Political Decision Quotes
After the Confederate defeat at Roanoake Island, Norfolk, VA, in January, 1862:
Ford assumed the Presidency upon Nixon’s Watergate resignation. He was the only President in history who had never been elected to national office. When he pardoned Nixon he lost much of his support from the left and the middle. Weakened, he came under the influence of the very conservative wing of the Republican Party who urged him to dump his Vice President Nelson Rockefeller from the Republican ticket in the 1976 election. Rockefeller was a liberal republican who supported abortion rights and civil rights. Rockefeller, realizing that Ford’s nomination was in danger, volunteered to step down. {641394} Ford accepted and regretted his action as soon as he had done it. The result was that Ford lost to a relatively unknown Southern governor, Jimmy Carter. However the Conservative wing of the Republican Party had triumphed and the liberal republicans, who had been the backbone of the Republican Party since its inception did not play a significant role in the party for the next 30 years.
The wording implied that if the upcoming convention should draft him for a second term, he would run. But the convention was more interested in politics than in exegesis. Coolidge was ignored, and Herbert Hoover won the nomination.
This was a variation of the famous Henry Clay quotation.
In 1963 there was only one Congressman who expressed misgivings about United States military involvement in Vietnam:
Essentially Trollope claimed that English political parties are by their very nature, conservative, in the sense that they tend to resist great change. This has tended to be true in America and other democracies, but there are a number of exceptions. Where political parties are totally unsuccessful, they have little to lose. Likewise, when a political party becomes overwhelmingly dominant, it tends to overreach and try and make ideological change. However when there is true contest among the parties, they tend to be conservative in the sense that even if they are liberal parties, they do not move in extreme ways.
