How the GOP Can Salvage A Terrible Election Year
The biggest drag for Republicans is their presidential nominee, who is likely to lose and seems to have given up on the race, but there’s a lesson in recent political history Republicans might learn from. As David Grann wrote in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in 1996, the Republican National Committee and its chairman, future Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, withheld their fire for much of the campaign, playing wait-and-see on both the presidential and congressional levels. Here’s Grann on Barbour:
More valuable than his homespun spin, each of his ten stubby fingers seemed to possess its own Midas touch: He raised a record $65.8 million in 1994 and helped rescue the National Republican Congressional Committee from a staggering debt. Ironically, the man now under fire from Hill Republicans for hoarding GOP money shelled out more on a midterm election than anyone in RNC history. In a less talked-about gamble, Barbour even borrowed $5 million in the final months of the 1994 campaign to restock Republican war chests.
After the election, Paxon, the jubilant chairman of the NRCC, raved to the National Journal: “It isn’t too much to say that he is, next to Newt Gingrich, the guy that we think is most responsible for us winning our majority.” The Economist put it more succinctly: “Saint Haley.”
The Weekly Standard
10/25/16
Magnolia Tribune
