“I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate”

Still on limited bandwidth blogging. I was planning on weaving this pair of quotes into a couple of our ongoing threads (particularly this one), but that will have to wait. For now I'm just going to present them without comment and let you very capable readers draw your own conclusions:

From a Rick Perlstein piece on Mitt Romney and the conservative movement:

M. Stanton Evans, a legendary movement godfather, stood up. He said my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Richard Nixon had never been a conservative. He proceeded, though, to make a striking admission: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate”—at which point, apparently, Nixon finally convinced conservatives he could be one of them.

And from a recent (February 2nd -- post-scandal) story on Governor Christie:

“We are very excited to announce that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will speak at CPAC 2014," American Conservative Union Chairman Al Cardenas told Yahoo News. "At this year's CPAC — and through our theme 'ACU's Golden Anniversary: Getting It Right for 50 Years' — we will celebrate how conservatism has shaped our past and look to the future with excitement. This will be the year that conservatives begin pulling the nation back from the brink of Barack Obama's disaster with a movement that inspires, unites and discovers new solutions to our current challenges.”

An invitation to speak at the conference, held near Washington each spring, is traditionally a prime opportunity for aspiring Republican presidential candidates to make an impression on some of the party’s most active supporters, as well as the national media.

Last year, the ACU, which organizes the three-day confab, made the controversial decision not to invite the rising GOP star. The group withheld its invitation as punishment for what some in the movement viewed as Christie’s insufficiently conservative record the year prior, Cardenas said. Christie lost favor with some Republicans when he gushed over President Barack Obama’s response to Superstorm Sandy just weeks before the November presidential election. His sharp criticism of House Republican leaders who delayed recovery funding after the storm also created tension at the time.