all paying the price.

As I discovered yesterday while reading what Ann Coulter described as “the greatest book since The Bible” – M. Stanton Evans’s masterful Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies, the tendency of vacillating middle-of-the roaders to hijack right-wing parties and turn them into mildly socialistic ones indistinguishable from the opposition – thereby subverting democracy by denying voters a meaningful choice – has been going on for a long time, and hasn’t been confined to Britain:

“…it’s useful to recall that, in the 1950s and for a while thereafter, there was indeed an effort underway to new-model the GOP in the image of its opposition. After so many years of Democratic rule, it was argued, the Republican Party could no longer tread the conservative path preferred by the old bulls in Congress. 

The vogue of this conception may seem odd today, looking back on the Goldwater-Reagan Risorgimento that turned the GOP into a staunchly conservative party in both presidential and legislative circles, then carried it on to election wins at state and federal levels. However such ideas were fairly trendy in the 1950s and early ‘60s, promoted in major press outlets, and embodied in the presidential hopes of such media-favored liberal GOPers as New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and New York City mayor John V. Lindsay. It was all very New York/East Coast/establishmentarian, and nicely underscored the concept of policy continuity with the Truman-Acheson era….”

What about “it was all very Eton/Notting Hill/establishmentarian, and nicely underscored the concept of policy continuity with the Blair-Brown era…”?

No wonder Joe McCarthy’s courageous fight against America’s enemies – the communist agents, party members and “liberal” fellow-travellers who infested the US public sector in the ‘40s and ‘50s – was ultimately scuppered by the middle-of-the-roaders in his own party.

Mitt Romney should tell Dole to boil his head.

A pox on fanatical moderates.