Two Books for Feuding Republicans

Jonathan Martin: “As mainstream and Tea Party Republicans wrestle for control of their party, it might be wise over the holidays for each faction to crack open a pair of recent books that recount previous episodes of internecine political combat.”

“In his memoir The New Democrats and the Return to Power, Al From, the founder of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, recalls dragging his party away from the left amid a string of presidential losses during the 1980s. And the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in The Bully Pulpit, describes the friendship and eventual rivalry between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft that cost the Republicans the White House in 1912 and led to a split in the party that lasted decades.”