Barack Reagan

Kirk Dillard, the Republican minority whip of the Illinois state senate, illustrates the threat Obama represents to conservatives:

Obama can be to liberalism what Ronald Reagan was to conservatism, and that's a friendly face or likable personality that can move the country left.

Phil Klein, to whom Dillard gave the above quote, elaborates in a cover story for the American Spectator:

A quarter century ago, Ronald Reagan not only won the presidency, he won the argument, selling a generation of Americans on the virtues of individualism and limited government. Just as Reagan's sunny optimism portrayed conservatism in its most positive light, Obama puts a happy face on liberalism.

"[He has] perfect pitch, I think, for the mood of the country, which is a flinch from the rhetorical vitriol for the mood that is consuming this town, "George Will said of Obama on ABC's This Week. "He's a little like Ronald Reagan in this regard: Reagan used to drive people crazy, in the Democratic Party, because they'd say the public doesn't agree with him on this or this or this or this, and they vote for him. They voted for him because they said we like him, he's not off putting, he's not frightening. And I think this is another 1980."

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The Daily Digest

"The decision to adopt Hillary and drop Clinton has nothing whatsoever casual to it," observes Tod Lindberg.

David Frum notes three elementary mistakes in Bob Novak's memoirs: (1) Novak and Frum lunched, only once, at the Oval Room on November 21, 2001, not at the Hay Adams on September 19, 2001. (2) Frum began work as a White House speechwriter in January, not March, 2001. (3) Frum does not live in Georgetown, which Novak should know because he's been to Frum's house for dinner.

Check out the best of Reagan's TV ads from his 1984 campaign.

Does Daily Kos violate McCain-Feingold? According to a complaint filed with the FEC, "It surely spends at least $1,000 per year in hosting and based on what they charge (and get) for advertising, their support of candidates is certainly worth over $1,000 per year. Lastly, their self-identified purpose is to influence elections in the Democrats favor." David Freddoso draws the appropriate conclusion: "None of this is an argument for regulating Kos, but rather an argument for abolishing the silly campaign finance regime that that the Kos-krazies and their ilk have pushed on us for a generation now."

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Wisdom from Joe Klein's Politics Lost, Part 1

A month ago, I was asked to name the three most recent books I had read. I could only name two—Bob Woodward's State of Denial and One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century.

I explained that I am a voracious reader, but of newspapers, magazines and blogs, but I was chagrined.

Accordingly, I've since digested three books, all of which I'll blog about by quoting or summarizing the passages I underlined. Here's the first, which was inspiring, highly informed, balanced while retaining conviction, yet not wholly persuasive; that is, Joe's thesis works best if applied selectively rather than comprehensively. (Disclosure/self-promotion: as an editorial intern at Time in 2004, I did some research for Joe on this column.)

Here's the thesis (excerpts follow after the jump):

I am fed up with the insulting welter of sterilized speechifying, insipid photo ops, and idiotic advertising that passes for public discourse these days. I believe that American politics has become overly cautious, cynical, mechanistic, and bland; and I fear that the inanity and ugliness of postmodern public life has caused many Americans to lose the habits of citizenship. . . .

[What we need is] not just the intermittent bolts of unmassaged oratory but also the spontaneous moments of honor and cowardice, the gestures, the body language, the smirks and sighs—that gave us real insight into those who would lead us. It encompasses Bobby Kennedy quoting Aeschylus and Richard Nixon saying that we won't have him to kick around anymore.

1. On Ronald Reagan (paraphrased):

Once, when Reagan aide Michael Deaver handed his boss some questions Deaver had planted with a friendly audience, Reagan tossed the questions into the trash. "Mike, this won't work," he said. "You can't hit a home run with a softball.

2. On Republican vs. Democratic messaging:

Ronald Reagan had given his party the gifts of simplicity and clarity and, as we have seen, a coherent belief system that could be explained in sentence fragments. Military Strength. Low Taxes. Traditional Values. The Democrats, by contrast, were the party of the complex, clause-draped sentence: "We need to spend money on Head Start programs in order to... [ellipsis in original]". . . .

Democrats slouched toward public pessimism—the middle class was always suffering silently, the poor neglected, the environment degraded—but they were philosophically optimistic: humankind was improvable, reform possible, government could help make things better. Republicans, by contrast, were publicly optimistic—the United States was exceptional, the greatest country in the world, and anyone who said otherwise was unpatriotic—but privately realistic and often pessimistic: people were who they were, the poor would always be with us and there was no sense trying to change them. . . .

In public, Reagan's 1984 "Morning in America" was countered by Congressman Richard Gephardt's 1988 "it's close to midnight and getting darker all the time". . . . In 1968 . . . an academic named William Gavin, who would later become a White House speechwriter, sent Richard Nixon a memo about communications strategy: "Voters are basically lazy, basically uninterested in making an effort to understand what we are talking about." He went on to discuss the difference between intellectual and emotional appeals: "Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand."

3. On impressions vs. policies:

In the television era, fleeting impressions counted far more than cogent policies. Fleeting impressions were all most people had time for. Presidential politics was all about character... [ellipsis in original] or rather, the appearance of character. . . . [I]t wasn't about the economy, stupid.

It was about the appearance of caring about the economy, stupid.

4. "The best political advice I've ever heard," from William Bennett to a meeting of the Christian Coalition:

"Some of the people who follow me onto the stage are going to say things that you will find very pleasing. They speak our our 'virtues' and the vices of the other party. They will speak about 'us' and 'them.' But in America there is no 'us' and 'them.' There is only 'us.' And if a candidate tells you only thing that you want to hear, if he asks nothing of you—then give him nothing in return, certainly not your vote, because he is not telling you the truth."

5. On fund-raising:

"Do you want to know what I do all day?" he [Alex Sanders, the Democratic sacrificial lamb in the 2002 race for Strom Thurmond's South Carolina Senate seat] asked me. "I sit at a desk with a telephone. A woman named Ashley Newton sits across from me with pieces of paper called focus sheets and a stopwatch. She hands me a focus sheet and a phone number and some vital information about a potential contributor. I call the number. She starts the stopwatch. I have six minutes to make the sale. I'm supposed to make ten calls per hour. So I start out like this, 'Hello, my name is Alex Sanders and I'm running for the United States Senate. Have you ever heard of me in your whole entire life?' Then I chat with him for a moment about life at his horse farm or whatever. I tell him I know about the horse farm because I have a focus sheet with all this information. And then I say, 'I'm not calling to ask for your vote. It'd be a waste of time to ask for a single vote. My purpose is far more humiliating. It's the chemotherapy of a political campaign. It's painful... [ellipsis in original] Wouldja give me some money?' If they say yes, I tell them I have two more questions, and these are far more humiliating than the last. 'First, I am so sorry to have to ask but, when you gonna send the money? Can you send it today?' And then I say, 'Now this last question is so embarrassing that I can hardly bring myself to ask it, but... [ellipsis in original] How much?' And before they can think about it, I jump in and say, 'How 'bout a thousand bucks?'

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The Ronald Reagan We Forget

From Joe Klein's exciting new book, Politics Lost: How American Democracy Was Trivialized by People Who Think You're Stupid (pp. 64-65):

He defined his presidency by enacting the largest tax cuts in American history in 1981, then turned around and imposed two of the largest tax increases in history, in 1982 and 1983, after his tax cuts sent the federal budget deficit into the ionosphere. He said that "government was the problem, not the solution," and yet he spent little political capital cutting or reforming the federal morass (that would be left to Bill Clinton, who cut more than 250,000 federal jobs and balanced the budget). Reagan styled himself as the ultimate hawk, and yet he violated one of the core principles of U.S. national security policy: he negotiated with terrorists during the Iran-Contra debacle, trading arms for the releases of hostages.

Semantic quibbles: why does the book's subtitle use passive voice, and why does Klein repeat the phrase "tax cuts" in the first sentence above?

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Craig Shirley on Ronald Reagan

The author of Reagan's Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign That Started It All, Craig Shirley previews his forthcoming Rendezvous with Destiny in op-ed an for Townhall. A few insights, turns of phrases, and points that need repeating:

• "Ronald Reagan so thoroughly dominates the Republican Party that no one calls themselves a 'Ford' Republican let alone 'Nixon' Republican. . . . Reagan's name has so much power in the Republican Party that so-called Republican lobbyists on K Street invoke his name to convince Republican lawmakers to do very un-Republican things."

• "Reagan also had a strong libertarian streak and as late as 1975 was still describing himself as a 'libertarian conservative.'"

• "Reagan put Soviet communism under the heel of his cowboy boot and crushed it."

• "The Reagans were always fond of one particular young war hero: John McCain."

• Reagan "didn't feel the need to redefine [conservatism] as 'kinder and gentler' or 'compassionate'," since he knew that "meant the noun was the enemy of the adjective."

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Reagan's Heir Need Not Be a Reaganite

In the past several years, as the GOP has labored under the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan has become our collective lodestar—all things to all conservatives.

Libertarians claim him as one of their own, owing to his rhetoric about government as the problem, not the solution. Christians view his conversion to the pro-life agenda as his strongest legacy. Neocons uphold his ending of the Cold War.

The biggest hurdle facing the current crop of our presidential candidates is the inability of each to unify these three wings of the party.

All three support the president on Iraq, especially, and crucially, the surge. But despite McCain's voting record, the religious right doesn't trust him. Nor do they embrace the pro-choice, pro-civil union New Yorker, Rudy Giuliani. On paper, Mitt Romney is the Christian candidate, except that he's only recently become so, and he's Mormon.

Rudy is the libertarian candidate, save for his elevation of security over liberty. Romney's language about deficits and vetoes is attractive, if you minimize health care. Ditto for McCain's bona fides on pork and waste, if you overlook McCain-Feingold and tax cuts.

So who will be Reagan's heir? At this point, no one. Still, it behooves us to remember, as George Will has written, "that insisting on perfection in a candidate interferes with selecting a satisfactory one." Or, to use another cliche, politics is the art of compromise.

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