Every four years we are told that no Democrat is ever allowed to mock or wish for any extremist Republican nominee for president because Democrats once mocked Reagan as the most extreme and unelectable candidate and he ended up shellacking the Democrats two elections in a row. It certainly is true that some Democrats back in ’79 and ’80 thought that Reagan was unelectable because of extreme statements he had made in the past about Social Security and Medicare. But to use an extremely over-worked cliché, today’s Republican Party loons are not your grandfather’s Republican Party loons.
Consider the following:
- Reagan had been a successful governor of the largest state in the union for two full terms, without scandal.
- Since the 1950’s, Reagan had been very much a part of national affairs as a party activist and spokesperson.
- Reagan had been running for president since 1968 and had well-articulated views on world affairs by the time he was nominated in 1980.
- While Reagan wasn’t exactly a policy wonk, he was a public intellectual who personally wrote lengthy radio commentaries about politics and public affairs for the years between his 76 and 80 campaigns.
- Reagan was a serious student of political ideas and the selling of these ideas. His first wife divorced him, not because he was a Gingrich-style adulterer, but because Reagan was, in her words, too “boring” because he liked to discuss politics all the time.
- While some people disliked Reagan’s policies, nobody disliked Reagan personally. Reagan was beloved by his staff, associates and friends, most of who claim they never heard him speak an ill word of anyone.
- Reagan was, by all accounts, a serious, stable person who had a 50 year plus relationship with his wife Nancy without a whiff of personal controversy.
So because Reagan, with the above qualifications, got elected President, we Democrats are forever supposed to be banished from pining away for extremist and plausibly unelectable Republican nominees?
Consider the following:
- Newt Gingrich impeached a President of the United States for committing adultery (note: if you think the reason was perjury, you are a complete GOP tool and you might as well stop reading now) while at the same time having an affair with a 28-year old staffer. Later, he blamed his adultery on the fact that he loved his country too much and worked too hard. Would Reagan have done that?
- Herman Cain publicly prides himself on being ignorant and scorns the very idea of knowing anything about Ubecky-becky-becky-stan. Reagan stayed home on Saturday nights reading for years before entering the Oval Office. Granted he was reading Readers’ Digest and National Review.
- Michele Bachmann can’t get through a sentence without saying something so bone-chillingly non factual that your teeth hurt and you fear you’ve just lost 5 IQ points. And say what you will about Nancy Reagan, nobody thought she was using Ron as her beard.
- Rick Perry couldn’t be more inarticulate if he were Porky Pig. Sure Reagan stammered occasionally, but it wasn’t until the Alzheimer’s set in around `84 that he was unable to articulate basic thoughts.
- Ron Paul wants to eliminate nearly every department of the Federal Government. He makes Barry Goldwater look like Ted Kennedy. Sure, Regan wanted to drop income taxes from 70% to less than half. But Paul thinks it should go to nearly zero.
Every honest liberal Democrat I knows concedes that if Republicans fantasized about the Democrats nominating Bernie Sanders or Noam Chomsky as the presidential nominee, there would be good reason. Either candidate is so extreme within the context of US politics that either would go down in massive defeat. It’s time conservatives found a single strand of intellectual honesty and admitted that there are candidates similarly extreme and unelectable in their party and Democrats have a right and even an obligation to lick their chops at the prospect of running against one of them. My favorite is still Newt Gingrich, though I think any Republican other than Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman could be equally disastrous in a general election.
