Professor Emeritus at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate University and a distinguished fellow of the Claremont Institute, Jaffa was dean of what National Review has called “Claremont conservatism,” which is influential not only in California, but throughout the country.

In academe, Jaffa is best known for his Lincoln scholarship, going back to 1959 and the highly influential “Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.” The sequel, after a lifetime of scholarship and refelection, came in 2004 with, “A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War.”

The latter book highlights the Gettysburg Address, which Jaffa maintained was “a speech within a drama. It can no more be interpreted apart from the drama than, let us say, a speech by Hamlet or MacBeth can be interpreted apart from Hamlet or MacBeth. The Gettysburg Address is a speech within the tragedy of the Civil War, even as Lincoln is its tragic hero. The Civil War is itself an outcome of tragic flaws — birthmarks, so to speak — of the infant nation.”

According to a National Review profile last year:

Jaffa is one of the most famously cantankerous intellectuals in America …. This is especially true for fellow conservatives. “If you think Harry Jaffa is hard to argue with, try agreeing with him,” quipped William F. Buckley Jr. in the foreword to one of Jaffa’s books. “He studies the fine print in any agreement as if it were a trap, or a treaty with the Soviet Union.”

Other sparring partners have included George Will and the late Irving Kristol. NR wrote:

“I do not mean to be gentle with you,” Jaffa once wrote in an open letter to Walter Berns, another conservative scholar. “In your present state of mind, nothing less than a metaphysical two-by-four across the frontal bone would capture your attention.” 

(Alas, Berns, another influential scholar of the conservative movement, himself died on the same day as Jaffa, at 95.)

Goldwater 64

In practical politics, Jaffa was best known as a speechwriter for Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. Not many political phrases are remembered five days after a campaign, let alone five decades. But this lone Goldwater spoke in his GOP Convention acceptance at the Cow Palace in San Francisco still is recalled, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue.”

The line was a dig at the “moderate” Rockefeller wing of the party that Goldwater had defeated, also called “Me Too” Republicans back then for going along with Democratic Party increases in taxes and government; or what today is called a RINO — Republican in Name Only.

President Johnson’s campaign ran with it, part of its ongoing smears of Goldwater as an “extremist” who would start endless wars. That theme most infamously was shown in the LBJ campaign’s “Daisy” attack ad, itself one of the few campaign ads anyone remembers. It depicted a little girl picking daisies as an atomic bomb explodes in the background over Johnson’s voiceover warning that Goldwater would get the country involved in deadly wars.

Ironically, it was LBJ who got the country involved in the Vietnam quagmire that cost 58,000 brave young American lives, and in the end was lost.

Liberty

But the point of Jaffa, and Goldwater, was that liberty is non-negotiable. Lincoln said in the “House Divided” speech in 1857 that Jaffa wrote about, “In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.”

Lincoln did not say, “I believe this government can endure, maybe 1/10 slave and 9/10 free. After all, we don’t need extremism in defense of ending slavery.”

Although Goldwater lost, his campaign inspired a generation of conservatives, many of them later Jaffa’s students at Claremont. The conservative movement helped elect Ronald Reagan, a big Goldwater backer, president in 1980 and 84.

And conservatism remains a strong voice in American politics, as the GOP victory in last November’s election showed. Jaffa’s work endures.

But he missed a step. Shouldn’t we first be blaming himself and other Republicans for nominating such duds as the Bushes, McCain and Romney?

More than 50 years ago, JFK used to ask of Republicans, “Where do they get these candidates?”

Despite all the changes in the past five decades, that hasn’t changed.

And Kennedy didn’t mean the great Barry Goldwater, whom he was friends with from their Senate days. The two pals planned to hold a series of debates around the country during the 1964 election, but JFK was shot. He was succeeded by LBJ, who refused to debate Goldwater and ran one of the most vicious campaigns in history, especially the infamous “Daisy” Mushroom Commercial that Bill Moyers (yes, the PBS guy — he’s always lived off our tax money) ginned up.

That reminds me of the old conservative quip. “People said that if I voted for Goldwater, we’d get war and death. I voted for Goldwater, and we got war and death” — but under supposed peacenik LBJ, of course, who won his mendacious election in a landslide.

Kennedy meant guys like Nelson Rockefeller and George Romney (father of Mitt).

Anyway, if they want to win, Republicans obviously need to start again nominating candidates in the Goldwater-Reagan mold.

Pictured are two senators who are strongly against Obamacare and behind the government shutdown, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Except the Senate voted for Obamacare. Ted Cruz's family aren't Confederates, but immigrants from Cuba. Kentucky, whicn Paul represents, never left the Union; it never was part of the Confederacy. And Rand Paul's family originally was from Pennsylvania, where his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, was born. Ron Paul graduated Gettysburg College, which a history says owes its “inception to Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican and abolitionist from Gettysburg.” If you saw last year's Steven Spielberg movie, “Lincoln,” Stevens is the firebrand abolitionist played by Tommy Lee Jones.

After becoming a medical doctor, Ron Paul served as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Air Force. Then he moved to Texas to practice obstetrics. That's why Rand grew up there. Texas in the South, but the Pauls are Keystone Staters.

Single payer

Lofgren says:

“I am not an Obama partisan. I have many bones to pick with him, including the healthcare bill. If your intent was to insure as many people as possible, you’d have single payer. You also wouldn’t pay off big Pharma and the insurance companies.”

But single-payer never would have passed. And getting Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big HMO on board was critical to passing Obamacare. Democrats learned from the 1993 Hillarycare debacle, when they were strongly opposed by the medical establishment. Remember the Harry and Louise commercial? This time, the Democrats got that establishment into the operating room. It's odd that a longtime GOP staffer wouldn't know that.

Lofgren:

“These people are basically neo-Confederate insurrectionists. They are in substantive rebellion against the orderly government of the country.”

Hardly. The GOP House funded every part of government, in separate bills, and sent the bills to the Senate — excepting only the funding of Obamacare. Under the U.S. Constitution, all tax bills must originate in the House; Obamacare obviously has taxes (the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in June 2012 precisely because it is a tax; at least according to the court).

Lofgren then brings up the deals previous GOP leaders made with Democrats. Well, we don't know yet what kind of deal House Speaker John Boehner will make with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama.

But here's one of Lofgren's examples:

“In the ‘80s there was a willingness to negotiate, to compromise. The Beirut bombing killed 246 Marines, and it revealed a terrible lack of cooperation between the individual services. And [Sen.] Barry Goldwater and Bill Nichols, his Democratic counterpart in the House Armed Services Committee, got together and came up with the Joint Chiefs reform act. There was no partisanship about this. It was, 'How do we fix this problem?'”

Actually, the “problem” was that the Marines were in Beirut in the first place; which is why President Reagan immediately removed them.

Goldwater is cited because he was Mr. Conservative. However, the Joint Chiefs reform was hardly as monumental as Obamacare would prove to be. And at the time, in the mid-1980s, I well remember that the Joint Chiefs reform was criticized for giving the chiefs, in particular the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, too much power. The reforms certainly didn't prevent the military from going along with the recent debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Newt and Bill

Lofgren:

“I think Gingrich’s speakership was an important way station on the road to our current circumstances. Because he very much polarized things.”

That's funny. Because recently I saw on Piers Morgan's show both Gingrich and Bill Clinton saying that they cooperated to resolve the 1995 shutdown and other controversies of the late 1990s. Both said President Obama and Boehner should be talking to one another.

Lofgren:

“Just based on intuition, I tend to think it’ll go on until sometime close to the default date, 17th of October. Because the government shutdown is a bad thing, but a default puts us into uncharted territory. When you screw around with the full faith and credit of the United States government, that’s serious.”

Actually, the government has been in actual default for some time. When you can't pay your bills for years and years, that's actual default. When you run up not just $17 trillion in debt, but $222 trillion in unfunded liabilities, that's actual default.

Bye-bye middle class

And with Janet Yellin becoming the new head of the Federal Reserve Board and continuing the inflationist policies of Ben Bernanke, things are just going to get worse. Because inflation is 2 percent officially (a lot more in reality), but interest rates are zero, the government effectively is borrowing money at low interest rates — but destroying the savings of the middle class.

No wonder middle-class incomes have plunged 7.3 percent since the Great Recession struck five years ago, including during the Obama “recovery.”

And Lofgren wants to increase the burden on the middle class through Obamacare's immense tax increases on the middle class. Even as many companies are cutting hours worked for many employees below the 30-hour threshold under which Obamacare is imposed.

Even before Obamacare, an immense weight of regulation and taxation has weighted down the backs of the middle class to the breaking point.

I don't see any “neo-Confederates.” But what I do see is the federal government further enslaving our once-free people.