Invasion of the Party Snatchers

By Scott Horton

WaPo's Michael Abramowitz treats us to a conversation with Vic Gold, whose impeccable GOP credentials include service as a campaign aide to George H.W. Bush during his senatorial effort in Texas, and work as a press assistant to Barry Goldwater during the ill-fated 1964 presidential effort.

At a lunch recently at a downtown Washington hotel, Gold, 78, hands over the program, now an artifact of seemingly ancient history. He is trying to explain why it was so hard to write his new book, one whose title encapsulates what he now thinks of his onetime friends: “Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP.” The two men at the top, he says, were men he knew pretty well—or at least he thought he did.

“What I described there was the Cheney we all thought we knew,” Gold says ruefully.

His book, to be published this month by Sourcebooks with an initial print run of 20,000 copies, offers quite a different assessment of the two most powerful men in Washington. Under Bush and Cheney, he argues, the GOP has moved away from principles of small government, prudent foreign policy and leaving people alone to live their private lives -- all views Gold associates with his hero, Goldwater. “Invasion of the Party Snatchers” makes plain Gold's contempt for the direction of his party and the guidance of its leaders.

“For all the Rove-built facade of his being a 'strong' chief executive, George W. Bush has been, by comparison to even hapless Jimmy Carter, the weakest, most out of touch president in modern times,” Gold writes. “Think Dan Quayle in cowboy boots.”

Gold is even more withering in his observations of Cheney. “A vice president in control is bad enough. Worse yet is a vice president out of control.”

Gold gives us evidence that there are still old Republican believers, and some of them are overcoming party loyalty to adopt a critical tone. “The depredations of the Bush administration -- the war, violations of civil liberties, expansion in government, the politicization of the Justice Department, to name just a few -- have violated [Gold's] sense of what the Republican Party should stand for” writes Abramowitz.