New years and old passings

May everyone have a blessed New Year. I'll hopefully be back to writing on a routine schedule starting in 2007 with my new piece "From Catholic to Orthodox, From Christian to Islam" on possible new trends in religious faith.

As a child of the 1970s, I should say something on the passing of Gerald Ford although too young at the time (I was four years old) to remember his presidency (political conciousness began with Jimmy Carter). It's interesting that his death comes at the end of this year for the party he represented clearly has changed. Ford was a Republican back when it was seen as northern political party. He represented Michigan's fith Congressional District, which is centered around Grand Rapids and is home to many conservative Dutch Calvinists. It's one of the few remaining traditional GOP districts in the north (most of these located in the Midwest). He shared their values of frugality and was always seen as a fiscal conservative. The maelstrom of the 1960s (there we go again, always the '60s) put Ford on the opposite side of many Republicans in terms of foreign policy and social policy. The Ford-Reagan contest for the GOP nomination in 1976 was fascinating (as all primary campaigns are fascinating) because it was a struggle between the new and old GOP. Ford held on, barely, because the old structures of the party held firm (and because many southern Goldwater Republicans who would have supported Reagan became ensconsed in the party during the Nixon Administration and stayed loyal to Ford, especially Mississsippi's Clarke Reed who's contested delegation made the difference at the '76 GOP Convention in Kansas City.)

Afterward Reagan was urged by National Review publisher Bill Rusher and others to form a third party to unite all the conservatives and run on his own but Reagan refused. "Bill, they can't stop me the next time," Reagan said. And he was right. He undertsood the political and demogrpahic trends that would, four years later, deliver him the nomination overwhelmingly. George Bush I tried to run on the old structures and was walloped.

But it's Ford that truly is the last northern Republican and not the Conneticut Yankee Bush. For Bush, behind the patrician facade, is as much a political animal as Bill Clinton, and all through his career he has changed and altered and shifted himself to fit the realties of the new GOP. That's how he became vice president, that's how he was nominated by the party for president, that's how he got elected President, that's how he was able to bequethe his political legacy to his sons. There's a reason why George II and Jeb were governors of Texas and Florida and not Massachucetts and Conneticut or Maine. That's why the Bushes live in Texas now. Ford at least, will be buried in his home in Michigan. A home he truly loved.

Reqieum im Pacem.

---Sean Scallon