Commentary: Stop throwing dirt on GOP 'grave'

By Ed Rollins
CNN Contributor

   
Editor's note: Ed Rollins, a senior political contributor for CNN, is Senior Presidential Fellow at the Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University. He was White House political director for President Reagan and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.


Ed Rollins says the Republican Party has bounced back from defeat before and will do so again.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- My message to the national media and political pundits on their premature obits on the Republican Party: Quit throwing dirt on our graves!

We may be feeble, but we are not dead and to paraphrase a quote from the Terminator: We'll be back.

Being older than dirt myself, I have a perspective others might not have. I have been amazed recently at all the stories in the media regarding the perceived end of the Republican Party. It might be wishful thinking on some of their parts. This week's Time magazine cover story titled "Endangered Species" is the epitome.

The defection of Sen. Arlen Specter to the Democrats after polls showed he would lose badly in a Republican primary, and the rocky start of new Republican National Chairman Michael Steele has created a feeding frenzy.

Ironically in 2001, after Sen. Jim Jeffords switched to the Democrats, Sen. Spector wanted a rule change that wouldn't allow senators to change their parties between elections. And how many of you can name the last four Republican Party chairmen? Or Democratic Party chairmen for that matter.

Another debate heated up over the weekend when former Vice President Dick Cheney commented on former Secretary of State Colin Powell's Republican credentials on "Face the Nation." Cheney said he thought "Colin had already left the party." He also said he thought Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama was "some indication of his loyalty and his interests."

Obviously Cheney took the Obama endorsement as a betrayal by a man he recommended to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and whose nomination as Secretary of State he certainly had to approve in his role as vice president. But neither Cheney nor Powell are the future of the Republican Party, so the debate is no longer relevant.

As bleak as things might seem today for Republicans, I have to put things into context.

I became a Republican in the summer of 1972. I was involved in running President Nixon's re -election campaign in California and became part of his administration at the start of his second term.

In very short order after my arrival in Washington in January 1973, the Nixon administration came apart at the seams with a daily soap opera of criminal charges, congressional hearings, federal indictments and the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew for bribe taking, followed 10 months later by the resignation of Richard Nixon who was about to be impeached by the Congress.

I was demoralized and ashamed of the leaders of my new party. But I wasn't going to quit because I still believed in the principles of strong national defense and smaller government, and in the idea that working people should do better than those who don't.

In the aftermath of all this, Republicans got slaughtered in the midterm elections of 1974, losing 48 House seats and five Senate seats. Republicans had only 144 House members in the 94th Congress.

Two years later, Jimmy Carter was elected president and I was convinced Republicans would be in the wilderness the rest of my political life. After the first 100 days, President Carter's approval rating was 69 percent -- higher than President Obama's.

And four years after that I was working in the White House as an assistant to President Ronald Reagan -- who defeated Carter by a landslide and won a Senate majority and a philosophical majority in the House. For 20 of the next 28 years, a Republican was in the White House.

In spite of losing five of those seven presidential elections, hardly anybody was saying the Democrats must move to the right. No, they nominated Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry -- all liberals and two of them "Massachusetts liberals."

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