The GOP: Rabbits or Tigers?

By JEFFREY LORD





Reagan, Thatcher and the real battle behind defunding Obamacare.




“We had rabbits when we needed tigers.” — Ronald Reagan writing in his diary of congressional Republicans
Well.
There they go again.
The GOP Establishment is terrified at the idea of defunding Obamacare.
Except, of course, that the opposition within the GOP Establishment and among some conservative pundits to defunding Obamacare — as Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio propose — has nothing whatsoever to do with Obamacare.
Zero.
As Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher would both recognize instantly. 
Leading to the obvious. The problem within the GOP is just as Reagan described decades ago: too many rabbits, not enough tigers.
First: Reagan and Thatcher. We’ll get to the critics after that.
Reagan, right from the very beginning of his active political careerin 1964 all the way through his two terms in the White House, saw the party’s problem as the timid, barnacle-encrusted GOP Establishment. An Establishment he called the “fraternal order” Republicans, as he told the New York Times in December of 1976 when the GOP was reeling from what Reagan saw as yet another unnecessary GOP presidential loss by faint-hearted party moderates, this one to Jimmy Carter by Gerald Ford.
“With some of our friends we don’t need enemies,” Reagan frostily noted in his diary in 1984 after another frustrating presidential encounter with faint-hearted GOP moderates on the subject of budget cuts.
I’m afraid I blew my top at one point. It seemed to me they [GOP Establishment congressmen and senators] are willing to let the Dems. run with the ball because they don’t think we can stop them. I told them before we do that, it’s time for us to agree on our position & then let me take it to the people (TV) & smoke them out. The way we’re going we’re not exerting any leadership.
These were the Republicans and their media supporters who preferred, as he said in an earlier speech, “pale pastels” over “bold colors.” Reagan saw the GOP Establishment, one Reagan biographer later wrote, as being “victims of the political equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages come to sympathize with their captors.”
The “captors” being Establishment liberalism.
Tellingly, over in Great Britain’s Conservative Party, Reagan’s political soulmate Margaret Thatcher was dealing with the exact same problem. Thatcher and her allies summoned a term of art from the elite British public school system that described boys seen by their peers as “feeble” or “timid” — “the wets.”

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