My memory is precise. Ronald Reagan did not win his first term on conservative philosophy. He won because Jimmy Carter was awful.
Carter lost because his voters went silent and stayed home. That allowed Reagan’s republican base to emerge and win the election for RR.
If Carter hadn’t screwed up so badly, Reagan’s conservatism would have been treated the same as Goldwater’s.
Conservatism was not the mainstream in the 70s. Because Nixon was not a conservative and neither was Ford. So republicans had not experienced an actual Goldwater-Reagan brand of conservatism before Reagan. Conservatism was a ‘?’ in terms of running the government.
What propelled Reagan into the White House was his ‘hawkishness’. There was no conservative tidal wave. What you appear to have experienced was a field left empty by disappointed and embarrassed liberals, leaving the field for republicans to take over. It was not a tidal wave, it was a vacuum.
Conservatism did not become popular until Reagan had been in office for 2 years and people could visibly see that his leadership was exceptional. He was not elected because people believed in conservatism.
And I am referring to the general electorate in a statistical sense. Conservatives were a part of the republicans in 1979 but the branding of republicans was more moderate like Nixon or Ford except that Reagan talked tough and talked of rebuilding our military. Conservatives were a subset of republicans and not a large one. As Reagan’s term unfolded and his popularity increased, the subset of conservatives in the GOP became larger as people adopted it as their brand.
What I am saying about Rubin is that she is touting and associating herself with Reagan as a great refined conservative that the American people elected and fully embraced in 1980. No, the American people did not embrace conservatism in 1980 because it was a wildcard, something without general experience. What was embraced was a vision to fix our military and our economy, and to stop the decline of prestige around the world.
I will bet that if Rubin were alive and writing in 1979-1980 she would be slamming Reagan for his extreme ‘John Birch’ like views. Of course years later after Reagan won the hearts of the American voter, she would say she was for Reagan all along. And that is what she is doing with her garbage views referred to in Jeffrey Lord’s piece above. Rubin’s writing is a pig and she’s trying to put lipstick on it by associating herself with Reagan and twisting history while she does it.
What happened to President Ted Kennedy?
Why did Birch Bayh lose?
George McGovern?
Frank Church?
Gaylord Nelson?
No one expected these titans to lose. They didn’t lose because of Reagan’s personality. They lost because their ideology was rejected.
Remember Prop 13? Wasn’t that a conservative wildfire?
Why did the ERA fail?
Remember how broad the opposition to the Panama Canal treaty was?
It was a conservative wave. Led by brillaint, principled conservatives.
Jenifer Rubin would’ve been with Bill Bennett, Dr. Krauthammer and her fellow neocons in the Democrat party.