Ed Gillespie Quotes
I don't think we're as divided as many in the elite would have us believe.
Gillespie, Ed. Winning Right: Campaign Politics and Conservative Policies. Free Press, 2006, p. 110.
This was his most famous speech.
After Roosevelt, most eras of American politics more or less followed the pattern Roosevelt described herein as a “calamity”, with the anger becoming more or less intense. Jefferson thought that these were natural divisions of politics in all societies--{604810}. The thing that masked this for years was race and slavery. In Lincoln’s time there were liberals and conservatives in both parties if race were ignored. In Theodore Roosevelt’s era, he, Taft and others were generally liberal reformers, while a large number of Republicans were conservative supporters of the status quo. Some democrats were radical reformers like William Jennings Bryan while others were arch conservatives. Until 1964 and the Civil Rights Act there were many conservatives in the Democratic Party, but almost all switched to the Republican Party in anger. The Republican conservatives tended to drive the Republican liberals out of the party and for the last part of the 20th century Roosevelt’s “calamity” well described the American political scene, and the anger increased carrying partisan bitterness into the 21st century.
The term “rugged individualism” was used at the time be very conservatives and the very wealthy to describe business leladers with words that had very good public connotations. They argued that it would be undesirable to curtail their individualism that was so important by any government regulations or laws that would limit what the business leaders could do. However, the reality was that these very successful and powerful “rugged individualists” had regimented most everyone else—employees, consumers, and small businessmen who might sell them services or products. To Tugwell, if the wealthy and powerful few had no restrictions on their individualism, there would be precious little individualism for most of society. He sought a balance of regulating the individualism and prerogatives of the few somewhat in order to allow the vast majority of people to be able to have individuality as well.
Edward Walter Gillespie is an American politician, strategist, and lobbyist who served as the 61st Chair of the Republican National Committee from 2003 to 2005 and was Counselor to the President from 2007 to 2009 during the Presidency of George W. Bush. In 2012 Gillespie was a senior member of the Mitt Romney presidential campaign.
