Source: Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON — When House Speaker Paul Ryan told fellow House Republicans that he would no longer campaign with or defend GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, he may have felt it was the obvious, principled position to take.
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Ryan’s goal in distancing himself from Trump, he told House GOP lawmakers on a conference call Monday, was to focus on saving the GOP majority in the House, potentially imperiled by Trump’s decline in polls. But Ryan’s new posture may already have backfired. Some fellow GOP House members are furious. And national party chairman Reince Priebus pointedly has not abandoned Trump, pledging to keep spending party money on the nominee’s campaign.
Ryan appears only to have empowered Trump. The voluble billionaire, after all, clawed his way to the nomination by bucking the party establishment – and Ryan, as speaker, is as establishment as it gets. Now Trump boasts of feeling liberated.
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Even in 1964, when the GOP nominated the libertarian-leaning Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater for president, an ideological outlier, the party’s top congressional leaders did not abandon him. Well-known party figures like Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Gov. George Romney of Michigan did reject Senator Goldwater, but the GOP leaders in the House and Senate stuck by his side. Everett Dirksen of Illinois, the Senate minority leader, even nominated Goldwater at the party convention.
Read more:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2016/1011/Why-Paul-Ryan-s-gambit-on-Trump-is-backfiring
