GOP - A Party Turned Upside-Down

by Michael Reagan: Nobody ever tried to build a house by starting with the roof and working down -- it can’t be done. You have to start from the bottom up. The same thing is true about building a political party. You have to start at the grass roots and work your way up to the national level, going from precincts, to counties, to states and all the way up to the national level. Without a large body of workers at the local level, a political party would be like an army with only generals and no privates. . . .

Ask yourself just how many of the current crop of Republican presidential candidates have spent the last four, six or eight years working out there in the states helping to elect Republican congressional candidates and local and state officials and in the process helping to rebuild the at the grass roots? How many have followed the example Richard Nixon set after his defeat in the 1960 presidential election and in his later campaign to win the California governorship? Instead of retiring to California and licking his wounds, he spent the next six years tirelessly crisscrossing the country working to elect Republican congressional and state and local candidates and as a result, by 1968 he had a vast network of GOP grass-roots organizations that helped elect him and other GOP candidates. That’s the kind of work you have to do to create a national political party, but it has been sadly lacking in recent years. It needs to go on not just in election years, but in between elections. It’s a full-time job. . . .

What this party is lacking right now is that sturdy grass-roots movement which is the mechanism that wins presidential and congressional elections. Here where I live in California, you’d have to put out an All-Points Bulletin to find the Republican Party at the grass roots. That’s why the Democrats all but own the state, lock, stock and barrel. When the Rockefeller-wing philosophy prevails, the GOP loses. When the Reagan wing is in control, we win. We don’t need kingmakers. We need workers. Until we get them we’ll be the minority party.

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