Re-Rat Awards to Senators Gregg, Specter
In Finest Hour 142, Spring 2009, I proudly presented the Churchill Re-Rat Award (issued infrequently) to Senator Judd Gregg (R.-NH), who accepted nomination as President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce but then withdrew, saying he could not balance “being in the Cabinet versus myself as an individual doing my job.” Gregg’s nomination had sewn fear among conservatives who learned that NH’s Democratic Governor, John Lynch, would appoint a liberal Republican in his place.
On 26 January 1941 Winston Churchill, who had deserted the Conservative Party for the Liberals in 1904 but oozed back into the Conservative Party in 1925 (after being appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer the previous year by Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin) remarked to his private secretary John Colville: “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”…