If Responsible Republicans are in fact approaching extinction, I think we can identify the crucial event that signaled their demise. It was a December 1993 memo by conservative strategist and commentator William Kristol. Kristol’s advice about how Republicans should respond to Bill Clinton’s 1993 health-care effort pushed the GOP away from any cooperation with the other side. His message marks the pivotal moment when Republicans shifted from fundamentally responsible partners in governing the country to uncompromising, hyperpartisan antagonists on all issues.
In his five-page memo, Kristol took aim at Bob Dole and other congressional Republicans who were then working to find a compromise around the shared goals of universal coverage and cost containment. Kristol called for the GOP to “adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal.” He argued that a bipartisan deal on health care would be a political victory for Democrats and a defeat for the GOP. “Unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal,” Kristol wrote, ” … would be a monumental setback for the president, and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.”
Weisberg, on the decline of the Responsible Republican
The only problem I have with these words is that they suggest a sort of "destiny's child" involved in this--as though we could have stopped this all from happening if Bill Kristol hadn't written that memo. The catch is, Kristol was just one of a phalanx of fetal neo-cons waiting to birth a movement that would fuck things up for all of us. Sending a Terminator back to kill Kristol's mom or Kristol himself wouldn't change anything. There's still Rumsfeld and Cheney who had been neo-cons loooong before the term existed (pre-neo-cons?).
Still, it's an interesting pinch of history there and it did really happen.
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