It may seem like ancient history, but as recently as George W. Bush’s presidency, Marc Racicot wasn’t just the Republican governor of a red state, the Montanan was also the chairman of the Republican National Committee. His commitment to the party and its future was unquestioned: Racicot was a Republican, thoroughly and completely. He even chaired the Bush/Cheney re-election campaign.
It’s precisely why so many were surprised in October 2020 when the former RNC chairman announced his support for then-candidate Joe Biden. Racicot said at the time that he saw Donald Trump’s presidency as “dangerous to the existence of the republic as we know it.”
Sixteen months later, the former governor also saw the RNC he once led formally censure two Republican House members for seeking the truth about the Jan. 6 attack. As HuffPost noted, Racicot decided to speak out once more.
Former Republican National Committee Chair Marc Racicot has a warning for the current chair, Ronna McDaniel, over the party’s “search for power for its own sake and its obsession with winning at any cost.” … “Regrettably, it appears, ‘you have hitched your wagon to the wrong star,’” Racicot, who was RNC chair from 2002 to 2003 and Montana governor from 1993 to 2001, wrote in a four-page letter published in the Billings Gazette.
The entire open letter is worth reading in its entirety, in part because it captures the anguish of a former Republican leader who’s clearly struggling with his party’s direction. “I must confess,” Racicot noted near the top of his piece, “it is difficult to even know where to begin.”
He made the case to McDaniel, for example, that in the political life of the United States, “there is no greater or higher loyalty as a citizen or an officeholder than a shared loyalty to the nation and the Constitution. Every citizen agrees to that premise as a condition of the social contract between the people and their government. Hence, loyalty to a political party or candidate never trumps allegiance to the Republic.”
Of particular interest was the Montanan’s focus on what he described as “the elephant in the room” — the 2020 presidential election and “the efforts of the unsuccessful candidate to overturn the results.” From the open letter: Although it is ever so neat and tidy to blame the defeat of the former president on the existence of decisive and widespread fraud, there is not even a scintilla of evidence, anywhere, to support such piffle. The former president didn’t experience defeat in 2020 because of fraud. The truth is quite the opposite. The defeat of the former president is explained by the fact that legions of responsible citizens, part of that Great Middle of America, voted the way they did because they embraced the very fidelity to their country and its Constitution that the RNC claims to embrace in its Party Platform.
If recent history is any guide, this is the sort of thing that might generate a tantrum from the former president, who’s likely to call Racicot a “RINO” who’s wildly out of step with the attitudes of the Republican Party’s rabid base. And therein lies the point: In the not-too-distant past, the idea that Marc Racicot, a former RNC chair and former Republican governor, would hardly recognize his own party might’ve seemed outlandish. But in 2022, this is where they party finds itself.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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