When Buckley Met Reagan (Reagan/Palin slam)

The New York Times( small, Manhattan paper ) ^ | January 18, 2009 | ROSS DOUTHAT

[Leisler]

On the night that William F. Buckley met Ronald Reagan, the future president of the United States put his elbow through a plate-glass window. The year was 1961, and the two men were in Beverly Hills, where Buckley, perhaps the most famous conservative in America at the tender age of 35, was giving an address at a school auditorium. Reagan, a former Hollywood leading man dabbling in political activism — the Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin of his But the microphone was dead, the technician was nowhere to be found and the control room was locked. As the crowd began to grumble, Reagan coolly opened one of the auditorium windows, stepped onto a ledge two stories above the street and inched his way around to the control room. He smashed his elbow through the glass and clambered in through the broken window. “In a minute there was light in the upstairs room,” Buckley later wrote, “and then we could hear the crackling of the newly animated microphone.”

This anecdote kicks off The Reagan I Knew (Basic Books, $25), a slight and padded reminiscence published posthumously this past autumn, nine months after Buckley’s death. As a personal portrait of the 40th president, the narrative is sketchy at best: the Reagan whom Buckley knew turns out to be the Reagan most of his friends and allies knew — amiable, smooth and ultimately opaque.

What the book does offer, though, is an expansion on the theme lurking in that opening vignette, in which the man of ideas came face to face with the man of action, and the intellectual famous for describing the world met the future president eager to change it. At its most interesting, “The Reagan I Knew” provides a case study on the ........

[Northern Yankee]

the Tim Robbins or Alec Baldwin of his time...

Big difference here. Ronald Reagan loved this country. These guys don't.

[MaggieCarta]

"Small Manhattan Newspaper" Chortle.
No comment, marking for later read.

[kittymyrib]

The usual drivel by a NYT writer. Can anyone imagine the Leftist wusses, Robbins or Baldwin, doing what Ronald Reagan did that night...or reviving a failing economy without massive bailouts or defeating the Soviet Union without going to war?
In spite of these troubled financial times at the Old Gray Has-Been, they really should employ a good psychiatrist for the staff. Writing such as this is embarrassing.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Yep, that’s the Reagan everyone knew! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. :)

[LibLieSlayer]

Birds will not even crap on the slimes any longer... die you old gray whore!

LLS

[Moonman62]

I liked this line in the article.

Reagan was a model populist because he was a smart populist, and because the liberals who disdained him looked like fools in the end.

[Loyolas Mattman]

That's not even an NYT regular. Douhat is a senior editor at “The Atlantic.” As such, he bears some responsibility for allowing Andrew Sullivan's demented rantings about Trig to continue unabated.

[mimaw]

Drop dead Ross. Hope your $hitty magazine and that putrid NYT rag goes belly up this year.

[ReleaseTheHounds]

What a bunch of twaddle!

[GQuagmire]

Another example of the Left’s absolute fear of Sarah Palin. They know she is coming and will do anything to stop her

[nathanbedford]

This union occasioned a great deal of comment during 2008, which turned out to be an annus horribilis for conservatism, and little of it was positive. Populism’s corrosive influence on the conservative mind — or the conservative mind’s cynical manipulation of populism — was cited in briefs against Sarah Palin, against the record of George W. Bush and against the entire run of conservative governance going back to Richard Nixon. Sometimes it was liberals arguing that an earlier generation of high-minded conservatives (Buckley being the prime example) would be horrified by the anti-intellectual spirit that had overtaken their movement in the age of Bush and Palin. Sometimes it was conservatives, your David Frums and Peggy Noonans, hinting at the same. And sometimes it was left-wingers — like Rick Perlstein, in his teeming history “Nixonland” — arguing that conservatives had always been cynical manipulators of populist sentiment: the mask might have slipped a bit more in the Bush era, but beneath the genteel facade provided by wordsmiths like Buckley (or William Safire or George Will or whomever), the modern right has been Palins all the way down.

The author misconceives the cancer which is currently afflicting the Republican Party. Because he is a liberal his kind are energized by a belief that they can and should order the world in accordance with their schemes to lead us to the promised land where their rationality will do away with the superstitions of the right and permit the essential goodness of man to bloom under their husbandry. And that, of course, is why the left places such public stock in its alleged "intellectualism." This is why all Democrat presidents have to be geniuses and all Republicans are morons -because, this time, with the right liberal genius at the controls their scheme will actually work.

The problem for America and therefore the problem for the Republican Party is not a want of brains but a want of courage to preserve our freedom. Republicans, whether newly revealed Rinos like Peggy Noonan or crusty old conservatives like Mitch McConnell have abandoned the fight for freedom. Our author thinks that Republicans are animated out of a "populist" motive because that description carries so much negative baggage. It is not populism, which is rank manipulation of society by a different group by different means, which conservatives seek, it is liberty.

There is really no philosophical conflict between cerebral conservatives like William F. Buckley and trench fighters like Tom DeLay provided both keep clear that they are striving for freedom from the likes of this author. Sarah Palin is an authentic voice of conservatism which needs to master a few forensic skills to be nationally attractive. But she will never be a successful national figure merely as a populist no matter how glib she becomes.

The road for conservatives to the promised land is as clear for us as the needle pointing straight to the poll: we must defend America against the insatiable appetite of the Obama administration to make vassals of us all for our own good. We must defend the individual, that is our individual liberties, from the state.

It is not intellectual rigor which we lack but courage.

[LibLieSlayer]

Nice bit of info... thanks.

LLS

[free me]

Well done.

[turfmann]

Very well said.

[Valin]

For what it’s worth...
I recently bought the Audio version and all I can say is you won’t be disappointed in the book.

[therut]

HEHE-—small manhattan paper-—HEHEHE that is funny.

[RichInOC]

Yes, Bill Buckley was a great man with a great mind and did Yale proud. On the other hand, I remember when conservative intellectuals, certainly Mr. Buckley, didn’t use to look down upon politicians or their own colleagues as uncouth hicks just because they weren’t Ivy Leaguers, Seven Sisters alumnae, or at least Eastern college alums. The longer we go, the more I wonder if Ronald Reagan would ever have had a chance to be Ronald the Great had he had to deal with today’s conservative commentariat. “Eureka College, Muffy? Where’s that?”

[Leisler]

Thanks. There is one thing lefties can not abide and that is to be thought unimportant. So, I do what I can.

[Clemenza]

Sarah Palin is an authentic voice of conservatism which needs to master a few forensic skills to be nationally attractive. But she will never be a successful national figure merely as a populist no matter how glib she becomes.

THANK YOU!!!