Hankering for a Winner

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The New York Sun

According to Senator Schumer, the Reagan days are over. “We’re about at the tail end of the Ronald Reagan era, where his ideas — fresh and, even as a Democrat, I’d say, many of them needed at the time — have just lost steam, lost resonance,” the senior senator for New York said last week.

Reagan’s simple conservative philosophy may have “lost resonance” among Democrats, if it ever resonated much at all, but among Republicans, to be sure, the personality and the ideas of “The Great Communicator” continue to cast a long shadow over the race for his putative successors.

In Richmond, Va., which is prime Republican real estate, a Los Angeles reporter sat in on a two-hour-long discussion between a dozen GOP supporters brought together by a pollster from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

His conclusion? “Many, perhaps most, Republicans are still essentially undecided. They’re looking for the next Ronald Reagan, and they’re not sure they’ve found him yet.”

The observation spells a significant difference between the Republican and the Democratic view not only of the presidential race so far, but also of the state of American politics.

Conservatives are looking for the continuation of what, in retrospect, appears to have been a golden age of conservatism, when Ronald Reagan sat smiling in the White House, Margaret Thatcher was firmly in control in Downing Street, the Soviet Union was fast crumbling, and America had begun to recover its optimism after a procession of profound political disappointments: the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter.

Politics is above all about perceptions, and Reagan’s preeminent skill was to suggest to Americans that so long as he was in charge they would feel good about themselves and the future. He kept his thinking to a small number of key ideas: lower taxes, less government, a balanced budget, a tough approach to tyrants abroad, a tough line on anti-social elements at home.

The absence of social conservative ideas in his program is significant. He was the first divorcee to become an American president and counted among his friends in Hollywood many homosexuals, though there was a naivety about gay matters that caused him to be shocked when he discovered his friend Rock Hudson had died of AIDS.

Reagan went to church, now and then, yet, while he prayed from time to time, usually when he needed some reassurance, organized religion was of little importance to him.

When Republicans today say they are hankering after a new Reagan, even social conservatives are not necessarily looking for a good social conservative.

What they are looking for is someone with a clear morality, with unshakeable views, and heading in a clear direction. In brief, they want strong leadership.

They are still looking for the Son of Reagan because no Republican candidate has yet offered the Gipper’s certainty, his eloquence, and his effortless grasp of the national narrative. Compared to Reagan, the Republican field looks inadequate, unexciting, unappetizing, anemic.

The Democrats have no such unifying figure to call upon, though they, too, have heroes. It was interesting to hear John Edwards say on Sunday he was not worthy to carry the shoes of his idol, the left wing populist Robert Kennedy. Senator Clinton the other day recalled with affection her memories of the anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy.

Unlike the Republican candidates, this time round Democrats rarely conjure up a president from their party’s past in order to invite a comparison. In the Democratic debates you do not hear invocations of Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt.

The only name that conjures a form of Democratic golden age is that of Bill Clinton. In some respects he was a son of Reagan, just as Tony Blair was a son of Lady Thatcher. He put into effect a number of reforms that Reagan advocated but never achieved: balancing the budget, free trade, welfare reform, ideas Senator Schumer might call “fresh and, even as a Democrat, I’d say, many of them needed at the time.”

But President Clinton’s achievements are left largely unsung; his wife, it appears, has sole rights to the family franchise.

We are in a time of war, albeit a war which only rarely impinges upon our daily comforts. We are engaged in full scale military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the home front, we have never before devoted more personnel and treasure to defending ourselves from terrorist attack.

Yet the name on the lips of Republicans is of a president who, despite his rhetoric and his military spending, shied away from active military conflict. His response to the bombing of American marines in Beirut was to announce a general withdrawal from the region. His invasion of Grenada was little more than an exercise in regional muscle flexing, though Americans were killed in the process.

Reagan’s instinct, which he put into practice in his talks with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, was unilaterally to give away America’s nuclear weapons — a policy which in Europe was advocated only by the pacifist fringe.

The Democrats, meanwhile, shun their own bellicose past. Since Woodrow Wilson, the Democrats have been the party of military adventures abroad. Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson: all took the nation to war overseas under the banner of democracy and freedom. In the wake of President Bush’s war on terror, that Democratic tradition has been abandoned.

In their quest to find a winner in November, Republicans hanker after a peaceful golden age that cannot be replicated. And in their rush to distance themselves from anything to do with war, Democrats reject their noble past. And so this already long and increasingly long-winded election is turned topsy turvy.

Mr. Wapshott’s biography of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, published by Sentinel, comes out tomorrow.


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