Exorcising the ghost of Gerald Ford

Jeffrey Lord has an excellent piece in The American Spectator which traces the historical fault lines between Republican moderates and their conservative opponents. A sample:

Over and over and over the two men sparred from one end of America to the other in 1976. Ford was the adamant "moderate" -- proud that he had picked the statist New York ex-Governor Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, ashamed of himself for dumping Rocky in a bid to stave off Reagan. Ford was about "trimming" government with a spending cut here and there when he wasn't busy negotiating with the Soviets. To Reagan the federal government was the Leviathan incarnate, an increasingly out-of-control Frankenstein which, if not sharply downsized, would bring the American Experiment crashing down around its citizens heads. And the Soviet Union should disappear. Or, as he also later said, "we win, they lose."