Rules of the GOP Fraternal Order | The American Spectator
A lesson from the 1912 Taft-TR Convention.
Rule One: Don’t question the rules.
Rule Two: Unless you want to change the rules to preserve the Ruling Order.
The other day, a surely very nice guy who was identified as a former Colorado Republican Party Chairman appeared on CNN to discuss the latest state of play in the Trump-RNC dust-up. Among other things he dismissed concern over Colorado’s rules for selecting delegates by saying that they had been in place since… 1912.
Uh-oh. In saying this the ex-chairman clearly unwittingly opened a door that makes Donald Trump’s
point about GOP Establishment-types monkeying with the rules, and makes it more or less exactly. Why? Well, hop into the time traveling machine and come with me back to, yes, 1912.
The Republican Party is in absolute turmoil. President William Howard Taft is in the White House, the protégé of his predecessor and old friend President Theodore Roosevelt having won the White House four years earlier after TR declined to run for a third term. But now? Teddy Roosevelt is upset with his old friend. It seems Will Taft has turned out to be a tad more conservative than the trust-busting TR approved. OK, actually a lot more conservative. And so TR, more than furious, has plunged headlong into the presidential race, directly challenging Taft for the GOP nomination. Also in the race was a third candidate: the liberal Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette.
They battle across the country, with Roosevelt winning 9 of 12 states that had primaries. But the rest of the then-48 states had no primaries. And as the Chicago Convention approached, the delegate numbers stood this way ...
-go to link-
Rule Two: Unless you want to change the rules to preserve the Ruling Order.
The other day, a surely very nice guy who was identified as a former Colorado Republican Party Chairman appeared on CNN to discuss the latest state of play in the Trump-RNC dust-up. Among other things he dismissed concern over Colorado’s rules for selecting delegates by saying that they had been in place since… 1912.
Uh-oh. In saying this the ex-chairman clearly unwittingly opened a door that makes Donald Trump’s
point about GOP Establishment-types monkeying with the rules, and makes it more or less exactly. Why? Well, hop into the time traveling machine and come with me back to, yes, 1912.The Republican Party is in absolute turmoil. President William Howard Taft is in the White House, the protégé of his predecessor and old friend President Theodore Roosevelt having won the White House four years earlier after TR declined to run for a third term. But now? Teddy Roosevelt is upset with his old friend. It seems Will Taft has turned out to be a tad more conservative than the trust-busting TR approved. OK, actually a lot more conservative. And so TR, more than furious, has plunged headlong into the presidential race, directly challenging Taft for the GOP nomination. Also in the race was a third candidate: the liberal Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette.
They battle across the country, with Roosevelt winning 9 of 12 states that had primaries. But the rest of the then-48 states had no primaries. And as the Chicago Convention approached, the delegate numbers stood this way ...
-go to link-
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