By Major W. Cox
Delegates at the 1996 Republican National Convention picked Bob Dole as their candidate for president. The former senate majority leader has history on his side. Since the Republican Party was formed, voters have manifested a preference for GOP candidates in a majority of presidential elections.
From 1861, when Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president, to the time George Bush left the office 1992, Republican presidents held the presidency for 80 of the 132 years. Historians generally agree that Republican origins are rooted in sectional conflict during the 1850s, over the expansion of slavery.
Enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed earlier compromises that excluded slavery from new territories in the Western United States. Passage of this Act served as the unifying agent for abolitionists, while splitting the Democratic and the Wig parties. "Anti-Nebraska" protest rallies spread quickly around the country. At one such meeting in 1854 at Ripon, Wisconsin, attended by a group of abolitionist Free Soilers, Democrats, and Wigs, they decided to call themselves Republicans. This name was selected because they considered themselves to be the political descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party.
The Republican Party was a success from the beginning. The 1854 congressional elections sent 44 Republican candidates to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Other elections saw Republicans elected to the U.S. Senate and to various state houses. In 1856, Sen. John C. Fremont became the Republican candidate for president. In the election, Democrat James Buchanan defeated Fremont. However, the Republican Party emerged from the 1856 elections as the antislavery party.
Four years, later Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president with 39.8 percent of the popular vote. Shortly after Lincoln took office, the American Civil War began. The North’s defeat of the South left the Democratic Party in shambles, because in the South, Democrats had been closely allied with the Confederacy.
From it’s creation the Republican party was in the ascendancy. Of the more than 70 years between 1860 and 1932, Democrats controlled the White House for only 16 years. During this era, the Republican Party led the nation through the Civil War. At the conclusion of the war, the GOP shepherded three amendments to the constitution through the approval process granting full citizenship to the former slaves.
After World War I, the Republican Party became more conservative than the Democratic Party. Republicans, with support primarily coming from the upper middle class and corporate, farming and financial interests, began to favor political policies of laissez-faire, free enterprise, and fiscal responsibility, and positions against the welfare state.
The 1932 election of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt ended Republican party ascendance. One of Roosevelt’s main accomplishments during this election was attracting the black vote to the Democratic Party away from the Republican Party. Since 1932 the Democratic Party has been, for the most part, the ideological home of the black vote. Ironically, as blacks gained influence within the national Democratic Party, support for GOP presidential candidates in the South increased. At the same time, Democrats continued to dominate congressional and local elections in the region, ushering in an era of split-level government.
Bob Dole wants to end split-level government and return Republican control to both, the executive and congressional branches of government. He hopes to do this by making the party more attractive to nonwhite and women voters. Naming political rival, Jack Kemp, as his vice presidential running mate is a significant step on the path leading to that objective.
Jack Kemp is ideologically suited to balance the Dole ticket. Throughout his political career, Kemp has voiced his belief in politically and fiscally conservative programs without using the exclusionary rhetoric voiced by so many carrying the Republican Party’s banner of late. Another astute Dole political tactic is the conspicuous role he is creating for Gen. Colin Powell in the campaign.
Dole’s most prudent political move yet, was to quiet Pat Buchanan. Buchanan represents a faction within the Republican Party that wants to return America to the "good old days" of white-male superiority. Mr. Buchanan would barricade the country’s borders and hold American corporations hostage in order to provide jobs for this former legally classified privileged class. Republicans may have little tolerance for affirmative action programs, but Senator Dole makes it clear; under his watch, the GOP will manifest even less toleration for racism and sexism.
History is indeed on Bob Dole’s side. To become our next president, he must follow the path laid out in his speech before the Republican Convention. At the same time he needs to avoid those weak and missing planks in his party’s platform.
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Originally Published: 28 August 1996, Montgomery Advertiser
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