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By WILLIAM B. ALLEN
Rappahannock News Contributing Writer
One of the great political ploys of the 1980s has surfaced in the movement to repeal the twenty-second amendment — the two term limitation on the President of the United States. It may just achieve its goal, which is to deflect public attention from the disarray in the Republican Party that will be highlighted in the struggle for the 1988 nomination. But even if it should achieve more than that, even if the Democrat-controlled Congress were to accommodate the ploy, and the states complied with ratification in time for the 1988 election, Ronald Wilson Reagan would not become a candidate.
The same disarray which the play seeks to mask explains why Mr. Reagan won’t run, and in fact why he will likely leave the Republican Party nationally in the same kind of shape he left the California Republican Party when he completed his terms as Governor. President Reagan’s situation does not differ much from that confronted by George Washington in 1799. A few months prior to the first President’s unexpected death, he was urged by New England Federalists to come forth yet again to rescue his country. They wanted him to run for President in order to head off the victory of the Republican Party headed by Thomas Jefferson.
Washington pointed to the same evidence which Connecticut’s Jonathan Trumbull had cited to persuade him to run as demonstrating that he should not run. Trumbull said that only Washington could head off a Republican victory, given the complete disarray of Federalist forces under John Adams. Washington responded: “If men, not principles, can influence the choice on the part of the Federalists, what but fluctuations are to be expected? If principles, instead of men, are not the steady pursuit of the Federalists, their cause will be seen at an end. If these are pursued, they will not divide at the next election of a President. If they do divide on so important a point, it would be dangerous to trust them on any other.”
Mr. Reagan’s Republicans are in the position of Mr. Washington’s Federalists, with the additional burden of having no particular principles to unite them. The closest thing to a principle for post-Reagan Republicans seems to be the slogan,
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