At ABC's The Note on Wednesday, Rick Klein reported an interview with Ronald Prescott Reagan, where Klein and Jon Karl told him they were discussing whether Reagan was more like Barack Obama or Sarah Palin. This is a tough one? The president's son insisted his father more like Obama than that idiot Sarah Palin:
“Just on the basis of intelligence, you would have to say Barack Obama. I don’t think my father has anything in common with Sarah Palin whatsoever,” Ron Reagan told us on ABC’s “Top Line” today. “I'm a little offended that we even have to talk about Sarah Palin, who has nothing interesting to say.”
ABC's Klein and Karl laughed with him as he said that. At least Klein noted Reagan Junior is a "prominent liberal voice," or he's at least as prominent as the media's Reagan-haters desire to make him. Klein said "He feels as if his father’s memory has been misappropriated by some conservatives, who gloss over elements of his record that they don’t agree with." Klein didn't stop him from mangling his father's record on taxation:
“It's not surprising that Republicans revere him as an icon and want to use him in that way. He's almost a fetish object, as I've said, over on the right,” Reagan told us. “True enough, he was a lower-taxes-and-small-government kind of guy. But of course the top marginal rate when he was in office was 50 percent, so he might be pretty happy with things the way they are now. I don't know though -- I can't speak for him. A lot of other people do like to speak for him, though, but I think it's a mistake. Many of them have never even met him, of course.”
Is Reagan Junior really demonstrating his superior politically savvy over conservatives like Palin? The top marginal tax rate at Reagan's inauguration was 70 percent. The first round of Reagan tax cuts lowered that to 50 percent, and then the tax reform of 1986 dropped the top marginal rate to 28 percent in 1988. It's currently 35 percent, so Reaganites would prefer 1988 rates to 2011 rates. Many have never met him, but they don't mangle the factual basics.
Klein left out the part of their video interview where Junior said his dad was a fetish object and then that "He's like the rubber bustier of the conservative movement. Everybody's got to paw over him." This is not a winning visual image. It doesn't exactly honor his father's memory.
Unsurprisingly, Junior Reagan sees the GOP already losing momentum, and thinks Obama is a centrist:
As for the current political climate, Reagan said he feels the latest phase of the so-called “Republican revolution” is “already losing steam.”
“It's a lot easier to stand aside out of power and snipe at somebody trying to do something, but now when you have control of one House of Congress you actually have to do things,” he said.
Reagan said that on the budget "the Republicans don't have proposals and they don't have numbers," which is a rather odd conflict with the facts. So he added "If they do [?], thend tend to be dishonest, and made up. Funny money kind of stuff. And people see that. People see through the Republicans." It continued:
Obama he said, is “a centrist Democrat. That's what he is. He's the middle-of-the road kind of guy. All this talk about socialism and Marxism and leftist and all this kind of stuff is nonsense. It's just a lot of propaganda from Fox News. He is a centrist guy.”
“The danger is that he's going to move to the right. The center has already moved way over to the right. He doesn't need to move any farther. I'd like to see him be a little bit more like the two Roosevelts --Teddy and Franklin -- and take on corporate America a little more, take on Wall Street in a more concerted way.”
