Newsweek Touts an Eisenhower for Obama

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By Tim Graham (Bio | Archive)
February 5, 2008 - 13:16 ET
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As I mentioned earlier today, Newsweek's Richard Wolffe has an article on Republicans for Obama. This is a little like Vegetarians for McDonald's. The star of this piece is "dedicated" Republican Susan Eisenhower, a granddaughter to the distinctly non-ideological president of the Fifties. There are two problems. First, she's not much of a Republican. Second, this is the second time she's starred in an anti-GOP Newsweek piece in this election cycle. Wolffe began: 

Susan Eisenhower is more than just another disappointed Republican. She is also Ike's granddaughter and a dedicated member of the party who has urged her fellow Republicans in the past to stick with the GOP. But now Eisenhower, who runs an international consulting firm, is endorsing Barack Obama. She has no plans to officially leave the Republican Party. But in Eisenhower's view, Obama is the only candidate who can build a national consensus on the issues most important to her—energy, global warming, an aging population and America's standing in the world.

"Barack Obama will really be in a singular position to attract moderate Republicans," she told NEWSWEEK. "I wanted to do what many people did for my grandfather in 1952. He was hugely aided in his quest for the presidency by Democrats for Eisenhower. There's a long and fine tradition of crossover voters."

But Richard Wolffe (the frequent guest of Keith Olbermann) is having a little problem with definitions. Isn't it contradictory to be both a "dedicated" Republican and a "crossover voter"?

In fact, Susan Eisenhower is not really a "dedicated" Republican, if that means someone who always stands by her party. From the golden-oldies file, from the Los Angeles Times (October 26, 1986), a story by Marylouise Oates reported that Ike's granddaughter supported California ultraliberal Rep. Mel Levine. (His ACU scores at the time: 1985, zero, and 1986, five percent out of 100.)

The congressman, a former Republican who once campaigned for Nelson A. Rockefeller, has set up a committee of GOP voters to support his reelection bid, headed by honorary chairs Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the late President, and Wickes Co. Chairman Sanford Sigiloff of television commercial fame.

The Republicans for Levine committee includes several City Council and school board members from Inglewood, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach and other cities, along with former county Supervisor James Hayes, former Los Angeles Police Chief Tom Reddin and former Sheriff Peter J. Pitchess.

This is not even the first time in this presidential election cycle that Newsweek touted Susan Eisenhower as proof the Republicans were tanking. From the May 14, 2007 Newsweek, an article by Michael Hirsh began: 

Susan Eisenhower is an accomplished professional, the president of an international consulting firm. She also happens to be Ike's granddaughter--and in that role, she's the humble torchbearer for moderate "Eisenhower Republicans." Increasingly, however, she says that the partisanship and free spending of the Bush presidency--and the takeover of the party by single-issue voters, especially pro-lifers--is driving these pragmatic, fiscally conservative voters out of the GOP. Eisenhower says she could vote Democratic in 2008, but she's still intent on saving her party. "I made a pact with a number of people," she tells NEWSWEEK. "I said, 'Please don't leave the party without calling me first.' For a while, there weren't too many calls. And then suddenly, there was a flurry of them. I found myself watching them slip away one by one."

It ended with Eisenhower, too:

Even so, Eisenhower and other lifelong Republicans say they haven't heard much yet from the leading Democratic candidates that persuades them. "I can't tell you how many Republicans I've talked to who are thinking along radical lines" about deserting in '08 if they hear the right message, says Eisenhower. "It's a buyer's market. Make my day."

As long as Hirsh mentioned the "international consulting firm," it should also be noted that Eisenhower was married in 1990 to Roald Sagdeev, an aide and space-program adviser to Soviet dictator/reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. If you're nerdy enough to want to see this "lifelong Republican" kvetch from the left in 1994 against Yeltsin and Clinton and about how Russia's fallen apart now that Gorby was gone, see an old PBS transcript here.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center.


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She is a Republican in the

February 5, 2008 - 13:20 ET by Dan The Man 2

She is a Republican in the Maria Shriver mold, and it sure is moldy.

Nuke em til they glow then shoot em in the dark.

Susan vs. Bush

February 5, 2008 - 14:50 ET by Tim Graham

Susan Eisenhower quoted in Newsweek's quotes section, August 6, 2001:

"A refuge to me means a land of last resort. I take my grandfather's legacy in Alaska very seriously." Susan Eisenhower, on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, created during her grandfather's presidency.

Liberal columnist Bob Herbert in the New York Times, February 27, 2006 on the anti-war film Why We Fight: 

If you want to get a chill, just consider the tragic chaos in present-day Iraq (seven G.I.'s were killed on the day I went to see ''Why We Fight'') and then listen to Susan Eisenhower in the film recalling a quotation attributed to her grandfather: ''God help this country when somebody sits at this desk who doesn't know as much about the military as I do.''

Republicans tanking?

February 5, 2008 - 13:26 ET by mattm

This is the MSM theme. This is the motivation behind their promotion of McCain. The truth is they are hoping that conservatives tank, not specifically Republicans.  And they think that if Republicans lose, conservatism loses.

Of course they're wrong, if McCain loses either the primary or the general, it will be because he's a Liberal. 

BTW what the heck does "build a national consensus" mean?  Take a poll and see what most people think?  This is liberal-speak, so Eisenhower is no conservative...so her support of Osama is understandable, but it has NOTHING to do with the state of conservatism.

This reminds me of the old

February 5, 2008 - 13:57 ET by Chris Norman

This reminds me of the old Subaru commercials from the seventies where they got people with last names identical to makes of other cars to say they drove their's. Like Susan Ford singing, "Ford drives Subaru..."

Tell me again...

February 5, 2008 - 14:01 ET by okiehawk44

Why is it important what someone's grandchild thinks about much of anything that is opposite of what dear old granddad or grandma believed in? She should probably release herself from some "duty to Republicanism" position she adopted -- maybe with help from dear old dad -- and just be herself.

From a bio

February 5, 2008 - 14:59 ET by stratman

From a bio page: 

"...she is a Senior Director of Stonebridge International, a Washington-based international consulting firm chaired by former National Security Advisor, Samuel "Sandy" Berger."

Seems that Ms. Eisenhower has a number of "friends" that would vote Liberal already and a few others that would "change" teams if it helped their business.  Reminds me of an old saying - Sleep with dogs, get up with fleas.

Concerning one of her books entitled Breaking Free: A Memoir Of Love And Revolution:

Eisenhower, a step-grandmother and the twice divorced mother of three daughters, is not being fanciful when she writes of her identification with Romeo and Juliet. In her case, the antagonistic forces were the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., either of which might have proscribed her marriage to Soviet physicist Roald Sagdeev. In a memoir written against the chaotic background of Gorbachev's perestroika, which she makes immediate and vivid, Eisenhower recreates the growing love between herself and Sagdeev, whom she met in 1987 at a U.S.-U.S.S.R. forum in New York. Before they married in 1990, the couple rendezvoused in Russia, the U.S. and various European countries at foundation and political meetings at which the author, the granddaughter of the 34th president of the U.S. and president of the Eisenhower Institute, is often a guest. The couple maintained a public professional decorum while meeting clandestinely for intimacy. If Eisenhower writes with surprising emotion of the upheavals in today's Russia, her passion is perhaps a reflection of her experiences in conducting her affair with Sagdeev and of her concerns for the Russians who became like family to her. She conveys the personal and the political with equal intensity in these pages. Of the couple's blood relatives we are given only glimpses, but they delightfully relax the book's fervor: At their awkward introduction, the author's father and her husband-to-be end up singing Russian folk songs as they drive the back roads of Pennsylvania; when the author first meets her aged father-in-law, a Tatar and a devout Communist, he whoops with pleasure at the fact that when he dies he can look up his new kin, President Eisenhower.

Heartwarming, isn't it?  But the review above does Comrade Sagdeev a disservice - Roald Sagdeev was head of the Soviet space program, adviser on arms control to Gorbachev, and Hero of Socialist Labor.  I'm sure granddaddy would have been thrilled.

Killing them with kindness isn't working.  Time to get scrappy with the Donkeys.

Give me a break Susan Ike

February 5, 2008 - 15:02 ET by exLib

 Obama is the only candidate who can build a national consensus on the issues most important to her—energy, global warming, an aging population and America's standing in the world.

Well, if that isn't the RNC Platform, I don't know what is...(sarc off)

 Since when does the average American care one bit about "America's Standing in the World".   I'm sure it's really fine for the most part.

 "I'm good enough, smart enough, and by golly, People Like Us!!"

 

 

These Rino's cry every night for you

February 5, 2008 - 16:18 ET by Lame Cherry

Eisenhower and his group never were GOP stalwarts. They were the moderates pissing around managing things like Harry Truman mismanaged things.

If Ike had simply SIMPLY opened up the buying of US military stores as Richard Nixon has asked of him to open his lead over Kennedy to where Kennedy could not have stolen the election, just ponder history.........

No JFK murder plaguing the nation.
Bay of Pigs success as Nixon would have bombed Castro, so NO CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS.

No Vietnam war where it was stalmated and given away later by Kissinger.

No Watergate.

No price controls in going off the gold standard.

No welfare state Great Society of LBJ.

No counter culture.

No Gerald Ford moderate.

No Nixon opening the government buying for an economic surge which caused a massive recession.

No Jimmy Carter.

There would of though been in 1968 a young Republican named Ronald Reagan taking over as President.

That means the Soviet Union collapsed 10 years earlier. That means no Jimmy Carter muhajadeen now al Qaeda. No Iraq wars, no Iranian nukes and no current recession from wars and NO BILL CLINTON nor Hamrod Hillary.

So pardon my French if I'm glad girly Eisenhower is gone, gone, gone with her clique of fascists who love government control of industry and people's lives they dictate.

Obama is a great place for her as he is the same social fascist as her old man who really is to blame for screwing over Nixon and causing all of this which brought about Jimmy Carter.

Just think of it........no raping, drunken, murderous Kennedy's to be paraded around as "American Royals".

Good bye lawyer Eisenhower.......adios to you and your cheap slave labor Mexican imports running your RINO industries.

 

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