"Nothing succeeds like failure"

Still sick, still swamped at work. This week has become about two notches above a death march.

In the meantime, here's a column that gives RINO arrogance the lampooning hell it deserves (reprinted here with permission of Newsmax.com).

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They have a poor record at the ballot box, but Republican Party "moderates" or RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) are arguing, in effect, that nothing succeeds like failure.

Former EPA Administrator and two-term New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman wants you to believe that significant Republican gains in recent years came in spite of the party's conservative leadership.

Though the liberals of the party have a record of keeping Republicans in the wilderness for years at a time, they claim they are best equipped to "save" the GOP from disaster at the hands of "the far right." Judging by Whitman's writings, "the far right" includes any successful Republican official who runs and wins on conservative principles.

She is not alone, of course. When I was in the Big Apple to cover last summer's Republican National Convention for NewsMax.com, I spotted an ad in the New York Times by self-described "moderates" urging the Grand Old Party to "Come Back to the Mainstream."
Signed by a group of has-beens and never-wases (including at least one who supported John Kerry for president), the ad basically accused President Bush of failing to protect the health of Americans and not appointing "mainstream" judges, a euphemism for cheerleading Tom Daschle's filibuster strategy.

Now comes Christie Whitman with a book titled "It's My Party Too," a tome that urges "radical moderates" to wage a fight to take back the party from conservatives.

Conservative Republican consultant Craig Shirley says he is inviting Whitman to be his guest at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in late February. Shirley says Whitman can then "learn why the GOP now controls the White House, the U.S. House and Senate and most governorships in the country."

It would be interesting if Whitman actually showed up at CPAC, but don't hold your breath. She seems to have a tin ear when it comes to realizing what works for the party and what does not. Her book lectures the Republicans to get with it and dump the policies that led them to victory at the polls, and instead adopt her "moderate" strategy, which has a history of failure after failure.

Governor Whitman's book "would have had more resonance if we [the Republicans] had lost the election," a bemused Indiana Congressman Mike Pence told NewsMax.com. Pence, who heads the Republican Study Committee (RSC, a group of conservative House Republicans), believes there was a rush to the galleys to change the book's wording after Kerry lost.

Indeed, it's reasonable to speculate that the book was written in the expectation (hope?) that Bush and the Republicans would lose the election, thus enabling Whitman's book to make the case that "moderates" can "rescue" the party from its conservative folly. Instead, she had to reword it to say, in effect, "Well, yes, the party won, but if Republicans listen to me, they will still do better."

There is so much in this book that ignores reality that it is extremely difficult to know where to begin in trying to refute it without writing an entire book to set the record straight. I will attempt to sum up a response to her direct arguments in another article. Before we do that, however, we should examine the RINO track record as political strategy, both nationally and in Whitman's New Jersey.

Christine Whitman attracted national attention in 1990 when she came close to defeating incumbent Democrat Bill Bradley for the U.S. Senate. She came back in 1993 to become the first candidate to defeat an incumbent governor (Democrat Jim Florio) in the Garden State's modern history.

In both instances, the biggest issue was taxes. Bradley ignored voter outrage over Florio's tax hikes, and Florio's huge tax increases ultimately brought him down.

Interestingly enough, Whitman's gubernatorial campaign, which had been floundering, was rescued with the help of an ardent conservative, Forbes magazine editor Steve Forbes. He helped Whitman craft a tax-cutting plan that was pivotal in her primary and general election victories in 1993.

Whitman makes no mention of Forbes in her book. He becomes a non-person, but not for the first time. Governor Whitman also turned her back on Forbes when he ran for president. She thanked her fellow New Jerseyan for his help by supporting one of his presidential primary opponents, Bob Dole, in 1996.

When Whitman resigned as governor to become President Bush's EPA administrator in Washington in 2001, Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine wrote in the Newark-based newspaper, "Like a dinner companion who goes to the rest room just before the bill shows up, Christie Whitman seems prepared to take off for Washington just as New Jersey's residents are getting stuck with the bill for the biggest state bond issue in American history."

"This is going to do irreparable harm. She's leaving us holding the bag," Bagota, N.J., Mayor Steve Lonegan told NewsMax at the time as he was preparing a lawsuit challenging the legality of the $8.6 million bond issue. (Lonegan is now widely discussed as a possible gubernatorial candidate in this year's election.)

So, what happened between Whitman's successful tax-cutting first two years (when she was riding a wave of popularity) and her ignominious exit that left behind a bond issue of questionable legality?

Richard Kamin, who was the Whitman administration's Director of Motor Vehicles (DMV), says fiscal policy was sound as long as Brian Clymer was her state treasurer. When Clymer left, according to Kamin in a NewsMax interview, that discipline collapsed. Clymer's impressive resume includes a stint as federal transit administrator for the first President Bush.
Some Republicans believe Christine Todd Whitman can take a share of the blame for twice enabling the continued career of Frank Lautenberg, one of the state's leading liberal Democrat politicians.

1. In 1994, generally a good year for Republicans, then New Jersey state Assembly Speaker Chuck Haytaian (pronounced High-tie-yan) appeared to be well on his way to ousting two-term incumbent Lautenberg in a race for U.S. Senate.

Aside from his mastery of the ethnic politics of New Jersey, Haytaian's candidacy was getting a boost from his repeated appearances on the "Bob Grant Show," then on New York City's WABC Radio, which covers New Jersey. But during the campaign, the left-wing New York Magazine published a hatchet job on Grant.

Lautenberg then used the anti-Grant screed to beat Haytaian over the head in a "guilt-by-association" approach. When confronted with the article and pressured by the media, Governor Whitman joined in the magazine attack on Grant. Of course, that did not help Haytaian, who went on to lose to Lautenberg by a mere 3 percentage points. Some loyalists think Whitman's actions made the difference. (Grant ultimately went on to WOR, where he landed on his feet).

2. In 2002, the re-election campaign of Democrat U.S. Senator Robert Torricelli was rocked by scandal. When the uproar became intolerable, Torricelli had to bow out of the race. That appeared to clear the way for Republican candidate Doug Forrester to win by default.

But thanks to the Whitman-stacked State Supreme Court, that was not to be. The Democrats recruited Lautenberg – who had retired from the Senate two years earlier – to run in Torricelli's place. Just one problem: New Jersey law did not contain a provision for substituting a new candidate so late in the campaign unless a candidate had died. The GOP thus argued that putting Lautenberg on the ballot was unlawful.

The New Jersey Supreme Court – "made up of judicial activists from both parties," according to the Almanac of American Politics – decided otherwise. Lautenberg, with high name recognition, won.

A solid majority of the justices who ignored the law had been appointed by Governor Whitman. And why had a Republican governor appointed such activist judges? It seems that Whitman – who had an "in your face" attitude toward the many in her party who disagreed with her pro-choice stance on the abortion issue – went out of her way to appoint liberals and "feminists" to the state's highest tribunal, apparently unaware that the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington had taken the abortion issue out of the hands of the state courts.

Had she instead appointed justices whose rulings were guided by what the law says rather than what they wish it would say, chances are Lautenberg would have had to run a write-in campaign if he wanted to get into the race. That would have left Republican Forrester with an advantage. Like the return of Dracula, Lautenberg's career had been saved again – however inadvertently – by Whitman's war on GOP conservatives.

Whitman is by no means the first "moderate" Republican governor of the Garden State. Tom Kean, whose world outlook is similar to Whitman's, held that top job for two terms in the '80s.
Whereas Whitman went out of her way to emphasize her war on party conservatives, Kean made conservatives a part of his coalition.

Whereas Whitman was re-elected by a razor-thin margin in 1997 (because of a third-party conservative candidate, who provided an alternative for conservatives who believed they were unwelcome in Whitman's GOP), Kean was re-elected in 1985 with 70 percent of the vote, including 60 percent of the state's minority voters.

Speaking of electoral success, let's take a quick look at "moderate" performance in running things in the Republican Party.

With the GOP under conservative leadership controlling the White House and enjoying increasing majorities in the House and Senate, how does that compare with the history of "moderate Republican" stewardship?

In fairness, we will ignore the last year of the hapless "moderate" Gerald Ford's tenure in the White House. Democrats dominated everywhere else, but the normal electoral process had been warped by the intervention of Watergate. Moreover, Richard Nixon governed as a liberal, but much of his rhetoric was conservative. So that doesn't give us a clear picture either.

That leads us to Ike.

In the first year of Dwight Eisenhower's presidency (1953), the Senate was controlled by Republicans 48-46. In the final year of Ike's "moderate" Republican administration (1960), the lineup was 64 Democrats and 34 Republicans – a loss of 14 senators.

In 1953, Ike had a House in the hands of Republicans by 221-213. In his last year, Democrats ruled the House by the whopping margin of 283-153, a loss of 60 congressmen. (The totals in both chambers did not include tiny numbers of "independents" from time to time, but did account for temporarily larger totals in the House right after Alaska and Hawaii had been admitted to the union).

Figures provided by the Council of State Governments show the GOP had 25 governors at the outset of Ike's leadership. By the time he left the White House, there were a mere 16 Republican governors.

Great job of rebuilding the party, "moderate"-style. Right?

Now let's see how the Republicans fared in New Jersey under Governor Whitman's "moderate" rule.

When she was elected in 1993, the Republicans in 1991 had been swept into total veto-proof control of the Legislature: 27-13 in the Senate, 58-22 in the House. After the 2001 elections – the first opportunity the voters had for a referendum on eight years of "moderate" GOP rule (including Whitman's seven years) – the Democrats won control of the House, 44-36, and secured a 20-20 tie in the Senate.

If Governor Whitman is to claim, as she does, that it's time for "moderates" to take control of the party, it is reasonable to ask why the Republicans were weakened when she was in the driver's seat. This appears to be an argument that says nothing succeeds like failure.

UPDATE: Patrick Ruffini takes his licks at Christi as well....