Death of the Last RINO President

Or more precisely, the last President from what we once called the "Rockefeller Republicans".

by Rod D. Martin
January 2, 2007

Many others have said plenty this week about Gerald Ford’s virtues, and about them there is surely much to be said.  But perhaps the most significant thing for conservatives to note is that Ford was the last RINO (Republican In Name Only) President; or more precisely, the last President from the Party’s Rockefeller Republican wing.

That distinction is worth making, because in Ford’s case “RINO” is an anachronism, only valid from our point of view today.  And the fact that this can be said is illustrative of a change too many conservatives have forgotten.

When Gerald Ford occupied the White House, what we call RINOs were the Republican Party: not merely socially liberal but socially uninterested, Keynesian in their economics (the man who made Ford President, Richard Nixon, famously said “we are all Keynesians now”, the point at which more than a few free market economists have opined that they knew that they were not), and accommodationist in their foreign …