Michael Reagan: The GOP Should Dump Its 'Litmus Test'

The GOP Should Dump Its Litmus Test By Michael Reagan FrontPageMagazine.com | February 16, 2007

The philosopher Diogenes is said to have wandered around ancient Greece holding a lantern and seeking to find an honest man.

My fellow Republicans, sans lanterns, are now wandering around the political landscape seeking to find the perfect Republican presidential candidate.

I don’t know if Diogenes ever found that honest man, but I do know that those Republicans are never going to find the perfect candidate, simply because he does not exist.

Some Republicans insist that the only perfect candidate would be a clone of my Dad, Ronald Reagan. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing, it’s important to recognize that Ronald Reagan, as he often admitted, was anything but perfect.

One of the criticisms about former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney focuses on his record concerning the abortion issue. We are told by the modern day Diogenes clones that he can’t be trusted to fight abortion because he once, more or less, supported a woman’s right to butcher her baby.

It may come as a surprise to these purists, but Ronald Reagan once supported abortion too. Yet nobody ever questioned his strong pro-life credentials after his conversion to Republicanism. They accepted his sincerity. Why can’t they accept Mitt Romney’s?

Romney’s record shows he should be totally acceptable to all conservatives, yet because of one dubious question concerning the validity of his conversion to the pro-life side, he is deemed unsuitable to carry the conservative banner.

The same is true of Rudy Giuliani. On every major issue, he is a solidly conservative and extraordinarily adept executive, but because he backs abortion and some form of gun control, America’s mayor -- the hero of 9/11 and the man who did the impossible by cleaning up New York -- is all but ruled out as a 2008 candidate.

Not one of the major candidates is free of some real or imagined flaw that offends some conservatives.

This is madness, and if it does not stop, the GOP is going to lose the presidential election in 2008. In the search for the perfect candidate we are going to end up with an imperfect candidate. Keep in mind the truism that agreement with someone on most issues and disagreement on others is seen as normal, but should you agree with someone on every single issue imaginable … well… to put it plainly, psychologists say you’re nuts.

I recently got a letter from a conservative Christian organization that asked me if the current GOP candidates are the best the Republican Party has to offer.

“Is it possible that GOP conservative ranks are this thin?” the letter writer asked. “Has the GOP nothing better to offer? Should not pro-family pro-life voters also want a low taxes and limited government candidate before they vigorously support him? Increased taxes and expanded government hurts everyone. Was Ronald Wilson Reagan an anomaly and did he represent the values of his party?

“These GOP candidates,” the letter instructed me, “are little better than Bob Dole, Gerald Ford, or [George] H.W. Bush. Did anyone notice they all lost?”

This makes me wonder if anybody can stand up to the litmus test these people are applying to candidates.

Ronald Reagan had one litmus test he applied to candidates. Were they Republicans? If they were he backed them all the way. He would let the party choose the candidate and he would support and vote for the candidate. He didn’t go sniffing around trying to find some flaw in their character or their past. Once nominated, they were his choice.

And nobody was more candid in admitting that he was anything but perfect than my Dad. He knew that like all men, he had his flaws and he spent a lifetime combating them. Had today’s GOP litmus test been seriously applied to him, he could not have passed the test.

The Democrats don’t have litmus tests. If the nominee is a Democrat, they support their candidate all the way, and if they lose it isn’t because they didn’t fight like demons for their man or woman.

If we want to win in 2008, Republicans had better wake up, and quit talking Ronald Reagan and start being like Ronald Reagan.

This stuff never changes.

Actually the self-styled moderates who we are being given the exclusive opportunity to choose between have a lot more internal enmity to account for than the conservatives.

Check out this blast from the past... Here is some accurately-reported history from 1990, an editorial by John Sullivan in National Review that I commend to your attention:

Now more than ever -
Ronald Reagan's presidency reevaluated - editorial
National Review, Nov 19, 1990
by John O'Sullivan
* One beneficiary of the present discontents in Washington is former President Reagan. A favorable reputation in history has been secured for him by the errors of his successor. The political wisdom of his tax cuts has been confirmed by the electoral disasters that are following their abandonment. And to cap it all, the old boy has his memoirs in the bookshops. What timing! How did he persuade George Bush to do it?
Yet, only six months ago, the cognoscenti were writing off the Gipper as a failed peddler of illusions that had now vanished to disclose a world in rags. He was responsible for the deficit-prompted recession (which had not occurred)-though not for the collapse of Communism (which had). He had been idle, ignorant, and ideological.
All in all, his performance offered a sad contrast to that of the "professionals" now running the show, "hands-on" pragmatists who understood "the process" of government. Wow. Members of the Bush Administration did not discourage this contrast since it flattered them. Look, Mom, no gaffes.
How are the mediocre fallen. The "process" of governing in Washington today is a joke-a series of botched compromises achieved through late nights and exhaustion. President Bush and his savvy pragmatists have split the Republican Party, handed the Democrats the fairness" issue, gained no important concessions, and in the name of bipartisanship ensured the election of a far-left spendthrift Congress at the very time the main obstacle to federal spending, namely the no new taxes" pledge, has been removed.
And so unpopular is the budget package, for which these sacrifices have been made, that President Bush is campaigning on the theme that the Democrats forced him to do it. He himself is an innocent outsider, shocked by the Beltway's excesses, just like ... Ronald Reagan.
* Which compels us to re-evaluate the past. According to well-informed leaks, Bush, Baker, and Darman were the boys who kept the Reagan Administration on the road. They restrained the old boy's follies and applied the brake of "reality" to Reaganite dreams. With Reagan no longer there to throw grit in their smooth-running machine, the nation would surely return to good government.
It now turns out that Reagan contributed something, after all. He had clear principles so that people trusted him even in bad times. He had a clear sense of priorities, pushing through the key policies-tax cuts, the defense build-up-that changed the world. And he had political shrewdness so that opponents found themselves playing by his rules (e.g., no new taxes), and subordinates thought that they were really running things.
He made governing look easy. Too easy. Even Richard Darman thought he could do it.
* The revival in President Reagan's reputation is even spreading to darkest Europe. At a recent dinner party of international civil servants in Rome, I ventured that he had caused Communism to collapse. This was greeted tolerantly as a sort of parochial stateside eccentricity. Then a French diplomat spoke up in my defense.
"That's exactly what they argue in Eastern Europe," he said. They believe that Reagan, not Gorbachev, won their freedom and ended the cold war." (Cries of Zut, alors," Caramba," "Mamma mia," etc.)
Most of the guests might have preferred not to believe this. But President Reagan's triumphal tour of the East, where he received an outpouring of gratitude from both ordinary people and the new democratic leaders, makes such skepticism untenable.
What? You didn't know that President Reagan had been greeted with such affection and regard on his trip? You watch too much television.

I especially like this bitingly accurate observation of Team Bush's contemptuous attitudes:

"Look, Mom, no gaffes."

We know how that turned out.

BS!
Their candidates had better toe the party line, and especially the anti-war line, else they get thrown under the bus.

I like M.Reagan, but I think he is missing the point. It is unfair to say that those who are unhappy with the current list of front runners are being one issue voters. Reagan is advocating supporting the party, not conservative ideology. The simple fact of the matter is many conservatives are unhappy with how the party has drifted to the left on may issues. In the end, if a Republican acts like a liberal democrat, they you may as well have elected a Democrat.

The primaries is the time to realign the party, not simply support the most popular guy just because everyone says he can win. We will defeat the Dem's, if and only if we stand on our principles, and hold the candidates to these principles.

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