“Today’s GOP wouldn’t endorse Reagan!”<\/p>\n
It’s an ofay little meme that’s been trotted out for the last couple of years by a bunch of liberals who might, on a good day, stick to trying to whiz on Reagan’s grave, with the aim of trying to undercut the “independent” vote going to conservatives as they did for Reagan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They note that Reagan passed legislation controlling guns, legalizing abortion and raising taxes.\u00a0 The first was an error of judgment while governor of California for which he more than atoned later in his career; the latter two, errors involving trusting Democrats to hold up their ends of deals; in the case of the taxes, the “increases” were both results of Tip O’Neil’s perfidy and a small fraction of the cuts he’d implemented earlier in his administration; they happened at a time when the economy was humming along, rather than on life support; dumb, but not dumber.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the meme almost rises to the level of a Berg’s Seventh Law violation – because while Reagan would likely do just fine in today’s GOP (his strength was in building coalitions of diverse people toward common ends, something the GOP needs today even more than it did in 1980), the great Democrat hero, John F. Kennedy, would get run out of most Democrat meetings on a rail:<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s Democratic Party \u2014 the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore \u2014 wouldn\u2019t give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.<\/p>\n
The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions<\/a> in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even spoke out against the \u201cconfiscatory\u201d property taxes being levied in too many cities.<\/p>\n
He was anything but a big-spending, welfare-state liberal. \u201cI do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort,\u201d Kennedy bluntly avowed during the 1960 campaign. One of his first acts as president was to institute a pay cut for top White House staffers, and that was only the start of his budgetary austerity. \u201cTo the surprise of many of his appointees,\u201d longtime aide Ted Sorensen would later write<\/a>, he \u201cpersonally scrutinized every agency request with a cold eye and encouraged his budget director to say \u2018no.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/div>\nOn the other hand, he was a Cold War anticommunist who aggressively increased military spending. He faulted his Republican predecessor for tailoring the nation\u2019s military strategy to fit the budget, rather than the other way around. \u201cWe must refuse to accept a cheap, second-best defense,\u201d JFK said during his run for the White House. He made good on that pledge, pushing defense spending to 50 percent of federal expenditures and 9 percent of GDP, both far higher than today\u2019s levels<\/a>. Speaking in Texas just hours before his death, he proudly took credit<\/a> for building the US military into \u201ca defense system second to none.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole thing.\u00a0 And send it to your Democrat friends.<\/p>\n
JFK, whatever his foibles and peccadilloes, would puke his guts out at the legacy of John Kerry, much less Barack Obama.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Today’s GOP wouldn’t endorse Reagan!” It’s an ofay little meme that’s been trotted out for the last couple of years by a bunch of liberals who might, on a good day, stick to trying to whiz on Reagan’s grave, with the aim of trying to undercut the “independent” vote going to conservatives as they did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-history-and-its-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39165"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39201,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39165\/revisions\/39201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}