By John F. Di Leo -
The Democrat Party may have saddled themselves with the worst presidential nominee in history – elderly, corrupt, arguably befuddled to the point of senility – but they do still have many brilliant political statisticians on their payroll, as evidenced by their effort to win back the week’s news cycle with a powerhouse list of endorsements.
On September 3, the Biden/Harris campaign proudly announced a huge list of fresh Republican supporters. Now, in any general election campaign, you expect all the members of candidate’s party to support him, plus perhaps a few friends or renegades from the opposition party. The hoped-for shock value of this announcement was that it was a list of 100 Republican officeholders, all endorsing the Biden/Harris campaign.
This raises questions, as it should. What would possess so many prominent Republicans to abandon their own party at the risk of never being elected again, especially in favor of a man literally on tape proudly boasting of blackmailing foreign governments with our tax dollars? How is this possible?
Well, as we learn from a little digging into the article, all is not as it seems.
For starters, the list is hardly a roster of current Republican officials. It’s led by Christine Todd Whitman, the 74-year-old former governor of New Jersey who served as G.W. Bush’s EPA administrator. She hasn’t faced the voters in 22 years, and has been generally considered a RINO (Republican in Name Only) throughout her political career.
Next comes Bill Weld, the 75-year old former governor of Massachusetts. Twice elected to that office, he resigned in the middle of his second term in hopes of accepting an appointment by President Bill Clinton to be Ambassador to Mexico, a position formerly considered a step-up from governor by exactly nobody in the history of the world. He too hasn’t been elected to anything in a long time – in his case, over 25 years – and the last time he ran for anything, 2016, he attempted a run for Vice President with the Libertarian party, a party with which he lines up philosophically on absolutely nothing, but which was willing to give him a shot strictly for his fading star power. Most Republicans, if asked who lays the strongest claim for the title, would nominate Bill Weld for King of the Rinos without batting an eye.
Next on the list is 79-year-old former senator Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire, who served in the US Senate for two terms across the 1980s, after which he served two years in the New Hampshire state senate. Unlike the more famous members of the list, Humphrey would not be considered a RINO, but was rather a conservative in office. Having drifted from that principled course in the years that followed, he supported liberal Republican John Kasich for president in 2016, and has been active since then in attacking the Trump presidency. He hasn’t been elected to anything in 30 years now, and is perhaps a textbook example of the NeverTrumpers of the right.
Note... we are not focusing on age here to give an indication that age is necessarily relevant; Ronald Reagan was president in his 70s, after all, and he was a principled conservative. The mention of these so-called Republican endorsers' often advanced ages is to emphasize how long it's been since many of them really faced the voters as "Republicans," and to identify them as members of the country club Republican establishment that President Trump has rightly identified as being too often allied with leftist Democrats against the nation's best interests.
To be fair, some of the members of this long list have indeed been elected more recently than the last millenium. Former Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and former US Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, for example, both vocal NeverTrumpers, served during this past decade, though more of them have been out of office for quite a while, leaving their identity as Republicans behind.
Take Ray LaHood of Illinois. A former Republican state legislator and congressman, he left the US House in 2009 to accept a cabinet post from Barack Obama, serving the Obama Administration’s goals for the Department of Transportation. Since leaving the Obama administration, he joined a DC lobbying-focused law firm, DLA Piper, and wrote a memoir entitled “Seeking Bipartisanship.”
Or consider Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, who served thirteen years in the US House, then quit mid-term to become a lobbyist with DLA Piper. Long a vocal opponent of principled conservatives, he has been associated with various groups pushing for the GOP to take positions more like those of the Democrats’ for years.
Need we go on? Former Republican congressmen like Susan Molinari of New York, Steve Bartlett of Texas, Tom Coleman of Missouri, all served in Washington for years, and haven’t faced the voters in this millenium, but found other lucrative careers on the sidelines of politics.
And it’s those sidelines that explain their hostility to the Trump administration, far more than political positions.
In office, President Trump has governed as more of a platform Republican than most of these longtime politicians did, and there are plenty of clear policy disagreements to be seen in comparisons between this list and the Trump record.
But even more than their policy differences, the striking wedge so visible between Donald Trump and this turncoats’ roster is their career tracks: Donald Trump made his living in the private sector, and never sought political office until he was of retirement age. By contrast, most in this list of opponents won political office when they were young, then hitched themselves to the lucrative gravy train of the world of political lobbying.
Politico was recently kind enough to identify at least a dozen in the list of endorsements who have made their careers in the DC swamp since leaving office. With President Trump’s constant denunciation of that incestuous world, is it any wonder that the swamp would fight back in every way it could?
The president’s policy efforts have been clear and focused: he has fought against illegal immigration, he has championed American manufacturing, he has stood for American strength on the world scene, he has worked to support our true allies like Israel.
The swamp opposes that agenda; they favor unrestricted immigration, the continued exporting of American jobs to third world sweatshops, even the unrestricted march of jihadists abroad.
So it should be no surprise that lobbyists who represent Chinese manufacturing interests, anti-Israel middle eastern interests, and the corrupt alliance that President Eisenhower called the “military industrial complex” would be horrified at the Trump Administration’s efforts to whittle back their influence and help the American economy to free itself from their clutches.
Every time President Trump stood up for American workers against the Chinese politburo’s state-owned manufacturing plants, every time President Trump cut taxes and regulations to help small businesses compete against the multi-national corporations, every time President Trump added another fifty miles to the wall or made it harder for illegal aliens to take legitimate jobs from legal American workers, another DC lobbyist signed up to oppose this president with every ounce of energy they could muster.
Americans think of political offices as the defining jobs of current or past celebrities, but sometimes they aren’t. We may still call these people “Congressman” or “Senator” or even “Governor,” because that’s the last political post they may have held… and they can keep that title for the rest of their lives… but that doesn’t make it their defining trait.
With most people, the job that matters most to them is the one they hold today. They may have been congressmen or governors 30 or 40 years ago – in the case of many on this list, it’s been even longer – but today, they’re lobbyists, or activists for some political cause in opposition to President Trump’s agenda and the platform of the Trump movement.
When you look at this list of 100, their status as once-elected officials isn’t the resume line that really matters. What counts is the business card currently in their pockets: as they collect their many checks from swanky offices up and down K Street.
This list of Republican turncoats isn’t really that at all; most of these people haven’t really considered themselves Republicans – in terms of agreement with the party platform and its current philosophy – since the 20th century. Their loyalty is available for rent; they are loyal to whichever businesses, nonprofits, and NGOs hire them to lobby on their behalf this session.
Whatever the media may say in reporting this list, don’t think of them as Republicans at all; real Republicans support President Trump and can’t wait for him to be reelected to that imperative second term.
When you look at this list, the names that should jump out at you are the ones on their business cards: DLA Piper, The Livingston Group, JTK Consulting, One & All, K&L Gates, and so many more of the many machers of K Street.
What kind of politician do mercenary lobbyists like? Who do they want in office? The weak ones, the pliable ones, the ones who can be schmoozed at a cocktail party, dazzled by a junket, or acquired outright by huge campaign donations or a pretty secretary. No wonder this bunch likes "Quid Pro Joe" Biden so much.
And no wonder they don’t like Donald Trump, an independent man with an actual backbone, who knows what he believes and is willing to work hard to achieve it for his constituents.
These hundred Ambassadors of the Status Quo never before realized their luxurious playground might be in jeopardy. They’re just defending their elegantly embroidered, silk-lined pockets, that’s all.
Copyright 2020 John F. Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international trade consultant, writer and actor. A one-time Republican County Chairman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he has now been a recovering politician himself for over 20 years. His columns are regularly found here in Illinois Review.
Don’t miss an article! Use the free tool in the margin to sign up for Illinois Review’s free email notification service, so you always know when Illinois Review publishes new content!
