The Slogan “Believe In America”: Translation, The Birthers Are Back In Town
Even after the release of his birth certificate, more Republicans than ever believe President Obama is foreign-born.
For most people, the “birther” conspiracy—centered on the belief that Barack Obama wasn’t a natural-born American citizen—ended when the president released his long-form birth certificate to the public last April. Birther claims were always bogus, but the release of the birth certificate was supposed to nail the coffin shut.
For a while, it did.
According to YouGov’s Adam Berinsky, the proportion of Americans who said that Obama was born in the United States rose from 55 percent before April 2011 to 67 percent afterward. Likewise, for Republicans—the group most likely to believe the conspiracy—the number who said Obama was born a citizen increased from 30 percent to 47 percent. Still low, but a real improvement.
Recently, Berinsky polled the question again, focusing on Republicans to see if their attitudes have changed in the ten months since the president released his birth certificate. Far from getting better, Republicans have actually doubled-down on the belief that Obama is foreign born:
Berinksy points to the durability of rumors in the face of lasting information as the culprit. As he writes, “Rumors tend to be sticky and merely repeating a rumor—even in the context of debunking that mistruth—increases its power.” Likewise, political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have found that corrections often fail to reduce misperceptions among the target ideological group and that corrections can even backfire and strengthen false beliefs.
In addition to both factors, I wouldn’t be surprised if election-year rhetoric plays into it as well. Up until recently, the GOP hopefuls have struggled to distinguish themselves, and some candidates—like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich—have centered their attacks on the assumed “foreignness” of President Obama. The slogan “Believe in America,” for example, doesn’t actually make sense unless you assume that the president isn’t American enough to lead the country. And claims that Obama is a “Saul Alinsky radical” who “apologizes for America” and wants to adopt “European socialism” are nods to the myth that Obama is foreign-born (and thus, untrustworthy).
As the election heats up, and this rhetoric becomes more intense, I wouldn’t be surprised if the proportion of Republican birthers increases from its current high.
Political, “Dumb And Deadly”: A Black Mark On The Pink Ribbon
Hard as I try, I can only conjure up two words to describe the decision on the part of Susan G. Komen For The Cure to pull its support of Planned Parenthood.
Dumb and…Deadly.
For years, Komen and Planned Parenthood have worked together to improve the opportunities for women to discover and get treatment for one of the most insidious of diseases—women’s breast cancer. And they’ve made a great pair. Together, these organizations have done an enormous amount of good when it comes to bringing the illness to the public’s attention and providing the services that have, undoubtedly, saved a great many lives.
Today, this partnership has been torn apart and, contrary to what one might have anticipated just twenty-four hours ago, it is not Planned Parenthood who finds itself struggling to make up the lost funding. The organization has benefitted from a massive inpouring of contributions since the news broke.
Rather, a review of the Susan G.Komen Facebook page makes it all too clear that their own organization is likely in line for a very bad year on the fundraising front given the large number of people who are deeply offended and distressed by the decision and have sworn to cut off their contributions to the group.
While it is tempting to say that the ‘good guy’ in this sad tale has emerged victorious, nothing could be further from the truth.
You see, the big loser in this story will be future breast cancer victims who may not get the diagnostic services or treatment required to save their lives as a result of what is sure to be a drop in funding for the Komen effort.
That is a true tragedy and one that certainly never had to be.
Despite the severe backlash being heaped on Komen For The Cure by one-time supporters, the organization continues to argue that there was nothing political about its decision. But nobody is buying this because it’s simply too hard to swallow.
Komen is sticking to the story that they had no choice but to pull the funding once Republican Congressman Cliff Sterns, a long-time opponent of Planned Parenthood, began a Congressional investigation to determine if Planned Parenthood has violated the rules that prohibit them from spending taxpayer money on abortion services. The Komen group argues that their governing principles do not permit them to contribute money to any entity under Congressional investigation.
But stupid is as stupid does. And, as noted, Komen For The Cure has behaved with shocking stupidity.
If Komen believes that Planned Parenthood provides a valuable service to the women Komen seeks to help and believed that PP did so before the investigation commenced last fall, why in the world would they permit such a congressional investigation—and one that has no time limit and could drag on until Democrats return to power and take over the investigating committee—to interfere with something as important as helping women with breast cancer? At no time has Komen suggested that Planned Parenthood was failing to use the money provided by Komen for the intended purpose. Had this been their position, their decision would have made a great deal more sense.
Are Komen’s rules of operating more important than the very purpose of their existence? If they believed that Planned Parenthood played an important role in helping women with breast cancer before, why would they do anything to interfere with that work, let alone use an investigation into whether or not PP is misusing taxpayer money for abortions – not breast cancer services—as a reason to withdraw their aid?
What if Rep. Sterns’ investigation does turn up some instances of Planned Parenthood breaking the rules? Does this mean that the work they do in support of women with breast cancer no longer ‘counts’? Are women who are in danger of losing their lives suddenly not deserving of help because some others may have received an abortion with some taxpayer money?
Anyway you look at it, this is an illogical and remarkably (here’s that word again) stupid decision.
I understand that there are many people who vehemently oppose abortion and that this would lead them to have a big problem with Planned Parenthood for providing the same.
But these people claim that they are ‘right to lifers’, devout in their desire to protect life. This, once again, causes us to wonder why these folks would take so strong a position when it comes to the lives of the unborn yet are unwilling to take such a position on behalf of a woman who has walked on the planet for a few years already. I simply don’t understand why right to life organizations everywhere are not imploring Susan Komen For The Cure to reinstate the funding to Planned Parenthood so that lives of affected women can be saved – just as they want to save the lives of the unborn.
While Rep. Sterns has taken the time to deny any involvement with Komen’s decision, and I take him at his word, why has he not acknowledged that, while he may be seriously opposed to abortion services, he can still support the work of Planned Parenthood—and Komen’s contribution to that work—when it comes to helping women facing a deadly disease? It is, after all, saving lives that Congressman Sterns proclaims himself to be all about.
Shame on the Susan G. Komen For The Cure for forgetting their mission and the reason so many people have financially supported their efforts and walked so many miles in support. Shame on Congressman Sterns along with any other opponent of Planned Parenthood’s involvement in abortion who cannot see the sheer hypocrisy of hating PP for taking lives while remaining unwilling to stand up for the services of PP that save lives.
I can’t think of a better example of how far afield we have gone when a charity devoted to fighting cancer allows politics to become its guiding force.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributing Writer, Forbes, February 1, 2012
The Winds Of Racism On The GOP Campaign Trail
Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:
Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them somethingbecause they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.
Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.
I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates in today’s contest aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.
A Dark Art
Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters –is one of the darkest political arts. In this race, Newt Gingrich is streets ahead of his nearest competitor in its use. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, he has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”
Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at leastsince 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting; it was Reagan who also introduced the “welfare queen” into public discourse.)
The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky”around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)
But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white Republican primaries.
Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.
New Realization
Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog-whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.
The former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who last week endorsed Gingrich, told me in an interview last year that Obama was more “international” than American. He also said that, unlike Obama, he rejects the label“African-American” because he feels “more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.”
Representative Allen West of Florida, one of two black Republican House members, recently called the Democratic Party a “21st-century plantation” and compared himself to Harriet Tubman. In August, he said, “Today in the black community, we see individuals who are either wedded to a subsistence check or an employment check. Democrat physical enslavement has now become liberal economic enslavement, which is just as horrible.”
How far in intent is West’s message from this one, recently delivered by Rick Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” (Santorum laterdenied that he said the word “black,” arguing that what he actually said was “blah.” The denial is not credible.)
The writer Gary Younge has noted that in Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, nine times more whites use food stamps than blacks do. But it doesn’t matter: Santorum wasn’t driven from the race for making such a blatant appeal to white resentment — instead, he won the Iowa caucus.
An Odd Video
Recently, I watched an educational children’s video produced by a company part-owned by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and current Fox News host). The video series, called “Learn Our History,” is meant as a corrective to a left-wing interpretation of the American story.
In one episode, a group of children are transported to Washington, in the late 1970s, a time when, we are told,“people are out of work and some of their morals are just gone.” The group, walking down a cartoon version of a street from “The Wire,” is confronted by a black mugger in a tank-top emblazoned with the word “Disco.” (Yes,“Disco.”) The mugger says to the time-travelers, “Gimme yo money!”
I asked Huckabee why the video advanced this particular stereotype. We had been speaking about the rationale for the video series, and he had just finished telling me that the project was meant to encourage moral leadership. Then he told me he had nothing to do with writing the show’s scripts, but it was his impression that the mugger wasn’t meant to be black. In any case, we were talking about a cartoon, he said, and cartoons traffic in“caricature.”
This is something cartoons share with many of today’s leading Republicans.
By: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, January 31, 2012
“Bait And Switch Cynic’s”: Obama Angers GOP By Standing Up For Middle Class
Republicans are furious with Barack Obama for waging a “divisive” populist campaign against Wall Street and America’s “elites” – because Republicans think that is supposed to be their job.
Together with the more confrontational tone he’s taken with Republicans since they rebuffed him on his middle class jobs package last summer, President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday is further proof he’s finally learned his lesson from the previous three years: That while he was off chasing independent “swing” voters said to prize compromise and moderation above all things, scheming Republicans had picked his pocket of those pitchfork-wielding populists who should have been Obama’s all along.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In both the physical world and in politics the law of gravity decrees that when things fall apart they are supposed to fall down. So, by all rights a second Great Depression that incinerated $16 trillion in household wealth and was brought about by the same kind of financial shenanigans and Wall Street recklessness that caused that first big depression back in the 1930s, should have provoked the very same kind of anti-business popular backlash that brought FDR to power then and should have created a Second New Deal now.
Yet, as populist historian Thomas Frank writes in his new book, Pity the Billionaire: the Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, so far the most visible response to the recent economic catastrophe has been a right wing campaign to “roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain and to clamp down on federal spending.”
The resurgence of the Republican Party so soon after the debacle of George W. Bush and the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 is a testament to human adaptability.
Rather than allow themselves to be crushed underneath a tide of middle class anger directed against the plutocrats and tycoons who stole their dreams away — as happened to Republicans in the 1930s — conservatives were determined this time around to lead the populist, anti-Wall Street revolt instead of be swallowed by it – even if it was a crusade cynically designed to serve the interests of the very same Wall Street that was responsible for the crisis in the first place.
Congressman Paul Ryan, for example, was both the author of the “kill Medicare as we know it” budget as well as an article in Forbes titled “Down with Big Business” in which Ryan argued that giant corporations could not be counted on to defend capitalism in its hour of need and so it was up to “the American people – innovators and entrepreneurs and small business owners — to take a stand.”
Conservative infatuation with “entrepreneurs” and “small business owners” was no accident. Like those prairie farmers who fed the Populist Movement of the 19th century, mom-and-pop hardware store owners are just as outraged by “crony capitalism” on Wall Street as they are by “European-style socialism” in Washington.
And so by passing the torch of free market capitalism from the international conglomerate to the local chamber of commerce conservatives knew they could give populist cover to a free market agenda that meant lower taxes for the rich and fewer regulations for Wall Street.
But the perfect expression of the Republican Party’s bait-and-switch cynicism came when Republicans tried to beat back Obama’s Wall Street reforms by pretending to be against Wall Street itself. Since “public outrage about the bailout of banks and Wall Street is a simmering time bomb set to go off,” wrote GOP pollster Frank Luntz in an infamous February 2010 memo to his Republican clients, the single best way for Republicans to kill Wall Street reform was to link it to favoritism of Wall Street — like “the Big Bank Bailout” instead.
And that is exactly what Republicans did, piously intoning how the Democrat’s reforms were really giveaways to the rich that sought to “punish” middle class taxpayers while rewarding “big banks and credit card companies.”
Add it all up and everywhere you looked the GOP defenders of the Top 1% were warning of “a colossal struggle between average people and the elites who would strip away the people’s freedoms,” said Frank.
Corrupt and cynical though all of this might be, Republican efforts to portray themselves as champions of little guy standing tall against “the interests” was not wholly implausible, as leaders of the revivified Right found the soil for their misdirection to be uncommonly fertile.
Hoodwinking the Tea Party Right that the “elites”who brought down the economy lived in Washington rather on Wall Street was never going to be a heavy lift.
In their year-long study of the Tea Party movement, The Tea Party and the Remaking of the Republican Conservatism, authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson found that while Tea Party members might be impresarios of political organization they were largely ignorant when it came to “what government does, how it is financed and what is actually included (or not) in key pieces of legislation and regulation.”
The blame, they say, lies squarely with “the content of right wing programming,” especially Fox News, which, the authors contend, propagates falsehoods “often as a matter of deliberate editorial policy.” Thus, millions of frightened Americans were uniquely vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation by a corporate-sponsored “‘populist” movement that served the interests of the plutocrats.
But making matters worse, the Democrats have not exactly covered themselves in glory when it comes to making clear whose side they are on. The bank bailouts begun under George Bush are easily blamed on Democrats who both inherited them when they won the White House and voted for them when they controlled Congress. Corporate control of Washington is also a problem that undermines public faith in Democrats who are supposed to govern Washington. And when “Clintonism” is a word that means the “People’s Party” is catering to the interests of the rich and powerful — or when neo-liberalism” defines an economic system indistinguishable from conservative laissez faire — you can forgive the average voter for having trouble separating Wall Street elites from Washington ones.
With a powerful media network like Fox News at its disposal, able to “make viewers both more conservative and less informed,” it’s not difficult to understand how Republicans have been able to lead a mass revolt against “elites” that largely serves the interests of those very same elites.
But with his more recent moves to the left President Obama has begun to turn this around and win back a middle class that should have been with him from the beginning.
“After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party’s defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist,” writes New York Times conservative Ross Douthat with a tone of resignation and disappointment more than agreement.
Peter Beinart of the Daily Beast agrees: “From Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck, the conservative assault on Barack Obama comes down to this: unfettered capitalism is true Americanism.”
Among right wing conservatives, Obama’s efforts to use government to make American capitalism more stable and just isn’t the sort of rescue mission that both Democratic and Republican administrations have been waging since the New Deal. Conventional stimulus spending and jobs programs are instead “an alien imposition, hatched in foreign lands, and designed to make us less free,” says Beinart. And so Obama will either effectively answer that charge “or he will lose the 2012 election.”
My money is on Obama who’s recent course correction may turn out to be his own “Southern Strategy.” The original got its name back in 1968 after Richard Nixon had a Eureka! Moment when he realized there was no way Southern whites who voted with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and were now standing with George Wallace at the schoolhouse door belonged in the Democratic Party of Civil Rights and the Great Society. And today, they don’t.
Nearly 50 years later, Barack Obama seems to have had his own epiphany when he looked around at those who were shaking their fists at “Big Government” but who’d also been put out on the street by Big Banks and Big Business, and the President wondered: How can these people possibly be Republicans?
Proof that President Obama is onto something with his new, more populist approach is the fact that the unerring homing missile of popular resentments and discontents — Newt Gingrich — is going after plutocrat Mitt Romney as a “malefactor of great wealth,” while dancing on Romney’s grave with a victory speech in South Carolina that spit out the word “elite” 27 times.
The contortions that Republicans have had to go through to recast themselves as the Party of the People in order to advance an agenda lop-sided in its favoritism for the wealthy few exposes the structural deformities that have always bedeviled American conservatives.
Like lizards who camouflage themselves from predators, there has always been something chameleon-like about right wing conservatives compelled to adopt protective coloration to survive in a hostile liberal environment.
That is why right wing conservatives have had to learn to speak the language of liberalism — borrowing words like freedom, liberty and democracy in order to superficially appear to embrace ideas and ideals forbidden to them by their reactionary belief system.
That is why members of the Religious Right and Conservative Movement are more familiar with the liberal community organizer Saul Alinsky than Alinsky’s intended liberal audience seems to be, taking to heart his advice in Rules for Radicals that the way for political movements to get things done is to “go home, organize, build power.”
And immediately after the economy collapsed in 2008 and 2009, conservatism positioned itself as a popular protest movement for economic hard times, jettisoning “aspects of conservative tradition that were either haughty or aristocratic,” says Frank “while symbols that seemed noble or democratic or popular, even if they were the traditional property of the other side, were snapped up and claimed by the Right itself.”
Right wing conservatives knew a popular uprising by angry and distressed Americans against the Powers That Be was in the offing. But this time, unlike the 1930s, Republicans intended to lead that revolt instead of be victims of it.
No wonder, then, that Republicans are calling the President “divisive” when he tries to take back from them the backing of The People that rightfully belongs to him.
By: Ted Frier, Open salon, January 29, 2012
“Name Droppers”: Neither Gingrich Nor Romney Has Much Claim On Ronald Reagan
The Reagan Wars are finally underway, and Newt Gingrich is getting called on his shamelessly frequentdropping of the Gipper’s name. It makes sense for the candidates — none of whom has been able to make the Republican base fall in love with them — to make such a nostalgia appeal, but there are risks to it for both frontrunners.
As Jeffrey Goldberg noted Wednesday, former Reagan assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams lashed out at Gingrich in National Review: “He voted with the caucus, but his words should be remembered, for at the height of the bitter struggle with the Democratic leadership Gingrich chose to attack… Reagan.” Meanwhile, the Restore Our Future PAC, run by a former close aide to Romney, has released an ad that features a quote from the former president attacking Gingrich and noting (rather pettily) that he only appears once in Reagan’s diaries.
There’s some truth to these attacks. A quick swing through news archives shows how often he criticized the president. Abrams highlighted this quote from 1986: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail…. President Reagan is clearly failing.” He also cited Gingrich calling Reagan’s 1985 summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”
That’s just a start. Here are a few selections from the vault, which seem more meaningful than scanning the index of Reagan’s diaries:
- In 1982, he was furious at Reagan for agreeing to tax increases. “As recently as April, he said, ‘I wasn’t sent to Washington to raise taxes.’ Now he’s going on television to explain why he didn’t mean it.”
- That same year, White House adviser Lynn Nofziger charged that Rep. Jack Kemp, the leader of a guerrilla band of House conservatives, was “hurting the president and the presidency.” A gleeful Gingrich retorted, “If Kemp went to Argentina tomorrow, we the rebels would go on.” He also said, “Maybe they can beat us by the sheer weight of the White House, but they do so at the cost of Reagan’s natural base.”
- Also in 1982, Gingrich found himself writing a handwritten apology to White House Chief of Staff James A. Baker, after he blasted Baker for harming Republican chances at the polls in that year’s midterm elections.
- Here he is in 1985, complaining that Reagan’s tax plan was much too far left: “The secretary of the treasury decided to make an alliance with a Chicago Democrat, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski, in effect pitting the president of the United States against the very people who gave him a 49-state victory.”
- Gingrich in 1987, commenting on Reagan’s spending plan: He “is now making, domestically, the biggest mistake of his second term.”
- In 1987, after Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination was defeated and nominee Douglas Ginsburg was forced to withdraw over revelations that he had used marijuana in the past, Gingrich blasted the Reagan administration: “We currently have no strategy, and we’re looking dumb.”
- Gingrich on the Iran-Contra Affair: “He will never again be the Reagan that he was before he blew it. He is not going to regain our trust and our faith easily.”
Gingrich spent much of the 1980s dispensing effusive praise for a supply-sider GOP presidential nominee of the decade. Here’s one quote:”the most important Republican since Theodore Roosevelt, the first Republican in modern times to show that it is possible to be both hopeful and conservative at once.” Damningly, however, he wasn’t talking about Reagan: he was referring to his friend and House colleague Jack Kemp.
But while Gingrich spent much of the 1980s pushing the GOP rightward and attacking the president when he tacked toward the center, the hard conservative pose was a new one for the Georgian. Reagan was of course the political progeny of Barry Goldwater. Gingrich recently suggested he’d supported the Arizona senator during his ill-fated 1964 presidential campaign, and while that might be true, it’s established fact that four years later, he was southern regional director for Nelson Rockefeller, the man ran against Goldwater in 1964 and whose name has become synonymous with moderate, East Coast Republicanism; he said in 1989 that he’d spent “most of [his] life” in that more centrist wing. Ed Kilgore reported last March that during Gingrich’s first two (unsuccessful) runs for the House, he actually attacked the Democratic incumbent from the left, before moving right in time for his victory in the 1978 race.
(In the same 1989 interview, Gingrich blasted Reagan’s handling of the black vote. “One of the gravest mistakes the Reagan administration made was its failure to lead aggressively in civil rights,” Gingrich said. “It cost the Republican Party. It helped cost us control of the Senate in 1986.”)
Recently, of course, the former speaker’s attacks on Romney’s work at Bain Capital have raised the eyebrows of conservative critics upset that Gingrich is attacking his rival from the left.
On the other hand, the Gingrich campaign is promoting a Nancy Reagan statement from 1995 — it might not be direct from the Gipper, but is the next best thing:
The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.
It’s hard to imagine, furthermore, that this is a winning battle for Romney, and not just because of his reputation as a moderate. Because he was working in the private sector in the 1980s, he didn’t have the chance to work with (or against) Reagan, but during a debate against Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994, then-Senate candidate Romney disavowed the former president is fairly clear terms. “Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush,” he said. “I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”
The irony in this fight over Reagan’s legacy is that — as Andrew Romano explained in Newsweek two years ago — the real man wasn’t as doctrinaire nor as conservative as partisans on both sides remember him (a fact Gingrich’s many attacks from the right above demonstrate). So the Republican race has turned into a contest between two candidates who used to be to the left of Ronald Reagan attempting to represent a party that has since moved to the Gipper’s right.
By: David Graham, Associate Editor, The Atlantic, January 27, 2012
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