January 23, 2003
WHOSE RANKS?:
Dissent in the Ranks (Howard Altman, January 16-22, 2003 , Philadelphia City Paper)Edward H. Hamm is a retired real estate investor and oil man. He's a card-carrying Republican who's given more than half a million
dollars to GOP campaign coffers, including $1,000 to elect George Bush. Hamm gives so much money to the party that he goes by the title of Republican Regent. [...]On Monday, Hamm paid $170,000 for a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal -- titled "A Republican Dissent on Iraq" -- exhorting Bush to back down. The ad is signed by more than two dozen people with Republican ties nationwide, including two from Philadelphia -- John Haas, the retired chairman of the board at Rohm & Haas, and Peter Benoliel, chairman of the executive committee of Quaker Chemical Corporation. [...]
Hamm's original draft of the ad was massaged by the Avenging Angels, a "progressive" advertising and communications firm whose founder, Gene Case, began his career working with Lyndon Johnson's 1964 re-election campaign.
According to Climaterescue.org, an environmentalist website, Case founded the $500-million advertising agency and assisted organizations like The Nation magazine, National Council of Churches, Nuclear Information and Resource Service and TrueMajority, a grassroots education and advocacy project founded by ultra-liberal ice cream magnate Ben Cohen. [...]
John Haas is happy to talk about why he signed Hamm's ad.
"I am not against war, just against us going in by ourselves," says Haas, who was a Republican until switching allegiances earlier this year to vote for Ed Rendell in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. "A unilateral approach to this problem is the wrong way to go. It is a mistake for us to go in ourselves and create more problems than we solve. It will infuriate the world community, the Muslim community and create more terrorists. If you go in with the backing of the Security Council, you are all right."
Haas, whose father helped found Rohm & Haas, says that disagreeing with President Bush is nothing new for him.
"I did not vote for Bush," he says. "I have been a lifelong Republican, but I was not able to go along with his politics."
In what sense are these guys Republicans? Posted by Orrin Judd at January 23, 2003 12:48 PM
"In what sense are these guys Republicans?"
What's your point, Orrin? That someone can't be against this war under the present circumstances and still be a Republican? If so, I find that attitude rather remarkable for someone who presumedly cherishes liberty.
No, it was that at least one of the signatories is a registered Democrat, not a Republican, and that they used not just a Democrat ad agency but a far Left one. So how is this a "Republican Dissent"?
Posted by: oj at January 23, 2003 1:38 PMFrom opensecrets.org, it appears that Hamm is legitimately Republican in his giving. Haas, on the other hand, is a Democrat, with donations to a bunch of Dems, the Democratic Congressional Committee and various liberal pacs.
Posted by: David Cohen at January 23, 2003 1:59 PMThe dissent isn't just over the war. It's a lot of other things that are adding up. Whether rightly of wrongly, Bush is seen to be compromising away too much on domestic issues: education, environment, cultural issues, and affirmative action (the Michigan quickstep notwithstanding).
Posted by: Derek Copold at January 23, 2003 5:54 PMBy ideological purists who'd rather be "right" than rule. In which case they'd get nothing.
Posted by: oj at January 23, 2003 8:14 PM