There’s been plenty of mockery of the three actual or potential Republican presidential candidates who named Ronald Reagan as the greatest living president, but Jonathan Chait of New York magazine feels their pain, sort of.
Chait observed in a Wednesday post that GOPers are in a bind when choosing the best living POTUS given that 1) for obvious reasons, they wouldn’t pick Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton; 2) George H. W. Bush “betrayed Reaganism”; and 3) George W. Bush suffered a “second-term collapse into deep unpopularity” despite “govern[ing] in a more consistently conservative fashion than Reagan had.”
“The Reagan answer was not a mistake — it was the reflection of a party lacking a usable past,” wrote Chait, adding that Republicans “have no evidence the demands of conservative ideology and practical governing success can be reconciled.” Moreover, Chait declared, even though “for the last 25 years, Reaganolotry has retained its grip on Republican doctrine…the Reagan of the Republican imagination bears only a loose relation to the actual man.”
From Chait’s post (bolding added):
[T]the ranks of the living presidents offer no answer to [Moody’s] question that can square with conservative doctrine. Two of the living ex-presidents (Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton) are eliminated off the bat on account of party affiliation. The other two, George Bush and George W. Bush, have been excommunicated for committing real or imagined ideological heresy. The Reagan answer was not a mistake — it was the reflection of a party lacking a usable past.
For the last 25 years, Reaganolotry has retained its grip on Republican doctrine. Reaganolotry holds up Reagan as a standard of perfection against which every other president is judged. The Reagan of the Republican imagination bears only a loose relation to the actual man. “Reagan” has come to represent conservative control of the Republican Party. A Reaganesque politician hews to simple precepts, like no new taxes ever, and unyielding hawkishness in foreign affairs. He symbolizes the apparent success of a proposition conservative activists began to make in the 1950s: that the party’s failures were a result of its moderation, and that its success would come if it adopted uncompromising conservative doctrine…
In reality, Reagan himself violated conservative precepts flagrantly. As an activist, he warned that the enactment of Medicare would herald the end of freedom in America. As president, he agreed to increase taxes, a progressive tax reform shifting a higher proportion of taxes onto the rich, and arms control with the Soviets, all to massive right-wing dismay. All these deviations were necessary for his political success, but conservatives forgot them to make him symbolically useful.
In 1990, George Bush agreed to raise taxes in return for spending cuts, as Reagan had done. When Bush lost reelection, this compromise served as the conservative explanation for his failure. He had lost because he had betrayed Reaganism…
[George W.] Bush governed in a more consistently conservative fashion than Reagan had. He relentlessly cut taxes, increased defense spending, and opposed regulation. Bush had retrenched on Medicare prescription drugs (much like Reagan had given up his opposition to Medicare) in the face of overwhelming public opposition to the conservative stance, but this failure hardly troubled conservatives at the time...It was Bush’s second-term collapse into deep unpopularity that forced conservatives to retroactively disown him as a heretic…
[But] Republicans still embrace his policy vision. All the Republican candidates are running on a domestic platform centered around regressive, debt-financed tax cuts as the key to economic growth. With the exception of an increasingly marginalized Rand Paul, all advocate a “muscular,” “Reaganesque” foreign policy that provided the same template Bush followed to his political demise…
Republicans today embrace George W. Bush’s ideas but not the man himself. This leaves them with no living model of a successful presidency they can publicly identify. The question of which president they would choose is not a trick but a reflection of a stark reality: They have no evidence the demands of conservative ideology and practical governing success can be reconciled.
