A not-so-mellow skeptic sees a GOP with no focus

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

Lyn Nofziger, at 81, is almost who he was at 41 -- a plain-talking, slightly disheveled California skeptic. He's a newspaperman who became the plain-talking, slightly disheveled top aide to Ronald Reagan, from the Gipper's 1966 campaign for California governor through his first year in the White House 15 years later.

With shirt collar still unbuttoned and tie still loosened, the goateed Mr. Nofziger has been lobbying for a living and, on the side, writing opinion columns and authoring Western novels.

He has opinions aplenty, but they are not likely to be confused with Republican or conservative talking points. He is a Reaganite but not a Reagan worshipper, a Republican but not a party apologist, a conservative who thinks the word is largely meaningless.

Of Mr. Reagan, he says: "Our problem is we are trying to make a saint out of a man who certainly wasn't perfect. But he was a unique president. He believed in three things: God, the American people and himself. And that's kind of unique."

The Nofziger take on what's happened to Republicans in the post-Reagan era is not what anyone would expect from a Capitol Hill lobbyist, let alone one who was also the first political director in the Reagan White House and attended daily senior staff meetings with Mr. Reagan, Edwin Meese III, Judge William Clark, James A. Baker III, Martin Anderson, Richard Allen and other marquee names of the Reagan administration.

"They've been in power too long," Mr. Nofziger says of Republicans. "Any time you put any political party in power for too long, it becomes corrupt. It loses its focus. It forgets why it came there."

When it comes to the so-called neoconservatives surrounding the president, he says, "'Conservative' is a word that doesn't mean anything. It can mean what you want it to mean."

But then he serves up a definition that he says he and Mr. Reagan were using before they met each other in 1965.

"To me, conservative means believing in a minimum amount of government and a maximum amount of freedom -- and keeping government out of people's lives and business -- and leaving people alone," Mr. Nofziger says. "I recognize you have to have national defense and have to finance the government. But government does not have to be the be-all and end-all."

White House battles