An Unmitigated Disaster

[Geee]

Townhall:

Republican party leaders may have worried that Donald Trump would not only lose the general election for the presidency, but would so poison the image of the party as to cause Republican candidates for Congress and for state and local offices to also lose. Now they seem to be trying to patch things up, in order to present an image of unity before the general elections this fall.

 

Regardless of how that attempt at patching up an image turns out, Trump's candidacy could be not only a current political setback for Republicans, but an enduring affliction in future elections.

 

For decades after Republican President Herbert Hoover was demonized because the Great Depression of the 1930s began on his watch, Democrats warned repeatedly, in a series of later presidential elections, that a vote for the Republican candidate was a vote to return to the days of Herbert Hoover.

 

It was 20 years before another Republican was elected president. As late as the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan was called by the Democrats' Speaker of the House, "Hoover with a smile." When a high official of the Reagan administration appeared before Congress to explain the administration's policy, a Democratic Senator said, "That's Hoover talk, man!"

 

Actually, it was a policy proposal the opposite of that of the Hoover administration, but who in politics worries about the truth? The point is that Hoover was still being used as a bogeyman, more than 40 years after he left office, and nearly two decades after he was dead. Trump's image could easily play a very similar role.