Word: gop
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...This claim is an overstatement. Within the scope of his own career Rockefeller has demonstrated such consistent insensitivity to the mood of the national electorate that it is unlikely he could have succeeded with any party. But it's also true that a shift took place within the GOP; power was moving to the string of Southern and Western states that constitute the sunbelt. That area was the main beneficiary of the post-WW II boom, still unhibited by the countervailing force of strong trade-unionism. Rockefeller stumbled upon this split by accident, purely out of his search...
Rockefeller gained the Republican nomination for governor with his favorite device--polls. His showed that he ran best among possible GOP candidates against Harriman, though he would lose heavily too, and therefore the nomination was hardly anything worth fighting for. In this way he whittled down the opposition of the state's powerful Republicans like Thomas Dewey who were suspicious of his ambition and his money. The contest of 1958 presented the ideal face for him; against Harriman, the Union Pacific heir, the issue of personal fortune was relatively muted. Rockefeller won by more than half a million votes, outspending...
...campaign for the presidency, Rockefeller demonstrated an insensitivity to the GOP establishment, that, while only mildly harmful then, would prove fatal to his political life four years later. He roamed around the world with little on his mind but fallout radiation (Nehru would remark later, "...a very strange man...all he wants to talk about is bomb shelters"), an issue which carried the implication that Eisenhower had been soft with the Russians. He entered the campaign an outsider and left a bad loser--in his final declaration of non-candidacy, Rockefeller avoided endorsing the only serious candidate left...
...court to get the nomination in four years. He spent the intervening time campaigning for local Republican candidates, particularly in the sunbelt, picking up IOU's wherever he went. So when Rockefeller emerged with his inevitable polls showing him beating Johnson in '68, it hardly mattered--Nixon had the GOP county chairmen. Rockefeller tried to offset Nixon's advantage with a $4.6 million media blitz and a new set of polls. But after the assassination of Robert Kennedy it was too late--Nixon had run in the primaries, and Rockefeller was trying to run in thepolls. The party leaders resented...
...Gramm drew blood, no doubt helping Alan Steelman, the Republican Congressman from Dallas who will oppose Bentsen in November. Many conservatives in the GOP are unhappy that Steelman was nominated, viewing him as a maverick with uncomfortably liberal tendencies. One Texas Republican political consultant asked me not long ago, "How the hell can Steelman come out for gay rights, the ERA, and legalized abortion, all in the same speech?" But Steelman is consistently on the Right in matters of government spending and management of the economy--he gets high marks from conservative groups who rate members of Congress--and Gramm...