I have written so many paens to the Lincoln Project people, including one just last night, I thought you might want to read one from someone who is not a contributor. From Frank Bruni of the Times:
Should you have any doubt about how passionately George Conway and the other Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project want to defeat the president, check out their ads.
There are dozens at this point, and the best are minute-long masterpieces of derision, miniature operas of contempt...
...
...[I]f George Conway...and the Lincoln Project succeeds, he and his fellow refugees from Trump’s Republican Party will find peace and a place in a restored, recognizable political order on the other side. Right?
Wrong. They don’t hope to regain control of the Republican Party, because they expect that Trump-ism will survive Trump and that Trump himself won’t shut up simply because voters shut him down.
“I personally think that the Republican brand is probably destroyed,” Conway told me. “It’s destroyed by it having become essentially a personality cult.” He said that he formally left the party, changing his voter registration to unaffiliated, some two years ago, and he doesn’t envision being able to return anytime soon.
But the Lincoln Project’s full-court press for Joe Biden, which involves social media and grass-roots organizing as well as internet and television ads, doesn’t mean that Conway and company are looking for a welcome mat in the Democratic Party. Not at all.
That’s what’s so fascinating about their quest. They’re not fighting to come in from the wilderness. The wilderness is a given. They’re just fighting to get rid of this one sun-hogging, diseased redwood — or orangewood, as the case may be.
I asked Conway, “So you’ll be a man without a party for the rest of your days?”
“Probably,” he said. “It makes me tremendously sad.”
...
It’s easy to miss or minimize how remarkable the Never Trumpers...are.
... they’ve gained in ranks and grown in determination, to a point where you have to go back to 1972 — when many prominent Democrats endorsed President Richard Nixon, a Republican, over George McGovern, the Democratic nominee — to find anything close.
...
And even that precedent doesn’t quite hold up. As the historian Timothy Naftali told me, the Democrats for Nixon split with him primarily along ideological lines, and they weren’t trying to undermine an incumbent president. Never Trumpers are doing precisely that, and while they have ideological quibbles with Trump, they’re motivated principally by their belief that he’s something of a monster.
...
... some political observers see what the Lincoln Project and its kin are doing as an exercise in protracted political suicide.
...
So does that make these Never Trumpers some uniquely high-minded breed?
...
... the most important syllable in Never Trumper is Trump, and Never Trumpers are essentially sowing the seeds of their own diminished relevance by working to get rid of him.
That’s why, when I look at them, I see patriotism, though John Weaver — who, along with Conway, helped to found the Lincoln Project — emphasized a different idea when we spoke. He stressed atonement.
...
“Jeff Sessions wouldn’t have gotten to the Senate had I not overseen his race in 1996,” Weaver told me. “Now I look back at that and say, ‘What kind of goddamn penance do I have to pay for that?’”
[Charlie] Sykes [RVAT] spoke of “a revelation” that he has experienced, courtesy of Trump. “The heart of politics is not about the policy,” he told me. “It’s about the values.”...
[That is the exact word I used to describe my first encounters with LP: Revelation.]
...
In exile he and other Never Trumpers have found clarity. They cut to the heart of the matter. That’s reflected in a Lincoln Project ad from late May that begins with a close-up of body bags and then pulls back until those bags form an American flag. These words appear over it: “100,000 Dead Americans. One Wrong President.”
I don’t know that they’ll tip the election. But they sure as hell tell it like it is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/opinion/sunday/republican-party-trump-2020.html
Should you have any doubt about how passionately George Conway and the other Never Trumpers at the Lincoln Project want to defeat the president, check out their ads.
There are dozens at this point, and the best are minute-long masterpieces of derision, miniature operas of contempt...
...
...[I]f George Conway...and the Lincoln Project succeeds, he and his fellow refugees from Trump’s Republican Party will find peace and a place in a restored, recognizable political order on the other side. Right?
Wrong. They don’t hope to regain control of the Republican Party, because they expect that Trump-ism will survive Trump and that Trump himself won’t shut up simply because voters shut him down.
“I personally think that the Republican brand is probably destroyed,” Conway told me. “It’s destroyed by it having become essentially a personality cult.” He said that he formally left the party, changing his voter registration to unaffiliated, some two years ago, and he doesn’t envision being able to return anytime soon.
But the Lincoln Project’s full-court press for Joe Biden, which involves social media and grass-roots organizing as well as internet and television ads, doesn’t mean that Conway and company are looking for a welcome mat in the Democratic Party. Not at all.
That’s what’s so fascinating about their quest. They’re not fighting to come in from the wilderness. The wilderness is a given. They’re just fighting to get rid of this one sun-hogging, diseased redwood — or orangewood, as the case may be.
I asked Conway, “So you’ll be a man without a party for the rest of your days?”
“Probably,” he said. “It makes me tremendously sad.”
...
It’s easy to miss or minimize how remarkable the Never Trumpers...are.
... they’ve gained in ranks and grown in determination, to a point where you have to go back to 1972 — when many prominent Democrats endorsed President Richard Nixon, a Republican, over George McGovern, the Democratic nominee — to find anything close.
...
And even that precedent doesn’t quite hold up. As the historian Timothy Naftali told me, the Democrats for Nixon split with him primarily along ideological lines, and they weren’t trying to undermine an incumbent president. Never Trumpers are doing precisely that, and while they have ideological quibbles with Trump, they’re motivated principally by their belief that he’s something of a monster.
...
... some political observers see what the Lincoln Project and its kin are doing as an exercise in protracted political suicide.
...
So does that make these Never Trumpers some uniquely high-minded breed?
...
... the most important syllable in Never Trumper is Trump, and Never Trumpers are essentially sowing the seeds of their own diminished relevance by working to get rid of him.
That’s why, when I look at them, I see patriotism, though John Weaver — who, along with Conway, helped to found the Lincoln Project — emphasized a different idea when we spoke. He stressed atonement.
...
“Jeff Sessions wouldn’t have gotten to the Senate had I not overseen his race in 1996,” Weaver told me. “Now I look back at that and say, ‘What kind of goddamn penance do I have to pay for that?’”
[Charlie] Sykes [RVAT] spoke of “a revelation” that he has experienced, courtesy of Trump. “The heart of politics is not about the policy,” he told me. “It’s about the values.”...
[That is the exact word I used to describe my first encounters with LP: Revelation.]
...
In exile he and other Never Trumpers have found clarity. They cut to the heart of the matter. That’s reflected in a Lincoln Project ad from late May that begins with a close-up of body bags and then pulls back until those bags form an American flag. These words appear over it: “100,000 Dead Americans. One Wrong President.”
I don’t know that they’ll tip the election. But they sure as hell tell it like it is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/11/opinion/sunday/republican-party-trump-2020.html
