Mad love to VP Biden, but I don’t see much difference between all the subliminal racism, homophobia, and “othering” that St. Ronnie carried with him and helped legitimize, and the rise of the Trumpeteers today. My sense is that Reagan’s takeover of the GOP discomfitted the old-school, genteel types of his day just as much as the rise of Trump discomifts people like Lindsay Graham or Mitt Romney in 2016. And just as Ronnie’s win allowed them to make their peace and get with the program, Lindsay and the rest have already telegraphed that if Trump is the winner he claims to be (he isn’t) they’ll hold their nose and join the cheerleading squad. So let’s not “whitewash” St. Ronnie, he was an avuncular psychopath who allied with Pol Pot, Jonas Savimbi in Angola, Bin Laden and the El Salvador death squads and whose CIA saturated our minority communities with cheap cocaine. He (and Goldwater) began the movement to the extreme populist right whose fruits we see today, and I have a sense that if he was running this year, he would fit right in.
We can hardly call this “healthcare” in any reasonable sense of the term!
This is precisely the sort of living-crisis-to-crisis world deregulation and privatization of the Reagan variety would leave most of us in.
Dick Nixon wouldn’t be able to get the nomination now. I’m not sure Barry Goldwater could, either.
Totally agree with you about what Reagan did = worst president of the 20th century. But he’d have to change his message to appeal to today’s Republican voters.
Ronald Reagan Could Not Win The Republican Primary Today
I wish he hadn’t won it in 1980, either.
Rubbish. RR was the original Tea Party idiot.
I agree the ER is not “healthcare” in the day-to-day,preventative or continuity of care sense, but it is a subset of healthcare.
And what Reagan enacted was a mandate… Hospitals were dumping patients who were unable to pay.
Yes, it didn’t solve the problem, but helped people get through emergency situations.
I don’t say this to defend Reagan, but to trigger cognitive dissonance in the wingnuts.
Reagan had more people in his administration indicted and convicted than any other.
TPM:
Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday said that judging by the state of the Republican presidential primary, Ronald Reagan himself would not be able to win the nomination
I have to say I’m getting pretty tired of the Reagan sanity project. Reagan was just as bonkers, racist, and vile as most of today’s wingnuts; witness his diatribes against Medicare, or as he called it - sounding just like a tea partier railing against Obamacare on a Rush Limbaugh call-in - Socialized Medicine.
The only reason Reagan is remembered as less extreme than today’s tea partiers is because he’s mostly remembered for his Presidency, where he was kept in check by a Democratic Congress, rather than his batshit rhetoric from the 60’s, 70’s, and the 1980 campaign.
Were Reagan running in today’s GOP, he’d be as vicious, bilious, and hateful as an industrial strength Cruz & Trump combined, and would walk away with the nomination.
Today’s Republican Party: Now with more Alzheimer’s
There’s your answer. Reagan at least TRIED to dog-whistle. When he slipped and started talking about “strapping young bucks” eating filet mignon with their food stamps, it was just a calibration error.
Was Reagan completely shameless? Sure. But he was polite enough to act as though he were capable of shame. Funny how it’s the little things you miss when they’re gone!
I agree with you in spirit, but think of it as a tennis match between Jimmy Connors circa 1980 and Novak Djokovic today. Sure, Connors was legitimately great for his day, and ounce for ounce he’s got every bit as much innate talent, but he’s training with a jump rope and using a dinky little wood or aluminum racquet. Djokovic’s is made of carbon fiber and strung with more tension than the highest note on a piano, and he’s got twenty different Ph.Ds feeding his every move into a supercomputer.
The awfulness meter that Reagan pegged would barely flicker for the modern wingnut.
Which one?
The real empty-suit Reagan?
Or the mythical one created by right-wingnut spin doctors?
Democrats should stop feeding into the latter, when republicans bring up Saint Ronnie the best response is a chuckle.
That’s for damn sure!