Reagan Haunts Candidates, Democrats and Republicans

Rick Perlstein addressed Obama’s citation of Reagan’s legacy, writing, “It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly.” Perlstein then refers to an article he wrote in 2004, after Reagan’s death, in Salon.com, where he addressed two fundamental challenges in remembering Reagan: “The first is that if Reagan's partisans succeed in creating an indelible memory of him as someone that everyone loved all the time, they will have won an important political struggle with consequences for today. The second is that if his partisans succeed in minting Reagan in public memory as a repository of bedrock principle, they will have been complicit in letting forgetting win the battle against remembering — because on their own, conservative terms, Reagan was often a sellout.” Perlstein concludes, “And last, if they manage to make the rest of us remember Reagan as the embodiment of the kind of genial conservative even a liberal could love…they will have scrambled history instead of helping to inform it. Because Reagan was always much more frightening than the sunny optimist of now-popular legend.”

Victor Hansen, in his piece, “The Use and Abuse of Reagan,” argues that both sides have lost sight of the Gipper’s actual legacy. On the Republican side: “In short, Ronald Reagan has been beatified into some sort of saint, as if he were above the petty lapses and contradictions of today's candidates. The result is that conservatives are losing sight of Reagan the man while placing unrealistic requirements of perfection on his would-be successors.” While the Democrats, forget his often liberal policies: for example, “Reagan's 1986 comprehensive immigration bill turned out to be the most liberal amnesty for illegal aliens in our nation's history…”

According to the New York Times columnist Frank Rich, the GOP candidates’ insistence on Ronald Reagan’s legacy demonstrates a failure of the Republican candidates to evolve. He writes, “It's not just that the old Reagan coalition of social, economic and foreign-policy conservatives has fractured. A more indelible problem for the Republicans in 2008 is that their candidates are utterly segregated from reality as it is lived by the overwhelming majority of their fellow Americans. The GOP presidential field's lack of demographic diversity by age, gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.”

The Wall Street Journal responds to Barack Obama’s comment on Ronald Reagan by comparing the two politicians. According to the Journal, “Mr. Obama is trying to … frame his candidacy as the advent of a liberal Reagan — though whatever problems we now face are several orders of magnitude removed from those that gave rise to Reagan. And unlike Mr. Obama, Reagan campaigned on forthright policy reforms — substance — and not merely a change in style.” The Journal concludes, however, “…Still, we suspect Mr. Obama is smarter than his Democratic critics in evoking Reagan as the example he wants to emulate, and it says something about the breadth of his political ambitions that he would do so.”