Yea, but give them credit for marching with Martin Luther King ....
oh ..... wait
Posted on 03/06/2010 11:49:19 AM PST by Al B.
Sarah Palin invokes him. Mitt Romney glorifies him. The "tea party" movement hopes to recapture him. And the Republican Party still can't get over him.
Six years after his death, and almost a century since his birth, conservatives are more transfixed than ever by Ronald Reagan, so much so that I fully expect a Gipper anxiety disorder to appear in the next edition of the psychiatrists' diagnostic manual.
"What would Reagan Do?" is a leading motto for the right. You can get the slogan -- or its WWRD acronym -- on a bumper sticker, a T-shirt, a coffee mug, a thong. There's even an iReagan app for your phone. And having renamed Washington National Airport for Reagan in the 1990s, last week congressional Republicans started agitating to have the Gipper replace poor Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill.
Such obsessions are not unique to the right: Writing three years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, historian Richard Hofstadter noted that FDR so thoroughly monopolized the liberal imagination that his passing "left American liberalism demoralized and all but helpless." But today, conservatives are the helpless ones.
Reagan was the most popular and successful Republican president of the past century, so it makes sense that he would be the shining model for conservatives, just as FDR has been the gold standard for liberals. (No small irony, since Reagan voted for FDR four times and modeled his statecraft after the Democrat's.) But as the current occupant of the White House could warn, measuring yourself against historical icons is a recipe for disappointment. These days, President Obama is more likely to draw comparisons to Jimmy Carter than to Lincoln or FDR.
Yet ambitious conservatives are undeterred.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
George Romney didn’t run in 1964.
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I didnt say he did up front...
His name was included in the running for the nomination on the convention floor...
and he didnt take his name of the ballot...
When he only got 40 votes he stormed out of the convention threatening revenge on Goldwater and his best friend Ronald Reagan...
George Romney went on to fight against Goldwater and split the party and to aid Johnson and encouraged other Republicans to do the same ...
One thing the racist George Romney did to stop the support for Goldwater was to slander goldwater as someone against the Civil rights Act...
Romney was lying but the accusation stuck at a time when the Republicans did not want to be seen as a party of exclusion...
Goldwater lost a lot of financial and political support that he could have had and won the POTUS with...
Later Ronald Reagan was interviewed about the loss to Johnson...
The conservative Reagan said that the moderates in the party, Romney and his friends, were detrimental to the Republican Party...
Reagan placed the blame right where it belonged...at George Romney’s door...
The Romneys dont care about the conservatives or the republican Party...
George Romneys own political resume is own of playing the Democrats against the Republicans...
He had both sides supporting him for Gov of MI and when they asked him which party he was running for he was mad as a hornet...
He begrudgingly picked the republicans but never forgave them for making him choose a side...
He thought he was entitled to rule over both parties in MI...
Entitlement and the Romney family go together...
Lenore Romney blantantly ran for the US Senate from MI on a Pro-abortion platform for 1970 FOUR years before abortion was legal in the US (Roe V Wade)
Mitt Romney has boasted that he was proud of his mother running with a pro-abortion platform...
When abortion was ILLEGAL ???
so much for Romney claiming to and/or having to “sustain” uphold the abortion laws ...
The Romneys are bad news for America...
Yea, but give them credit for marching with Martin Luther King ....
oh ..... wait
If he hadn’t had to take on Poppy Establishment? He would’ve nabbed Sarah in a minute.
Wow—Mitt’s even letting his hair start to creep gray around the edges the way his dad did his.
I would say that at this point her political grand strategy is ahead of Reagan’s based upon her invaluable experience on the 2008 ticket and her knowledge of how the RINO establishment works.
If she runs and wins the primary battle, it's going to be interesting to see what she does. Reagan bent over backwards to accommodate the establishment in his effort to unite the party. The courting of Gerald Ford, cozying up to Henry Kissinger and finally picking Bush as his VP may have been what he felt he needed to do to win the election. Will Sarah feel the same way if she gets to that position? We'll see.
Waiting on the Reagan and Palin pic.
And all teed up—the Mittster!
He sure foresaw the liberal likelihood to tax air, didn’t he!
“The courting of Gerald Ford, cozying up to Henry Kissinger and finally picking Bush as his VP may have been what he felt he needed to do to win the election.”
I have often wondered if it ever occurred to Reagan that, in hindsight, he could have won just as big without selecting Bush as VP. I would be curious to know Ed Meese’s take on it, since he is the only real “old Reagan hand” who is still with us and might be able to give us some insight into the Gipper’s mind on this. (my view is that Reagan probably thought to himself...”You know, I gave them Bush and it still didn’t stop the RINO rump group, with Mary Dent Crisp in tow, from deserting me in favor of John Anderson.”) It certainly made Bush his heir and Bush dismantled so much of the Reagan revolution and purged so many of the old Reagan hands that I wonder if RR had some regrets.
I hope that, if SP does vanquish the Establishment, she keeps this in mind and remembers that she really doesn’t need these people. There aren’t that many of them and they will never stop hating her. Ever. They certainly hated Reagan right up until he left office and the revisionists have been busy making him into a “big tenter” ever since.
[BTW, Thanks for the compliment. That is high praise coming from you, since your posts, especially on Reagan, are very accurate and make me remember things I had forgotten. Keep them coming.]
I think he certainly should have had at least an inkling of it. That's what is so aggravating, albeit in hindsight, about the decisions he made.
According to Craig Shirley in his book, Reagan's pollster -- Dick Wirthlin -- did some special polling in April of 1980 in which he amazingly did not ask about Reagan, Bush, Carter or Kennedy. Instead he asked Americans how they felt about themselves. He then related their responses to their support of Reagan's simple message of freedom, small government and optimism.
Boiling it all down, Wirthlin found that those that responded the best to Reagan's message were confident, assertive and optimistic in their outlook, and most importantly that they crossed party lines. As Shirley put it, "by narrowing his message, he was broadening his base."
Sarah Palin seems to instinctively understand this. I hope she applies this understanding if she's ever in the position of deciding how much to kowtow to RINOs. :)
“As Shirley put it, “by narrowing his message, he was broadening his base.”
Sarah Palin seems to instinctively understand this. I hope she applies this understanding if she’s ever in the position of deciding how much to kowtow to RINOs. :)”
I hope she takes the time to read Shirley’s book. Or, if she wants an abridged version, she could do a lot worse than your posts. (I suspect she is a Freeper, at least a lurker.) Unlike me, she is too young to have lived through Reagan’s rise, but she should read about the pitfalls he faced. She faces many of the same pitfalls. These RINOs are the reason why the GOP is called the Stupid Party. They don’t change their tactics, and they are using the same playbook against her that they used against Reagan. She should study their tactics, his responses and any improvements she might make to his strategy.
Judging from her successes thus far, I imagine she is doing just that.
BTW, I don’t know if you noticed it but the very week Jeb Bush gave the Newsmax interview about how complicated the world was, SP was on Hannity and she made it a point of saying that the solutions to the problems were NOT complicated. I may be wrong, but I though she was answering Bush’s planted axiom (so often levelled at Reagan) that things are monstrously complicated and simple solutions won’t do.
If not Palin herself, someone close to her needs to read this book to understand what Reagan was up against and how she can learn from it. That's why I keep referring to it because I hope (and think) people around her read this board.
...I don’t know if you noticed it but the very week Jeb Bush gave the Newsmax interview about how complicated the world was, SP was on Hannity and she made it a point of saying that the solutions to the problems were NOT complicated.
I sure did. In fact, she quoted (and attributed) Reagan directly, "There are no easy answers but there are simple answers."
Interesting little tidbit here on Michael Reagan, from the Encyclopedia. If someone has better info on this, I’d love to see it.
I trust Michael Reagan to live up the the principles of his father. From the looks of it, he supported Mitt, then supported McCain when Mitt dropped out.
2008 Presidential election
Reagan supported Mitt Romney until he dropped out of the race on February 7, 2008. Eight days later Reagan announced his support for Senator John McCain of Arizona, comparing the nomination battle between Romney and McCain to the 1976 battle between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. Based on his father’s actions after losing to Ford in 1976, Michael Reagan says that Ronald Reagan would’ve supported McCain.[8]
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Michael-Reagan
Makes sense to me. I supported Thompson...until he dropped out. Then I supported Romney...until he dropped out.
Finally, I was stuck with McCain.
In my mind, though, everybody who ran for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008 is automatically disqualified from ever attempting again.
If nobody in the field could figure out a way to trip up the weakest GOP candidate among GOP voters in my memory, there's no point in ever nominating any of them again.
Well, history would disagree with you. There have been many Presidents who have won after being defeated in a previous primary.
I like Sarah a lot! But she does have her work cut out for her, especially if the economy continues to get worse. If, again we go with history... in the last 150 years, one person has ever lost as a VP candidate, and come back to win the Presidency. That was FDR.
You betcha and he'd campaign for her too!
"Win one for the Gipper."
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Not sure why you think this is something out of the ordinary for a 60 year old. It's not like it's any different than when Palin and Mitt were both campaigning for McCain back in 08. Notice the grey temples back then.
If you think she has no experience, google her, you might be surprised. She has never held an ellected office, but has lots of good job experience and has learned much about politicals from her suroundings and her parents
That was when he went from the full dying to bits grey st the temple. Now he’s letting a little more of the white show almost as a trim rimming his face—which is exactly the pattern shown in the pics of his dad.
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