-By Warner Todd Huston
I’m not going to get all crazy over this one, but I just thought it was odd that in today’s Washington Times piece, Tony Blankley made a flat out wrong historical claim. In his piece titled “The strange GOP nominating victory,” Blankley said:
Assuming John McCain gets the Republican nomination, it will show how whimsical history can be. It would be the first time in living memory that a Republican presidential nomination went to a candidate who was not merely opposed by a majority of the party, but was actively despised by about a half of its rank-and-file voters across the country —and by many if not most of its congressional officeholders.
This is not really true. Wendell Wilkie was widely despised by all the regular Republican party bigwigs when he won the nomination through popular acclaim in a dark horse candidacy. When he accepted the GOP nod to run against Frankiln D. Roosevelt in 1940 he had only recently declared we even was a Republican having voted Democrat his whole life until that point.
The main reason we ended up with Wilkie taking the top GOP spot waqs because some very powerful media moguls pushed his candidacy in all their publications and built a popular storm for Wilkie outside the Party proper.
So, it isn’t the only such times as Blankley seems to imagine.
Just correcting the record.