People wonder what’s happened to the Republican party that they are all lining up like a bunch of robots behind their dear Leader. Here’s a reporter in USA Today:
Back in 1999, I spent a long day tooling around Iowa with Lamar Alexander. At the time of our travels in a Winnebago, accompanied by a couple of aides and a press corps consisting of me and an AP photographer, he was a former Tennessee governor and a presidential candidate trying to compete with the rock star campaign of George W. Bush.
What I remember most from that day was a dramatic back story that, to my puzzlement, he did not mention in his pitch to voters. President Bill Clinton had been impeached by the House and tried in the Senate in a consuming saga of sex, lies and investigations. Voters seemed ready for someone of, as they say, unimpeachable character. Enter Alexander, at least theoretically.
Who would be more perfect for the moment than a man who had taken over a state amid a gubernatorial pardon-selling scandal so serious that he was sworn in three days early in a secret 1979 ceremony, to cut short outgoing Gov. Ray Blanton’s corruption spree? So sensational they made a movie about it, called “Marie,” in which a lawyer (and future senator) named Fred Thompson played himself. The obvious narrative was that Alexander knew how to restore trust in government — he had already done it in Tennessee.
Alexander never became president, but in 2002, he was elected to his first of three terms in the Senate. He was known in Washington for pragmatic bipartisanship — a senator who quit leadership in 2011 so he could work across the aisle more often, and who made good on that most recently in partnership with Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., on education and health policy.
Now Alexander’s just another Republican cowering at the prospect of crossing President Donald Trump, one of the many people I don’t recognize despite having covered and followed them for years or even decades.
What happened? The truth is that these so-called sane Republicans were always primed to follow their leader. They followed Reagan, they followed the Bushes and they are following Trump. There’s a reason John McCain was called “maverick” and it’s because he was one of the few to buck the leadership. (Now we know that his little sidekick Lindsey Graham was just trying to bask in the reflected glow of the lights and cameras that followed him around.)
The people who refused to fall in line were right-wing ideologues like Gingrich and the new Freedom Caucus types, not the establishment. Now that the nuts are in charge the establishment is doing what it always does.
The Republican establishment has always been a bunch of lemmings. I’ve written about it for years.