Ronald Reagan

Reihan Salam: Mitt Should Run in 2016, And ‘Let Romney Be Romney’
By Tom Johnson | September 2, 2014 | 11:13 AM EDT

If reform-conservative pundit Reihan Salam gets his way, Mitt Romney will join Ronald Reagan on the list of Republican governors of coastal states who were elected president of the United States on their third try. In a Friday column for Slate, Salam wrote that he’s “delighted” about “speculation” that Romney “is at least considering another presidential run.”

Salam argued that if Romney does mount another campaign, he should present himself as a “populist” wonk opposed to “the outsize power of the megabanks and in favor of a more competitive and inclusive capitalism.” Such a persona, Salam surmised, would be closer to the real Mitt than the self-described “severely conservative” version of two years ago: “I tend to think that Romney’s struggles in 2012 flowed from his defensiveness and his fear of alienating Tea Party conservatives he didn’t truly understand.”

ABC's Ann Compton Cites Gracious Note From Elder Bush as Favorite Moment on WH Beat
By Jack Coleman | August 25, 2014 | 5:40 PM EDT

Ever notice that you seldom see Ann Compton, longtime White House correspondent for ABC News, appear on this site? What she said yesterday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" helps explain why.

After covering seven presidents and every presidential campaign since the Bicentennial in 1976, Compton is retiring and Stephanopoulos paid tribute yesterday with a nostalgic look back at her remarkable career. Compton began covering the White House more than four decades ago, at the tender age of 27, and was invariably in the thick of it. She was, for example, the only broadcast reporter on board Air Force One with President George W. Bush and his staff on Sept. 11, 2001. (Video and audio after the jump)

Salon: Hillary, Like Reagan, Thinks ‘Conquering “Evil” Is the Special Job of the Exceptional USA’
By Tom Johnson | August 18, 2014 | 1:55 PM EDT

It’s widely known that when Hillary Clinton was in high school, she was a big fan of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign. But would Hillary, if elected POTUS, take after the 20th century’s uber-conservative, Ronald Reagan, at least in terms of a hawkish foreign policy? Elias Isquith made that case in a Saturday article in Salon.

Isquith scrutinized the ideas Hillary expressed in her foreign-policy-themed interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg and found them wanting next to the modesty of the current president: “Obama, unlike Clinton, doesn’t talk about the world as if it were the stage for a great struggle between slavery and freedom. He knows that kind of talk was discredited by the results of our foreign policy from 2002 to 2008.”

New Yorker Blogger: Nixon Pioneered Politics of ‘Perpetual Grievance’ That Now Fuels the GOP
By Tom Johnson | August 8, 2014 | 7:35 AM EDT

A great many movement conservatives weren’t fans of Richard Nixon’s presidency, to the point that some of them, including William F. Buckley Jr., William Rusher, and M. Stanton Evans, backed a 1972 primary challenge to Nixon by Rep. John Ashbrook of Ohio.

But has Nixon, despite his ideological squishiness, greatly influenced today’s Republican party? New Yorker blogger Jeff Shesol says he has. In a Wednesday post, Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, essentially asserted that modern conservatism consists of Ronald Reagan’s principles but Nixon’s attitude, specifically his “sour brand of politics: the politics of resentment.” Parading one’s resentments, Shesol remarked, “has become a kind of reflex on the right, to the point of self-parody.” From Shesol’s post (emphasis added):

Salon Pundit: ‘Hillary-zilla,’ Friend of the Oligarchy, Dominates Dems' 2016 Landscape
By Tom Johnson | August 6, 2014 | 7:55 AM EDT

Conservatives seeking a potential president who’s like Ronald Reagan might be interested to know that Andrew O’Hehir of Salon thinks he’s found such a person. True, they might then be surprised to learn that he's talking about Hillary Clinton.

O’Hehir, who’s well to the left of Hillary on economic issues, doesn’t intend the Clinton-Reagan comparison as a compliment to either. He believes that she is and he was propelled by “the force of money and those who wield it,” and that these days, plutocrats control the whole political process: “You can’t separate the fact that only rich people can run for president from the fact that both parties are fueled by rich people’s money, or from the fact that beneath all their partisan bickering Democrats and Republicans have vigorously collaborated for more than 20 years on a set of deregulatory, low-tax and cheap-credit economic policies that have made rich people a whole lot richer.” From O’Hehir’s Saturday piece (emphasis added):

Daily Kos: For the GOP, Reagan Is Now Mostly a Cute Marketing Gimmick
By Tom Johnson | July 22, 2014 | 9:33 PM EDT

Liberals typically accuse conservatives of being fuddy-duddies, squares, and so on, but Daily Kos writer Hunter has a somewhat different take: he thinks most righties are “Reagan hipsters.” The caveat is that he doesn’t mean it as praise.

Apropos of the Republican National Committee selling throwback "Reagan Bush ’84" T-shirts on its website, Hunter asserted Monday that for today’s right-wingers, Reagan is less a paragon of conservatism than “a brand…so stripped of fact and context that he's just the Republican version of a lolcat, and very little more.” He suggested that you can’t blame the GOP for that fact-stripping, given Reagan’s many second-term misdeeds such as aiding “nice homicidal maniacs in Central America.”

Here We Go: WaPo's Chris Cillizza Says 'It's Virtually Impossible' For a U.S. President to Succeed
By Tom Blumer | July 22, 2014 | 10:50 AM EDT

It never fails. When the regime of center-right political leader with executive authority begins to implode, the focus is on how and why that person is failing — as it should be. When it becomes clear that a leftist mayor, governor, or president is entering the failure zone, it's because the job is impossible, or the city, state, or nation has become "ungovernable."

We're entering the excuses phase with President Obama (with an important qualifier to be explained later). At the Washington Post's "The Fix" blog yesterday, Chris Cillizza, in a post titled "It’s virtually impossible to be a successful modern president," had a trio of cop-outs at the ready:

Chris Matthews, Yes Matthews, Admiringly Recalls Reagan’s Response to KAL-007 Shootdown
By Brent Baker | July 18, 2014 | 12:45 AM EDT

Amazingly, Chris Matthews concluded Thursday’s Hardball by playing clips of how President Ronald Reagan reacted the Soviet shootdown of a Korean Air Lines 747 passenger jet in 1983 – even conceding, after a clip of Reagan charging the Soviets with terrorism and a “flagrant lie,” that “he was speaking for the American people.”

Matthews – probably inadvertently – illustrated how Reagan, unlike the current occupant of the White House, understood his role as leader of the free world under threat from evil forces.

Do You Agree, Brian? Williams Says Shevardnadze 'Admitted That Too Much Democracy Was a Bad Thing'
By Tom Blumer | July 8, 2014 | 8:32 PM EDT

On Monday evening's NBC Nightly News, host Brian Williams used a perhaps revealing verb to describe a belief held by former Soviet foreign minister and Georgian president Eduard Shevardnadze, who died on Monday at 86.

It would be good to look back and learn how Shevardnadze came to say what he said a decade ago before getting to how Williams framed it. As reported in Doug Martin's obituary at the New York Times (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Salon: Was ‘American Top 40’ Harmless Entertainment or Supply-Side Propaganda?
By Tom Johnson | June 24, 2014 | 7:11 AM EDT

As you probably know, the 1980s were boom years for conservatives. Among the most prominent right-wingers back then: Ronald Reagan, Tom Clancy, Casey Kasem…

OK, Kasem, who died on June 15, actually was a staunch liberal, a supporter in that decade of Jesse Jackson and later of Dennis Kucinich. But during the ‘80s, wrote Scott Timberg in a Sunday piece for Salon, “we had a political and economic revolution, spearheaded by a one-time actor who was often massively popular, that did the same thing as” Kasem’s radio show, “American Top 40.”

David Frum: GOP Needs a Tony Blair-Like Figure Who’ll Reform Party ‘By Standing Up to Its Most Extreme Elements’
By Tom Johnson | June 13, 2014 | 7:57 AM EDT

In a brief Thursday post on the Atlantic’s website, "reform conservative" pundit David Frum cited Eric Cantor’s primary loss to Dave Brat as further evidence that “Republican leaders” need to emerge to confront the “the destructive leadership of fanatics (and the cynics who make their living by duping fanatics)."

He cited Tony Blair as a model, someone " who revived his party by standing up to its most extreme elements," and asserted that if such leaders fail to appear, the GOP “might just as well already rename our dysfunctional party the Committee to Elect Hillary Clinton.” Frum’s entire post (emphasis added):

What They Said Then: How the Liberal Media Savaged Reagan
By Geoffrey Dickens | June 3, 2014 | 1:35 PM EDT

Thursday (June 5) marks the 10th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan’s passing and a look through the MRC’s archives shows that during his presidency many in the liberal media couldn’t withhold their contempt of the conservative icon.

From depicting Reagan as a puppet of the rich whose economic policies were cruel towards the poor and minorities, to denying his foreign policy vision helped lead to the downfall of the Soviet Union, the media did their best to trash the 40th President. The following is a look at the many ways the liberal media attempted to distort Reagan’s record.  (videos after the jump)