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Arthur J. Finkelstein, whose sharp, relentless attack ads helped elect dozens of conservative political candidates in the United States and abroad and made him a kingmaker in Republican circles for decades, died Aug. 18 at his home in Ipswich, Massachusetts. He was 72.

The cause was metastasized lung cancer, his family said in a statement.

Finkelstein cultivated a reputation as a shadowy behind-the-scenes figure, seldom granting interviews and rarely drawing attention to himself in public all of which lent him a mystique as a pollster, campaign manager and ruthless operative in electoral politics.

He became an influential political power broker in the 1970s who helped propel the careers of Republican senators such as James L. Buckley (N.Y.), Jesse Helms (N.C.), Orrin G. Hatch (Utah) and Alfonse DAmato (N.Y.), as well as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He also fostered a generation of Republican political consultants whose careers began on his campaigns.

Finkelstein was considered a master at developing simple campaign messages, which were repeated in such a steady barrage of negative television commercials that he was sometimes called the merchant of venom. As much as anyone, he was responsible for making the word liberal a political slur.

He was also something of a political conundrum especially after it was revealed in 1996 that his private life as a gay man was in sharp contrast to the views of some of the conservative firebrands he helped elect. Helms, for instance, often railed against the homosexual movement, which he said threatens the strength and the survival of the American family.

In 1996, New York Times columnist Frank Rich described Finkelstein as someone who sells his talents to lawmakers who would outlaw his familys very existence.

Finkelstein was credited with helping raise Ronald Reagans national profile during the 1976 Republican primary campaign. Ultimately, the nomination went to President Gerald R. Ford, who lost the general election to Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Reagans insurgent campaign against a sitting president laid the groundwork for his overwhelming presidential victory in 1980. Finkelstein was seen as one of several Republican strategists, including Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater and Charlie Black, who were instrumental in helping shape what became known as the Reagan Revolution.

Without Arthur Finkelstein, Ronald Reagan might never have become president of the United States, historian and Reagan biographer Craig Shirley wrote on the website of National Review magazine in January 2017.

During Reagans eight years in the White House, Finkelstein was an informal adviser to the administration and managed congressional and gubernatorial campaigns across the country.

He uses a sledgehammer in every race, political scientist Darrell M. West told the Boston Globe in 1996.

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Arthur J. Finkelstein, shadowy Republican campaign mastermind, dies at 72 - Press Herald

The race-identity politics of the left wants to say its all racist, Mr. Bannon added. Just give me more. Tear down more statues. Say the revolution is coming. I cant get enough of it.

Much of the partys political class, however, was in shock. Former Presidents George and George W. Bush issued a rare joint rebuke of Mr. Trumps stance, saying hate should be rejected in all forms.

And among younger Republicans there was a sense that the damage would be profound and enduring.

The last year and especially the last few days have basically erased 15 years of efforts by Republicans to diversify the party, said David Holt, a 38-year-old Oklahoma state senator running for mayor of Oklahoma City. If I tried to sell young people in general but specifically minority groups on the Republican Party today, Id expect them to laugh me out of the room. How can you not be concerned when the countrys demographics are shifting away from where the Republican Party seems to be shifting now?

The political blow that Mr. Trump has sustained is deep and worsening. Barely one-third of Americans now say they approve of the job he is doing, according to two polls released this week a fresh low for a president who was already among the most unpopular in modern times.

With midterm elections looming next year, Republican leaders find themselves in precarious territory, unwilling to abandon Mr. Trump for fear of losing his supporters even as the presidents position slips with the broader electorate.

The political price we may pay almost should be catastrophic, said Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist. A hanging in the morning will clarify the mind.

But Mr. Trumps tenacious base sees in the Charlottesville fallout something to cheer: a field general leading the latest charge in the battle to take their country back. Much as Mr. Trump promised he would restore America to its lost greatness during his presidential campaign a vow that, to many, clanged with sentimentality for a whiter, less tolerant nation he is using symbols of the Confederacy to tell conservatives that he will not allow liberals to blot out their history and heritage.

When President Trump refused to unequivocally denounce white supremacists on Tuesday, he stepped away from what U.S. presidents have seen as crucial to their job: setting a moral course for the nation.

Good people can go to Charlottesville, said Michelle Piercy, a night shift worker at a Wichita, Kan., retirement home, who drove all night with a conservative group that opposed the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

After listening to Mr. Trump on Tuesday, she said it was as if he had channeled her and her friends all gun-loving defenders of free speech, she said, who had no interest in standing with Nazis or white supremacists: Its almost like he talked to one of our people.

Conservatives like Ms. Piercy, who have grown only more emboldened after Charlottesville, believe that the political and media elite hold them and Mr. Trump to a harsh double standard that demands they answer for the sins of a radical, racist fringe. They largely accept Mr. Trumps contention that these same forces are using Charlottesville as an excuse to undermine his presidency, and by extension, their vote.

But Republicans who are looking at the countrys rapidly changing demographics growing younger, less white and more urban say Mr. Trumps Republican Party is not the party of the future.

Representative Will Hurd, who is half-black and represents a sprawling, heavily Hispanic district in Texas, said of Mr. Trumps latest eruption, Its embarrassing.

Representative Tom Rooney, 46, of Florida said it baffled him that Mr. Trump was so equivocal. To the people in my generation, its just something thats so obvious: This is repugnant, he said.

Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, who has written a new book excoriating the Faustian bargain his party made with Mr. Trump, said on Wednesday that being complicit now would extract a big political price later. Weve got to stand up to these kinds of things if we want to be a governing majority in the future, he said.

Yet for many Republicans, evidence that a more inflammatory wing of the party is ascendant is hard to ignore. The partys far right claimed a victory on Tuesday night when Roy S. Moore, the former Alabama chief justice who was removed twice from the bench, won the most votes in the states primary election to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessionss vacant Senate seat.

Mr. Moore, who has defied orders to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building and told lower court judges to ignore the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage, will now face the party establishments candidate of choice, Senator Luther Strange, in a runoff election next month.

When Mr. Moore spoke to a congregation in Jasper, Ala., this week, he did not mention the events in Charlottesville, nor did anyone else. He did, however, receive a round of head nods for declaring, Were living in the most apostate civilization in the history of the world, a statement that echoed the so-called alt-rights castigation of liberal degeneracy.

When the two highest-ranking Republicans on Capitol Hill addressed Mr. Trumps latest remarks, neither mentioned the president by name.

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, issued a short statement that declared, There are no good neo-Nazis. Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin put out a harshly worded denunciation of white supremacy, but his swipe at Mr. Trump was indirect. There can be no moral ambiguity, he said. (The Bushes also did not name Mr. Trump in their condemnation of racial hatred.)

Those who singled him out, like Senator Jerry Moran, Republican of Kansas, were in the minority. White supremacy, bigotry and racism have absolutely no place in our society, and no one especially the president of the United States should ever tolerate it, Mr. Moran wrote.

Like the president, Mr. Trumps most loyal supporters dismiss his critics as opportunists. They see the charges that Mr. Trump is too accommodating of racists as an accusation that they must be racist, too.

He was being realistic about what was going on, said Denise OLeary, a medical assistant in Wichita. Ms. OLeary wondered why no one else was coming down on the leftist demonstrators. There was violence on both sides, there was, Ms. OLeary said. We need to be honest about that.

To Rollie Weisser, a semiretired freight hauler from Wisconsin, the hypocrisy is absurd.

President Trump caught a bunch of hell because he didnt come down hard enough on white supremacist protesters, Mr. Weisser said one morning this week as he sipped coffee in a West Bend, Wis., McDonalds. They say he came down too hard on Kim Jong-un.

Mr. Weisser added, Make up your mind.

David Bozell, the president of the conservative activist group For America, said conservatives like him sometimes did not dare speak up in support of the president anymore: Were being told, Sit down, shut up, you Nazi.

As for those upset by the presidents contention that the rights violence was matched by the lefts, Mr. Bozell invoked the five white officers killed last summer by a sniper who expressed anger about police shootings of blacks. Tell that to the families of those slain Dallas police officers, he said.

Mr. Trump has always appreciated the emotional pull of questioning bias and fairness, especially with his white working-class base. And he fully understands how their vote for him was in many ways an attempt to rebalance the inequity they saw holding them back economically, politically and culturally.

But there are growing signs that his support among the most faithful voters is sliding. Gallup and the Marist Poll, which both released surveys this week, found that right-leaning voters were drifting away from Mr. Trump. Seventy-nine percent of registered voters who identified as strong Republicans in the Marist Poll now approve of his job performance, compared with 91 percent in June.

Jeremy W. Peters reported from Washington, Jonathan Martin from Birmingham, Ala., and Jack Healy from Wichita, Kan. Mitch Smith contributed reporting from West Bend, Wis.

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A version of this article appears in print on August 17, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Split in Party After Remarks On Racial Past.

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Trump's Embrace of Racially Charged Past Puts Republicans in Crisis - New York Times

"Manterrupting" is realand it's backed up by numbers and by situations that we see play out in meetings, in social situations, and on TV with what sometimes seems like daily frequency. In just three minutes, one 2014 study found , men will interrupt a woman about twice. But if we were to go back and look at that data, there's a high possibility a recent CNN interview would have skewed that number wayyyy to one side: a Republican Senate candidate from Virginia repeatedly interrupted anchor Kate Bolduan during an interview, talking over her multiple times. But a la Rep. Maxine Waters' fierce and instantly iconic behavior in a similar situation ("Reclaiming my time!"), Bolduan held her ground by reminded him that he was on her showand not the other way around.

Bolduan, host of CNNs At This Hour , had Stewart on her August 17 show to discuss last weekend's white nationalist rallies in Charlottesville , Virginia. What began as Stewart defending Trumps unhinged press conference statements turned into an even more cringeworthy two-minute exchange.

The conversation turned ugly when Stewart accused Bolduan of exploiting the tragic death of Heather Heyer , the 32-year-old woman killed last Saturday morning during a domestic terrorism attack in Charlottesville.

Bolduan asked Stewart about why Republicans haven't publicly condemned the alt-left: "Is it possible that its because someone died who was counter-protesting?

Youre trying to use this poor womens death to say that Confederate monuments should be taken down, Stewart replied. Thats exactly what youre trying to say, Kate.

"I'm sorry, is that what I said at all?" Bolduan, who's been a CNN journalist for over a decade, asked the GOP candidate. "In no way am I conflating the two."

He interrupted her repeatedly, and after Bolduan attempted to explain herself over Stewart multiple times, she finally put the politician in his place.

"I am the anchor of the show," she said. "I am asking the questions. Stop talking, stop talking. You're the guest on my show. I would like to continue the conversation with yourespectfully."

Her firm shutdown got Stewart to stop talking, and Bolduan was finally able to clarify that there is "a time and a place to have a debate and a conversation about the appropriate place for Confederate statues."

Watch her full takedown here:

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This CNN Anchor Perfectly Shut Down a Republican Senate Candidate Who Kept Interrupting Her - Glamour

COLUMBIA An angry tweeter directed his ire at U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan this week.

After President Donald Trump's insistence there were "very fine people" protesting at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and that "both sides" were at fault for violence that broke out, the man wrote that Duncan had "lost whatever credibility he has left by his defense of Trump."

Duncan, a Laurens Republican, had chosen not to single out white supremacists for particular condemnation but spoke out generally against "violence" and added, "I agree with the President when he says that we are all Americans first."

"Who does he represent?" the tweeter demanded to know.

Duncan responded simply: "The people of South Carolina."

Major Palmetto State Republicans offered a divergent array of responses,from direct opposition to ambiguous agreement, regarding Trump's controversial decisionto blame "both sides" for the violence in Charlottesville.

South Carolina's U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott offered the most forceful condemnations, both taking the president to task for suggesting a "moral equivalency" between white nationalists and the counter-protesters who opposed them.

But most GOP U.S. House members and gubernatorial candidates from South Carolina took a more cautious stance, condemning "evil" and "violence" while declining to specify white supremacists or directly address the president's characterization.

"The evil that was displayed in #Charlottesville cannot be tolerated or condoned by the American people and has no place in our great country," tweeted U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-Rock Hill.

Graham, who days earlier had served as one of the most vocal surrogates for Trump's aggressive approach towards North Korea, landed in the president's crosshairs on Twitter due to his criticism of the Charlottesville response.

"The people of South Carolina will remember!" Trump warned.

But the people of South Carolina won't have a chance to weigh in on Graham's electoral future until 2020, when the senator who cruised to re-election in 2014 is next on the ballot.

House Republicans on the other hand, all of whom will have to convince primary voters to renominate them within a matter of months next June, tend to be a closer barometer of their constituents real-time mood. And they have been far more circumspect about the president.

"Political courage is often measured by the distance to your next election," said Dave Wilson, a South Carolina GOP strategist. "The closer you are to facing the voters again is often the best indicator as to whether you are willing to take certain risks."

Rep. Tom Rice, R-Myrtle Beach, was the only S.C. Republican in Congress to specifically cite "white supremacists" as the group to blame for Charlottesville.

"Call them what they are," Rice wrote on Facebook. "I also call them cowards."

The five other House Republicans in the state's delegation offered less forceful responses to the president's message. Not one was willing to rebuke their party's standard bearer by name.

A majority of Americans 52 percent felt the presidents response to Charlottesville was not strong enough, according to a poll conducted by NPR, Marist and PBS Newshour. But that same poll found that 59 percent of Republicans thought Trumps response was just fine.

In a state where most Republican officeholders face a more serious threat in June's GOP primary than November's general election, they are more likely to pay attention to the latter number.

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis, from the Upstate, has repeatedly admonished his fellow Republicans for not standing up to Trump. After the latest episode, Inglis declared that Republicans are "in an abusive relationship" with the president.

"There's only one way to solve an abusive relationship, and that is leave," Inglis told The Post and Courier.

Inglis pointed to a proverb he often heard from former Democratic Sen. Fritz Hollings of Charleston: "No education in the second kick of a mule."

"How many more kicks do Republicans have to take to the gut before they realize that this old mule is really difficult to deal with?" Inglis asked.

But it is precisely Inglis' fate crushed in a GOP primary by now-Rep. Trey Gowdy as part of the tea party wave of 2010 that Republican politicians are desperate to avoid. Still, the ex-congressman implores his former colleagues to abandon fear of losing.

"You're worthless to the process if you're not willing to lead and risk your seat, so you may as well go home," Inglis said.

State Sen. Tom Davis agrees. The Beaufort Republican is likely running for governor next year but he insists he won't let political calculations stop him from speaking his mind.

"Let me be clear," Davis toldThe Post and Courier: "I think President Trump was wrong to suggest a moral equivalency between the white supremacist neo-Nazis and KKK members who attended the Charlottesville rally and the counter-protesters. He did say, I guess to his credit, that it wasn't his intent. But it's very difficult to unring a bell."

The three other major gubernatorial candidates Gov. Henry McMaster, Lt. Gov. Kevin Bryant and former Department of Health and Environmental Control Director Catherine Templeton all steered clear from opining on the president's stance.

McMaster offered prayers for Virginia and pointed to the "heart" South Carolina demonstrated after a racially charged shooting at a Charleston church in 2015. Bryant said the problem on display in Charlottesville was people taking their "beliefs to a level of violence." Templeton warned against letting "thedark voices at the extremes take over."

Davis assures Republicans he is "rooting for the president to be successful, as any American should."

"But on the other hand, it's also the responsibility of public officials, if he says or does something that you disagree with, to say so," Davis said.

With unified Republican control in Washington, upsetting voters is not the only reason to avoid crossing the president. Party leaders still see an opportunity to enact historic reforms on taxes, health care, infrastructure and other issues and they won't be able to do it without Trump's blessing.

By the end of the week, with the embers of Trump's fiery attack on Graham still simmering, Graham was back to singing the president's praises, commending him for elevating U.S. cyber command. The Seneca Republican is still banking on the president's imprimatur to build momentum for his health care proposal, one of the only remaining ideas for repealing and replacing Obamacare.

These Republican officeholders who criticize Trump one day and applaud him the next day, theyre all trying to find some political sweet spot for their own survival, said Barry Wynn, a former chairman of the S.C. Republican Party. "But thats going to be hard to do because it requires some level of predictability. And this president doesnt give them much of that.

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South Carolina Republicans grapple with Trump's turbulent response to Charlottesville - Charleston Post Courier

Republican strategists this week admitted that President Trump didn't have the best week on the divisive issue of race relations in America, but stopped short of saying Trump had done any permanent harm.

Trump faced criticism throughout the week for not immediately denouncing neo-Nazis and white supremacists after a violent rally in Charlottesville, Va. After condemning those groups, Trump then argued that there was violence on both sides of the protests, which led to more criticism that he was defending overtly racist groups.

Patrick Ruffini, a GOP strategist and co-founder of Echelon Insights, said Trump's exposed the divide on race that still exists in the U.S., and said it wasn't an optimal message for him to deliver from the office of the president. Ruffini said by that measure, Trump has fared worse than President Obama did on race.

"It does show how divided the electorate is on these issues, particularly along racial lines," Ruffini said. "That has not gotten better in the last couple of years, but I think certainly we've had these challenges with Ferguson and the Charleston shooting, where a lot of the same issues flared up, but at least at the time, the leadership of the country wasn't enflaming those tensions."

And though challenges with race relations aren't necessarily new, Ruffini said the president's response raises concerns.

"That is not a good role for the president to have," he said. "That somebody who is actively wading in on a wide, on a very contentious and divisive topic, when tragedies like this occur, normally there should be a unifying response from the White House, and we haven't seen that."

Also this week, Trump signaled his support for leaving Confederate-era monuments standing, after many elected officials renewed calls for them to come down in the wake of the events in Charlottesville.

"Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments," Trump tweeted Thursday. "You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!"

Support for leaving Confederate-era statues is high, according to a new NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll, which found 62 percent of adults believe they should remain.

But another GOP strategist, John Feehery, downplayed Trump's apparent missteps, the GOP has struggled with race issues in recent years.

"This is probably not a high point [for race relations]. But Trump was accused throughout the campaign of being a racist. There are some racists that support him, and he hasn't done an effective job at condemning them," Feehery told the Washington Examiner. "He kind of muffed the David Duke stuff, his less-than-impressive denouncement of them. But I don't think he's a racist."

Feehery noted that Trump's comments mark a low point for the president regarding race relations. But he said the Republican Party, too, has battled accusations of worsening race relations, though Feehery conceded that both parties have played identify politics in their own specific ways.

"We're better off trying to find understanding and have better communications among the groups instead of trying to call everyone a racist," he said. "I think if you're a Republican, you're used to this. There's no group that's more into identity politics than the Democrats. It's a party built on identity politics. They get their juice by calling someone anti-Semitic, anti-Islam. If you're a Republican, you've seen this played before."

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Republican strategists are worried, but not too worried, about Trump on race - Washington Examiner