The GOP & Romney's attack on Trump

[QueEx]

Romney says safe future 'greatly diminished' with Trump

Associated Press

© Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo In this Jan.28, 2015 file photo former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks in Starkville, Miss.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Thursday that the prospects for a safe future are "greatly diminished" if Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee for president.

Speaking at the University of Utah, Romney warned a packed auditorium that any of the other GOP candidates would be a better alternative to the billionaire businessman.

"The only serious policy proposals that deal with the broad range of national challenges we confront today, come from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich," Romney said of Trump's GOP rivals. "One of these men should be our nominee."

Romney is charging into the increasingly divisive White House race with a verbal lashing of Donald Trump and a plea for fellow Republicans to shun the front-runner for the good of country and party.

"His is not the temperament of a stable, thoughtful leader. His imagination must not be married to real power," Romney said.

Romney branded Trump as "a phony, a fraud" whose "promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University" in his speech.

Earlier Thursday, Trump dismissed Romney as "a stiff" who "didn't know what he was doing" as the party's candidate in 2012 and blew a chance to beat President Barack Obama. "People are energized by what I'm saying" in the campaign and turning out in remarkable numbers to vote, Trump told NBC's "Today."

The back-and-forth comes as Republican candidates prepared for the first post-Super Tuesday debate, scheduled for Thursday in Detroit, with Trump coming under increasing pressure from his party as he fights for the majority of delegates needed to win the nomination.

Thursday's condemnation and counter was coming four years after the two men stood side by side in Las Vegas, with Trump saying it was a "real honor and privilege" to endorse Romney's White House bid. Accepting, Romney said it was a "delight" to have Trump on his side and praised him for ability to "understand how our economy works and to create jobs for the American people."

Panicked GOP leaders say they still have options for preventing Trump from winning the GOP nomination — just not many good ones.

Romney also said that a Trump nomination at the party's convention in Cleveland in July would enable Democrat Hillary Clinton to win the presidency. He contended that Trump "has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president."

Romney's involvement comes as party elites pore over complicated delegate math, outlining hazy scenarios for a contested convention and even flirting with the long-shot prospect of a third party option.

Giving Romney the back of his hand, Trump turned his sights on the general election. His campaign reached out to House Speaker Paul Ryan's office to arrange a conversation between the two men, and urged Republican leaders to view his candidacy as a chance to expand the party.

Trump padded his lead with victories in seven Super Tuesday contests, with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz claiming three states and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio picking up his first victory of the 2016 race.

Despite Trump's strong night, he was not yet on track to claim the nomination before the party's national gathering in July, according to an Associated Press delegate count. He has won 46 percent of the delegates awarded so far, and he would have to increase that to 51 percent in the remaining primaries.

GOP strategists cast March 15 as the last opportunity to stop Trump through the normal path of winning states and collecting delegates. A win for Rubio in his home state of Florida would raise questions about Trump's strength, as could a win for Kasich, Ohio's governor, on his home turf.

The candidates have a high-profile opportunity to make their case to voters in Thursday's Fox News debate. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson all but ended his bid Wednesday, saying he would skip the debate and declaring he did "not see a political path forward."

The GOP mayhem contrasted sharply with a clearer picture on the Democratic side, where Hillary Clinton was drawing broad support from voters and her party's leaders. Rival Sen. Bernie Sanders vowed to keep up the fight, though his path to the nomination has become exceedingly narrow.

Romney argues that Trump's "domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe," Romney says. "And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill."

The Associated Press has asked Republican governors and senators if they would support Trump if he becomes the party's nominee. Of the 59 respondents, slightly fewer than half could not commit to backing him in November.

One long-shot idea rumbling through power corridors in Washington was the prospect of a late third-party candidate to represent more mainstream conservatives. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry has been approached by "a mixture of people" about being part of a third-party bid, according to Jeff Miller, who managed Perry's failed GOP presidential campaign. But Miller said Perry found the idea "ludicrous."

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Associated Press writers Julie Pace, Kathleen Hennessey, Andrew Taylor, Julie Bykowicz, Stephen Ohlemacher and Donna Cassata contributed to this report from Washington.

SOURCE: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...inished-with-trump/ar-BBqhRs8?ocid=spartandhp

 

[QueEx]

From Goldwater to Trump: When Parties Fail to Stop Alarming Candidates

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In 1964, Republican Party leaders were terrified by the ascent of the conservative Arizona
senator Barry Goldwater. Credit Photograph by Art Rickerby / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

The New Yorker
By Jeffrey Frank
March 1, 2016


The history of attempts to halt the rise of an alarming candidate, or even of one who just doesn’t fit a party’s idea of itself, offers no encouragement to those out to stop Donald J. Trump’s march toward the Republican nomination. When you reach a certain point, no cabal of “elders” [Romney et al., included ???] can rescue anything.

The Democrats in 1976. That’s what the Democratic Party establishment realized in 1976, when it couldn’t stop Jimmy Carter. It was hard to accept that a one-term Georgia governor who, moreover, said odd things (despite a fairly strong record on civil rights, he once used the phrase “ethnic purity” in connection with preserving a neighborhood’s character) could lead the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. A so-called A.B.C. movement—anyone but Carter—grew in intensity after Carter won the important Pennsylvania primary that April. As R. W. Apple wrote in the Times, “the ominous shadow of Hubert H. Humphrey”—the former Vice-President, who had lost to Richard Nixon in 1968 and was thought to be eager to try for the nomination—fell across Carter’s path to victory. Carter, in any case, went on to defeat a number of now forgotten Democrats with plausible Presidential qualities, among them the Senators Birch Bayh and Henry (Scoop) Jackson, and the Congressman Morris Udall. Humphrey never jumped in.

The Republicans in 1964. In 1964, Republican Party leaders were terrified by the ascent of the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. In retrospect, Goldwater was not all that frightening, although he did make some worrisome statements, such as speculating about whether to use nuclear weapons to defoliate forests in Vietnam. (He soon took that back.) Nor was Goldwater entirely doctrinaire. In a cheerful memoir of that time, “Flying High,” William F. Buckley, Jr., the founding editor of National Review, recalled that, when Goldwater needed a “philosophy,” a Buckley brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., ghostwrote the senator’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative.”

The Republican establishment, which then included a major newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, persuaded the Party’s most prestigious and beloved elder, the former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to write a column in which he urged his party to nominate someone who shared none of Goldwater’s views. Ike didn’t mention Goldwater by name, nor did he mention Goldwater’s main rival, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, of New York, who was expected to win the crucial, upcoming California primary. When the unstoppable Goldwater won (helped by the birth, three days before the primary, of a Rockefeller son with his second wife, whom he had married soon after both divorced their previous spouses), panic set in. Eisenhower and others encouraged William Scranton, the moderate governor of Pennsylvania, to make a last-minute challenge. But the governor’s allies quickly deserted him, leaving Scranton humiliated and Goldwater’s boisterous supporters in charge.

In a better world, Goldwater would have faced the incumbent President Kennedy in 1964, in what surely would have been a spirited, even educational contest between two men who liked each other while disagreeing strongly. Instead, he ran against Lyndon B. Johnson, who took office after Kennedy was murdered, and the race became a sour contest in which Americans had to choose between Goldwater, portrayed as a trigger-happy dimwit, and Johnson, viewed by many voters with distrust and dislike. As Robert Caro wrote in the third volume of his splendid Johnson biography, L.B.J., before the assassination, was about to be drawn into deeply embarrassing scandals connected to his protégé Bobby Baker, a former Senate page who had become suspiciously rich while serving as the secretary to the Senate majority. The scandal didn’t affect Johnson’s margin of victory in the general election, which was so large that the foundational voting patterns of the two parties were altered, especially in the Republicans’ loss of the black vote.


If Trump is the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton is chosen by the Democrats, the 2016 election may seem like a distorted, vulgar repetition of 1964:

* a contest between a Republican who scares and repels people, including Republicans, and​

* a Democrat whom many voters, including Democrats, don’t like or trust, leading to an outcome that may change the electoral map again.​

There are wishful hopes (Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, may be hoping) that no Republican will win the required number of delegates to secure the nomination in the primaries, which could lead to a brokered convention. But a Republican Party with the power to do the brokering no longer seems to exist. Of the two major not-Trumps, Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio, who in any other year might be seen as too far to the right even for the G.O.P., talks incessantly about uniting his party rather than his country, while Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, talks about uniting those who agree with his cruel, narrow outlook. Trump, meanwhile, could barely manage a wobbly disavowal of support from a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Republican Governor Nikki Haley, of South Carolina, said the other day that the effect of a Trump candidacy on the Party would be to “make us question who we are and what we’re about.” But the other Republican candidates would also prompt that line of questioning.

Several years ago, while working on a book about the relationship between Nixon and Eisenhower, I talked to Scranton about the 1964 race. He recalled Eisenhower’s view of politics and party, a view that then seemed startlingly naïve: “Ike was up on the theory—this was a kind of idealistic one—that you should get as many running for President in your party as you can and then select the best of them,” he said. I can’t remember if Scranton was smiling when he added, “It’s a nice idea, but it usually doesn’t work out very well.”

Jeffrey Frank, a former senior editor of The New Yorker and the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage,” is working on a book about the Truman era.


SOURCE: http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...when-parties-fail-to-stop-alarming-candidates

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[QueEx]

From Goldwater to Trump: When Parties Fail to Stop Alarming Candidates

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In 1964, Republican Party leaders were terrified by the ascent of the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. Credit Photograph by Art Rickerby / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty

The New Yorker
By Jeffrey Frank
March 1, 2016


The history of attempts to halt the rise of an alarming candidate, or even of one who just doesn’t fit a party’s idea of itself, offers no encouragement to those out to stop Donald J. Trump’s march toward the Republican nomination. When you reach a certain point, no cabal of “elders” can rescue anything.

The Democrats in 1976. That’s what the Democratic Party establishment realized in 1976, when it couldn’t stop Jimmy Carter. It was hard to accept that a one-term Georgia governor who, moreover, said odd things (despite a fairly strong record on civil rights, he once used the phrase “ethnic purity” in connection with preserving a neighborhood’s character) could lead the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. A so-called A.B.C. movement—anyone but Carter—grew in intensity after Carter won the important Pennsylvania primary that April. As R. W. Apple wrote in the Times, “the ominous shadow of Hubert H. Humphrey”—the former Vice-President, who had lost to Richard Nixon in 1968 and was thought to be eager to try for the nomination—fell across Carter’s path to victory. Carter, in any case, went on to defeat a number of now forgotten Democrats with plausible Presidential qualities, among them the Senators Birch Bayh and Henry (Scoop) Jackson, and the Congressman Morris Udall. Humphrey never jumped in.​

The Republicans in 1964. In 1964, Republican Party leaders were terrified by the ascent of the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater. In retrospect, Goldwater was not all that frightening, although he did make some worrisome statements, such as speculating about whether to use nuclear weapons to defoliate forests in Vietnam. (He soon took that back.) Nor was Goldwater entirely doctrinaire. In a cheerful memoir of that time, “Flying High,” William F. Buckley, Jr., the founding editor of National Review, recalled that, when Goldwater needed a “philosophy,” a Buckley brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., ghostwrote the senator’s book “The Conscience of a Conservative.”​

The Republican establishment, which then included a major newspaper, the New York Herald Tribune, persuaded the Party’s most prestigious and beloved elder, the former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to write a column in which he urged his party to nominate someone who shared none of Goldwater’s views. Ike didn’t mention Goldwater by name, nor did he mention Goldwater’s main rival, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, of New York, who was expected to win the crucial, upcoming California primary. When the unstoppable Goldwater won (helped by the birth, three days before the primary, of a Rockefeller son with his second wife, whom he had married soon after both divorced their previous spouses), panic set in. Eisenhower and others encouraged William Scranton, the moderate governor of Pennsylvania, to make a last-minute challenge. But the governor’s allies quickly deserted him, leaving Scranton humiliated and Goldwater’s boisterous supporters in charge.​

In a better world, Goldwater would have faced the incumbent President Kennedy in 1964, in what surely would have been a spirited, even educational contest between two men who liked each other while disagreeing strongly. Instead, he ran against Lyndon B. Johnson, who took office after Kennedy was murdered, and the race became a sour contest in which Americans had to choose between Goldwater, portrayed as a trigger-happy dimwit, and Johnson, viewed by many voters with distrust and dislike. As
Robert Caro wrote in the third volume of his splendid Johnson biography, L.B.J., before the assassination, was about to be drawn into deeply embarrassing scandals connected to his protégé Bobby Baker, a former Senate page who had become suspiciously rich while serving as the secretary to the Senate majority. The scandal didn’t affect Johnson’s margin of victory in the general election, which was so large that the foundational voting patterns of the two parties were altered, especially in the Republicans’ loss of the black vote.

If Trump is the Republican nominee and Hillary Clinton is chosen by the Democrats, the 2016 election may seem like a distorted, vulgar repetition of 1964:

* a contest between a Republican who scares and repels people, including Republicans, and​

* a Democrat whom many voters, including Democrats, don’t like or trust, leading to an outcome that may change the electoral map again.​

There are wishful hopes (Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, may be hoping) that no Republican will win the required number of delegates to secure the nomination in the primaries, which could lead to a brokered convention. But a Republican Party with the power to do the brokering no longer seems to exist. Of the two major not-Trumps, Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio, who in any other year might be seen as too far to the right even for the G.O.P., talks incessantly about uniting his party rather than his country, while Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, talks about uniting those who agree with his cruel, narrow outlook. Trump, meanwhile, could barely manage a wobbly disavowal of support from a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Republican Governor Nikki Haley, of South Carolina, said the other day that the effect of a Trump candidacy on the Party would be to “make us question who we are and what we’re about.” But the other Republican candidates would also prompt that line of questioning.

Several years ago, while working on a book about the relationship between Nixon and Eisenhower, I talked to Scranton about the 1964 race. He recalled Eisenhower’s view of politics and party, a view that then seemed startlingly naïve: “Ike was up on the theory—this was a kind of idealistic one—that you should get as many running for President in your party as you can and then select the best of them,” he said. I can’t remember if Scranton was smiling when he added, “It’s a nice idea, but it usually doesn’t work out very well.”

Jeffrey Frank, a former senior editor of The New Yorker and the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage,” is working on a book about the Truman era.


SOURCE: http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...when-parties-fail-to-stop-alarming-candidates

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[QueEx]

GOP is trying to put out Trump's fire with gasoline

 

[QueEx]

The Republican Anti-Trump Establishments 3 Lines of Attack Against Trump

The first line is what might be called a grand strategy approach.

The party foreign affairs elite is depicting him as a reckless madman who isn’t fit to carry the nuclear suitcase, let alone have control over it. This approach had its birth in an impassioned essay published by Eliot A. Cohen, a former Bush administration official and head of the hawkish John Hay Initiative, in The American Interest. Cohen signaled that this was a fight to the finish with Trump: “The Republican Party as we know it may die of Trump. If it does, it will have succumbed in part because many of its leaders chose not to fight for the Party of Lincoln … ”​

Now, in a letter that Cohen helped organize and that was signed by dozens of senior Republican foreign policy figures, including former World Bank President Robert Zoellick, and neoconservative guru Robert Kagan, Trump was excoriated as “wildly inconsistent and unmoored in principle.” They also announced they would refuse to serve in a Trump administration, a sign of just how deep the rift is becoming between Trump and the rest of the party. What’s notable about the letter is that it does not consist solely of neoconservatives. It contains important practitioners of the realpolitik school of thought. Apart from Zoellick, Robert Blackwill, a former aide to Henry Kissinger and former high-ranking State Department official, affixed his name to the document. Kissinger himself, with his customary discretion, did not sign the letter. In praising the letter, Max Boot, the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in Commentary magazine that Trump is “emerging as the number one threat to American security”— even bigger than ISIL or China.​

The second line is to attack Trump’s reputation as a straight-shooter who is calling out the establishment elites.

By calling him a “fraud and phony” and casting aspersions on his business reputation, Romney has amplified Senator Marco Rubio’s depiction of Trump as a “con man.” At the Republican debate Thursday night both Ted Cruz and Rubio planned to pile on and create unease about Trump’s moral and business character.​

The third line of assault on Trump, however, is for his opponents to focus on trench warfare.

It is obviously for all the candidates to keep campaigning until Cleveland, lobbing verbal hand grenade after grenade at Trump so that he arrives at the convention not only with a lack of a delegate majority, but is also crippled as a candidate. This would require Rubio, the darling of the neocon establishment and Republican financiers, and Senator Ted Cruz to play tag-team and even contemplate joining forces as president and vice president. In this scenario, Rubio could rescue his faltering political career by helping to slay the Trump dragon. Whether Cruz can bring himself to cross the Rubiocon, however, may be the biggest question facing the establishment. Odds are that if Trump is close to the nomination, he will offer Cruz the vice-presidential slot and Cruz gets to maintain his anti-establishment bona fides. Another plus is that given how ill-equipped Trump is to function in the Oval Office, Cruz could play Dick Cheney to his George W. Bush.
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But Democrats shouldn’t get overconfident, and predictions of the death of the GOP are decidedly premature (remember, the South did rise again eventually

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/mitt-romney-speech-fort-trumpter-213698#ixzz428hvFM9x

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