Contacts Are Everything

I found Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column interesting for the quotes she solicited from some of her prominent Republican contacts. I’m reproducing them here:

The past few days I reached out to some wise people, accomplished individuals whose love of country has been expressed through their careers.

I told the former Indiana governor and current president of Purdue University that I was calling people I knew to be sane. “That won’t keep you busy,” Mitch Daniels said.

He was upbeat on the election. “It seems to me the country just basically said it hadn’t lost its mind. I was stunned at the success the Republicans had in the congressional elections and in the state initiatives.”

He was hopeful about the presidential impasse. “I honestly think this mess offers an opportunity to, at the right moment, have a Goldwater moment.” That was when Republican members of Congress went to President Richard Nixon, during Watergate, and told him it was over. It was a moment of country over party. “It would signal that we got to get on with the business of the country now,” Mr. Daniels said.

I think that Mitch Daniels is one of the best pols on the scene today. He got out while the getting was good.

Bill Brock, a former representative, senator, cabinet member and head of the Republican National Committee, believes in his party as a constructive force in the world. He doesn’t like the president using words like “stolen” when he speaks of the election: “Of course there was some fraud. Did it change the outcome? No. . . . This leaves a situation where President Trump uses his words and his desire to go out in the field again, but the effect will be to disillusion his own supporters. He’s using their loyalty to justify the fact that he lost an election that he did not believe he’d lose. He’s using their loyalty to cover the fact he lost. And he exposes them to the hazard of finding out that the election was over and that there was no theft of adequate size to change the outcome.”

He believes Mr. Trump sent his followers on the field without weapons. His voters chose him because they were “desperate for someone who they felt understood them, that no one else hears them. They wanted a voice and they got him and he was a loud voice and he’d be heard, and he changed the world in many good ways. But that voice now is in defense of his own situation.

“Nothing will change the results in a given state. The Biden margin is now sufficient that it would take all the close states. That is not possible. To leave the impression it is possible will leave many people disillusioned.”

As for Mr. McConnell, “Mitch is trying to keep people together so there’s some coherence” when the process is over.

If you don’t remember him, Mr. Brock had a lengthy career as a representative, senator, Secretary of Labor, and trade representative.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls for sensitivity and a sense of mutual give. On Sunday she tweeted: “Congratulations President-elect @JoeBiden and Vice President-elect @KamalaHarris.”

But she also told me, “We need to worry about how bitterly divided we are. The level of anger is so high.” Trump supporters feel he was never given a chance: “I think we all need to take a deep breath. More than 70 million Americans voted for President Trump, and some reassurance through the process that this has been done fairly is not a bad thing.”

“It will be better when all this is over, and done expeditiously. I trust, and I think most Americans trust, the courts to get this right.”

As for the transition, “most of what you need to do in a transition you can do without the formality. The hardest part is getting your team in place, making personnel decisions, and then vetting those you’ve chosen. It’s not ideal that it hasn’t formally started. It would have been ideal to have it settled on election night and ideal to have a ‘normal’ transition, but they are experienced people.”

On the withholding of the presidential daily briefing, she says, “Sen. Harris has served on the Intelligence Committee, there is not much that will surprise her. Joe Biden has been vice president for eight years. The idea that we’re endangering national security is, I think, overblown.”

She is a veteran of Bush v. Gore. The official Bush transition didn’t begin until after the Supreme Court ruled on Dec. 12, 2000. Until then everything was uncertain—“it all came down to 537 votes in Florida, not multiple states with significant margins. I remember Gov. Bush calling me and saying, ‘I’d like you to be national security adviser.’ And I thought but didn’t say, ‘Yes sir, if you’re president.’ ”

Like everyone else I spoke to she wanted to see election reform.

Beyond that: “Trust the process that we are in. Our institutions work.”

I have considerable respect for Secretary Rice as well.

I’d be interested in what form they think that election reform should take. I don’t think the problem is election reform so much as the stakes in winning an election.