Many others have said plenty about Gerald Ford’s virtues, and I certainly concur with them.  But perhaps the most interesting thing to note about Ford is that he was the last RINO President; or more precisely, the last Rockefeller Republican.

That distinction is worth making, because my title characterization is an anachronism, only valid from our point of view.  When 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 policy.

They were the majority, these establishment predecessors of Christie Whitman and Lincoln Chafee.  Well, they were the majority in the GOP anyway.  Conservatives in the modern sense were disenfranchised, by being the defeated Goldwater remnant within the GOP, by foolishly clinging (particularly in the South) to a Democratic Party already captured by the Red Diaper Baby left, or by refusing to vote at all (the majority of Evangelicals).

The Ford Presidency summarized this perfectly. Ford was staunchly pro-abortion (and vocally so to the day of his death): he, like his once-upon-a-time Southern Baptist successor Jimmy Carter, could have effectively fought Roe and possibly overturned it but did not want to (that moment had passed by the end of the Seventies).  He, like his successor, was a tax-hiker: the one tax cut which his friends have noted in recent days was mere Keynesian fine-tuning, hardly the supply-side philosophical change Laffer first proposed to Cheney and Rumsfeld and which could have averted the Carter-era’s double digit inflation, interest rates and unemployment.  And no one has chronicled Ford’s Chamberlainesque sell-out to the Soviets at Vladivostok better than the great Phyllis Schlafly: Democrat white-flag Congress notwithstanding (however much they might rightly be blamed for tragedies from the fall of Saigon and Phnom Pehn to the failure of Americans to stop the Cuban invasion of Angola), Ford’s inept continuation of Nixon’s détanté started America down the slippery slope which ultimately led to the loss of 26 countries to Communism by the end of the Carter Presidency.

It took Ronald Reagan to change all this.  But the important thing to note this day is that Reagan did stop it, and indeed transformed it.  The stirrings for this change were already there:  Reagan, reinvigorating the Goldwater coalition, nearly beat sitting-President Jerry Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976.  But his triumph in 1980 — first in the Party, then in the nation — represented the end of the northeastern establishment’s dominance of the Republican Party, and the beginning of the popular conservatism which has spread far and wide ever since.

This is an important thing for disheartened Republicans to remember.  Many lament to me that the Republican Party has gotten “worse and worse” since Goldwater.  The precise opposite is true.  What’s more, the failure of conservatives to nominate Reagan in 1976 did not mean it was time to fold the tents and go home:  it meant that the time had come to redouble efforts, recruit new converts, and press the near-victory of ‘76 on to its logical conclusion.

Then as now, the whole world was at stake.  Roe remains on the books, with the most pro-abortion justice — Ford appointee John Paul Stevens — reported ill.  The Soviets were then at the gates; al Qaeda seeks daily to find ways in them now, with China and others growing stronger every day. A Democrat Presidential candidate looms who would make Carter look conservative, and who has already attempted to nationalize nearly 1/5 of the entire U.S. economy, all in the name of better health care and at just the moment when free market health reforms are making high quality health care accessible to more people than ever and when socialism has been shown to create more oppression, more suffering and more poverty than any other system man has devised.  A reinvigorated conservative movement must lead the Republican Party to new victories.  Everything hangs in the balance.

The death of Jerry Ford represents the defeat of an entire worldview, and the takeover of one of America’s two great parties by its heretofore disenfranchised conservative majority.  As in Canaan, the conquest has gone slowly, and the work has been imperfect.  But the workers must not tire, the task must be completed.

And more now than ever, victory is within reach.

And so it begins: the MSM busily pushes the story that Hillary Clinton is dropping like a stone in the polls, while Barack Obama and others are rising fast.

You’ll hear variations on this theme all year. Don’t believe it. It’s a sucker’s game.

Each cycle, but especially in cycles where the outcome is essentially foreordained, the media is faced with the challenge of keeping the public’s interest. Interest = ratings = ad dollars. So year-in and year-out, they build up the John Edwardses of the world just to send them crashing back down as soon as it suits them and/or reality sets in.

This year, of course, has a twist. The Left (which includes virtually the entire MSM) is salivating over the prospect of a Hillary-Obama ticket, a “double minority” team which they think will ensure higher-than-ever Dem turnout, crossover of at least some Republican women, and an especially radical course once in office.

To get there, they need a horse race, one big enough to validate the noob Obama as a Vice Presidential-level player despite his almost complete lack of experience or even resume. If he gives Hillary serious trouble, problem solved.

But don’t be foolish enough to buy the spin. The MSM will probably achieve this ticket-centric goal. But Hillary — polls notwithstanding — is unshakable. Her (and her husband’s) control of the precinct organizations in key early primary states (and everywhere else of course too) is unprecedented, their money machine untouchable (except by one man in the other party, Jeb Bush), their friends innumerable and perfectly positioned. Hillary is a lock.

The only question is whether we can beat her in November. And if the best we can offer is John McCain et al., the answer is no.