Republican party needs a reset - Echo opinion

Opinion echo published in the Bangor Daily News.

Kurt Bardella is a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project. He is a former aide to California Republican Reps. Darrell Issa and Brian Bilbray and former Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe.

Kurt Bardella

https://bangordailynews.com/2021/01/01/opinion/contributors/its-never-too-late-for-republicans-to-leave-the-party/

There was a time when being a Democrat or a Republican was defined by your views about health care, abortion, gun control, taxes, education, foreign policy, etc.

Those days are over.

It was something to hear Sen. Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah and the party’s standard-bearer in 2012, tell CNN’s Jake Tapper on Dec. 20, “I represent a very small slice of the Republican Party today.” An obvious, but candid, acknowledgement.

As he explained, the party he knew as a young man — and even just eight years ago — is gone.

“We were a party concerned about balancing the budget. We believed in trade with other nations. We were happy to play a leadership role on the world stage, because we felt that made us safer and more prosperous. And we believed that character was essential in the leaders that we chose. We have strayed from that. I don’t see us returning to that for a long time.”

Yet, when asked whether he thinks about leaving the GOP, Romney — like other Republicans who say they are repulsed by Donald Trump’s takeover — declined. He said he would be more effective battling inside the party. But I venture that’s only part of the rationale.

As someone who left the Republican Party to become a Democrat for similar reasons, people often ask me how I could have stayed in the GOP after Trump won.

The truth is, changing your political identity is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. For a person in politics — for the thousands of elected officials, staffers, local party officials, the entire political class really — it means unplugging from everyone you know and the foundation of your professional and social life. Imagine spending years of your life building relationships with like-minded people, and then one day, deciding to start over.

When you work in politics, your party is your team and your career. No one goes into politics without loving that life. If anyone thinks it is easy to casually discard all that because it is “the right thing to do,” you honestly have no idea what doing so really means.

That’s why, when Trump took office, many in Republican circles clung to the belief that he could be steered or managed. That, despite the inflammatory words, and actions that littered the campaign, the adults in the room would be able to contain Trump and preserve the political goals of the Republican Party.

I went through that very cycle when I made the decision in 2017, to leave the GOP. In doing so, I had to accept that I might not work in professional politics ever again. Back then, there was no Lincoln Project and nowhere for a former Republican-turned-Democrat to land.

Three years later, the situation in our country is even more dire. Republican leaders refuse to stand up to Trump even now, and by staying silent, are actively aiding and abetting his deranged plot to steal the election and undermine the will of the people.

I appreciate where Romney is coming from, but there comes a point where an institution is so thoroughly broken it must be rebuilt someplace else. The party’s true platform has become a toxic combination of authoritarianism and white nationalism. Rebuilding the party will require dismantling it. And helping in that cause doesn’t mean becoming an independent or agitating for a third party.

In the American two-party system, it means joining the other side — the Democrats. Steve Schmidt, Lincoln Project co-founder and John McCain’s campaign manager in 2008, explained why in a recent interview. “At the end of the day, there’s now one pro-democracy political party in the United States of America and that’s the Democratic Party,” he said. “And I am a member of that party because of that. I’m a single-issue voter. I believe in American democracy.”

At the start of the Trump presidency, anti-Trumpers who identified as Republicans stayed with the team hoping that their policy positions would still form the basis of a Republican agenda. That experiment is over.

If you were a Republican because you believed in fiscal restraint, under Trump the debt and deficit have exploded. If you were a Republican because you believed the GOP was stronger on national and homeland security, just look at what Trump said recently in cynically downplaying Russia’s cyberattack against our country. If you are a Republican because you believe in law and order, examine the records of the corrupt people Trump just gave pardons and commutations to. If you are a Republican because you are pro-life, there are more than 340,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 to call into question the GOP’s commitment to the sanctity of life.

Whatever issue has kept you aligned with the Republican Party, it’s time to accept that none of those issues supersedes the welfare of our democracy. When your party takes leave of its senses and takes its lead from the delusional rantings of a conspiracy theorist, it’s time to switch teams.

Republican Party is lost: A new mission and fresh leadership are necessary!

Abraham Lincoln was a Republican but the party he led has become racist.  It's time for truly conservative Republicans to take control of their political party and inspire new "Lincolnesque" leaders!

Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand!" Today's right wing of the extremist Trumpziism Republican Party is dividing Americans and destroying the Grand Old Party.  

Echo opinion by Jennifer Horn published in USA Today op-ed

New Hampshire - My mother spent a lifetime trying to teach me to stand for what is right. “You do the right thing because it is the right thing,” she would tell me, “no matter how hard it might be. You will be better and stronger for having done so.”

I became a Republican, in part, because those values seemed inherently aligned with the Republican Party as I understood it: a voice for equality, freedom and constitutional conservatism, with a rich history of fighting for what was right because it was right.

I ran for Congress and became the Republican nominee running on these beliefs. I was elected to two terms as the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican party, advancing these values. 

I have spent the past 20 years engaged in the fight for these foundational American principles — as a Republican.

GOP is dismantling democracy!

Nevertheless, for the past five years, I have found myself fighting for what I thought were the principles of my party in the face of the ever-deteriorating character and integrity of party representatives. 

They have revealed their impotence and decrepitude as they have fallen, one by one, at the feet of the most corrupt, destructive and unstable president in the history of our country.

It seems there is no assault on human dignity too great, no attack on democracy too extreme, to inspire the Republican weaklings in Congress to speak up or stand up to Donald Trump. (Maine Writer- So, Senator Susan Collins, are you listening?)

With very few exceptions, elected Republicans have been silent in the face of this president's most contemptuous and at times barbaric actions. They have defended and excused his impeachable betrayals.

Worst of all, they have openly supported his attempts to sabotage the Constitution and dismantle democracy, as we know it. Trump’s post-election attempts to invalidate millions of legitimate votes through an abuse of the judicial system amounts to no less than an attempted coup and has been openly encouraged and supported by every level of the Republican Party.

I have been asked thousands of times how I can continue to call myself a Republican in the face of such dangerous, anti-American actions.

The truth is, I cannot. 

Those ideals that I have spent so many years fighting for — liberty, conservatism, constitutional leadership — are no longer the principles of the Republican Party. 

Never, did I believe I would see the day when the party of Abraham Lincoln would try to invalidate millions of legitimate ballots and enlist in an effort to overthrow the lawful government of the United States.

Yet, that is where we are today. In the weeks since the election, the GOP has ransacked the Constitution. Republicans have demeaned our republic with their attempts to steal an election as if we were no more than a third-rate banana republic. They have humiliated themselves and disgraced our great nation.

As I watched the Republican Party and its elected leaders across the country coalesce around the most unpatriotic assault on our elections that I have ever seen, it became clear to me that the party of Lincoln is no more.
Just as Abraham Lincoln understood that America could not continue to stand with so destructive an institution as slavery, so have I come to understand that America and today’s Republican Party cannot coexist.

Embrace of Trump coup was too much

On Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the founding of The Lincoln Project, I will go to my town hall and rescind my registration as a Republican and register as an independent. I do so not because of Trump, but because of everyone else in the party who openly embraces Trumpism, because of the party’s perfidious leaders, and a platform that advocates against equal rights for all.

The GOP has become so destructive an institution — by embracing racism, accepting hatred and cruelty as the foundation for policy, and by advocating for and advancing the overthrow of democracy in America — that it has become wholly incompatible with the constitutional pillars of our country.

I have spent my entire life trying to meet the ethical measure of my mother’s lessons. I have spent my years in the Republican Party trying to meet Lincoln’s standard of "right makes might." And I have spent the past 30 years as a mom myself, trying each day to teach my children by my actions that we do the right thing, no matter how hard, because it is right.

Leaving the Republican party is no small thing for me to do. It is not an easy decision. I am sure that there are many reading right now who are thinking “good riddance" — and probably much worse.

But I make this choice in peace and on my own terms.

I remain committed to the fight for conservatism, constitutionalism and individual liberty. My belief in the promise that is America remains strong. America must remain a beacon of hope for freedom and liberty for all. 

Under Republican leadership, that beacon has been dangerously dimmed.

More importantly, however, I am reminded in this moment that freedom and democracy are fragile concepts. They are not tangible objects to be protected by tucking them in the back of a drawer. Each one of us, as Americans, must be ever engaged in their preservation.

As long as today’s Republican party holds sway over our nation, freedom and democracy are at risk, and every one of us must set aside our partisan differences and tribal instincts in their defense.

Jennifer Horn is the former chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party and is a co-founder of The Lincoln Project. 

The Lincoln Project is an American political action committee formed in late 2019, by a number of Republicans and former Republicans. During the 2020, presidential election, it aimed to prevent the re-election of Donald Trump and defeat all Republicans in close races running for re-election in the United States Senate.

Donald Trump must face up to his failures and resign

This essay was published in the History News Network by Wendy Melillo an Associate Professor of Journalism in the School of Communication at American University.  Although the subject is about political advertising and the impact it has on voters' emotions, the fact is, the imagry for Donald Trump's re-election is already cast in the message expressed by the Lincoln Project's "Mourning in America".  In my opinion, Donald Trump must resign.  Lack of leadership qualifications notwithstanding, Trump will not recover from the Lincoln Project ads.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yG_-K2MDo

The promise of American greatness knew no bounds in “Morning in America,” the iconic ad created by the group of political consultants and advertising gurus (the “Tuesday Team”) who worked for Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign. In the ad, Americans were working, getting married, and buying homes – confident that the country they lived in was “prouder and stronger and better” under President Reagan’s leadership than four short years before.

Advertising typically sells us life as we want it to be, not life as it truly is. Maybe that’s why the anti-Trump, conservative super PAC known as the Lincoln Project’s new ad “Mourning in America” is such a gut punch. As misery and despair unfold in scene after scene of job loss and death, there’s no escaping the dystopian nightmare America is now mired in as the country battles the coronavirus. After seeing the ad, Donald Trump started rage tweeting at the ad’s creators – attorney George Conway, Republican strategists Steve Schmidt and John Weaver, and media consultant Rick Wilson – at nearly 1 a.m. on May 5.

The history of political advertising offers a glimpse into why ads like this one can come to define a politician’s candidacy for better or worse. Ads that effectively tap into the collective cultural zeitgeist can become harbingers of a candidate’s fate in a way that political polling will never be able to do. Numbers can’t effectively capture the moment when advertising causes perceptions to harden into actual beliefs that govern voter decisions come election time.

We’ve seen such moments before. The 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad turned Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, into an unpatriotic, East Coast elitist. Compare the 2008 wil.i.am “Yes We Can” video in support of Barack Obama to the 2007 viral video “Vote Different,” which superimposed Hillary Clinton’s face in the place of Big Brother in a make-over of the 1984 Apple computer ad. Putting Obama’s speeches to music communicated hope and love. Depicting Clinton as an authoritarian evoked all the negative feelings against her.

It’s worth a trip down memory lane to recall exactly how much advertising has influenced presidential campaigns and their outcomes. Historians credit Eisenhower’s decision to accept advertising with changing the course of how modern presidential campaigns would be conducted going forward, according to the former Museum of Television & Radio’s (now the Paley Center for Media) 2004 exhibit, “Madison Avenue Goes to Washington: The History of Presidential Campaign Advertising.” Whistle-stop tours ended and the era of slick ads designed to enhance a presidential candidate’s image began.

Eisenhower hired veteran ad man Rosser Reeves in 1952 to create what would become the first presidential campaign spots to air on TV. Republican Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey had rejected Reeves’s advances four years earlier because he considered mixing puffery with politics undignified.

Reeves, later known for the famous M&M candy campaign “Melts in your mouth,” crafted Eisenhower’s image by removing his glasses and filming him answering questions from Americans about taxes and Korea. The strategy behind the $60,000 campaign, called “Eisenhower Answers America,” allowed Reeves to present the candidate as fatherly, decent, responsible and trustworthy. Democrats complained that Eisenhower was selling the highest office in the land like advertisers sold soap or laundry detergent.

John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign featured the first-time political ads were shot on location. One positive ad showed Kennedy talking directly about his Catholic religion, a controversial issue at the time. The Kennedy campaign also produced a damaging attack ad that undermined the carefully honed image Republican opponent Richard Nixon had earlier created during his famous Checkers speech. When Nixon ran against Kennedy, Eisenhower was asked at a press conference to name something his vice president had done. Eisenhower answered, “If you give me a week, I might think of one. I don’t remember.” The Kennedy campaign used the remarks in TV and radio ads that questioned Nixon’s experience and capability.

Stoking fear about Republican Barry Goldwater became the key Democratic advertising strategy used to keep Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House in the 1964 presidential race. The Democrats hired the ad agency Doyle Dane Bernbach (today DDB Worldwide) to produce a series of hard-hitting ads. One TV spot featured a saw slowly cutting off the eastern section of a model of the U.S. Just before the piece fell off and floated away, the announcer told viewers that Goldwater thought the nation would be better off without the Eastern Seaboard.

Perhaps the most controversial and memorable presidential campaign ad of all time, the “Daisy Girl” spot, played off of the very real fear Americans had of nuclear annihilation, as historian Robert Mann recounted in his book Daisy Petals and Mushroom Clouds: LBJ, Barry Goldwater and the Ad That Changed American Politics. The countdown to a nuclear missile launch is told through the eyes of a young girl pulling petals from a daisy flower as the mushroom cloud appears in her eye. The spot aired just once, on Labor Day, during NBC’s Monday Night at the Movies, but the subsequent media interest brought it fame as an attack ad.

The 1968 three-way race between Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace saw the birth of the media specialist in presidential campaigns, which became a major contributor to cost, even as attack ads grew in prominence. One Humphrey spot featured a man’s voice laughing uproariously as the words “Agnew for Vice President?” appeared on a TV screen.

When Nixon’s media advisors created their own in-house agency called “The November Group” in 1972, they “saved the 15 percent of the amount of television and radio air costs an agency holds back as the fee for placing an ad,” wrote Kathleen Hall Jamieson in Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. Advertising teams would appear again in Reagan’s Tuesday Team – named after election day held on the first Tuesday in November – and in 2000 for George W. Bush’s “Park Avenue Posse,” headed by the ad agency Young & Rubicam’s Jim Ferguson.

At the time, the 1988 race between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was considered the most negative historical contest since the 1964 Daisy Girl spot. Two ads painted a devasting picture of Dukakis as weak on crime. Jamieson described “Revolving Door” in her book this way: “A procession of convicts circles through a revolving gate and marches toward the nation’s living rooms.” Jamieson said the ad made a false inference “that 268 first-degree murderers were furloughed by Dukakis to rape and kidnap,” since the facts revealed that only William Horton, a first-degree murderer whose saga the Bush campaign chronicled in the “Willie Horton” ad, escaped his furlough in Massachusetts and committed a violent crime.

As journalists stepped up their scrutiny of advertising claims made in the 1992 race, Bill Clinton’s ad team used real news footage in attack ads and played on a positive association by including a photo of a young Clinton shaking JFK’s hand.

The people who produce advertising understand how emotions can drive decision making, and voting choices are no different from product purchasing decisions. One’s instincts, often translated into “which candidate would you would rather have a drink with,” influence the ballot box, as the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson knows only too well.

Speaking of his homage to the original Morning in America spot, Wilson wrote in his May 6 column in The Daily Beast, “That brilliant, evocative minute caught a moment of uplift in the minds and hearts of American voters in that rarest of political spots; it was true in the audience’s gut.”

The darker Mourning in America video, where America is presented as “weaker and sicker and poorer,” might well be the 60-seconds that decide Trump’s fate in November.