| Hmmm. Where have we heard this kind of thing before? To be specific? Right here when Ronald Reagan ran for president. Let’s start with the media first. • New York Times: Reagan’s candidacy is “patently ridiculous.” • New York Times: “The astonishing thing is that this amusing but frivolous Reagan fantasy is taken so seriously by the news media and particularly by the President (Gerald Ford). It makes a lot of news, but it makes no sense.” • New Republic: “Ronald Reagan to me is still the posturing, essentially mindless and totally unconvincing candy man that he’s been in my opinion ever since I watched his first try for the Republican nomination evaporate in Miami in 1968.” • New Republic: “Reagan is Goldwater revisited…He is a divisive factor in the party.” • Harper’s magazine: “That he should be regarded as a serious candidate for President is a shame and an embarrassment for the country at large to swallow.” • Chicago Daily News: “The trouble with Reagan, of course, is that his positions on the major issues are cunningly phrased nonsense — irrationality conceived and hair-raising in their potential mischief… Here comes Barry Goldwater again, only more so, and at this stage another such debacle could sink the GOP so deep it might never recover.” • Time: “Republicans now must decide whether he represents a conservative wave of the future or is just another Barry Goldwater calling on the party to mount a hopeless crusade against the twentieth century.” • Newsweek: Ronald Reagan is “a man whose mind and nerve and mediagenic style have never been tested in Presidential politics and may not be adequate to the trial.” • National Review (a conservative magazine): “Reagan’s image remains inchoate.… At the outset of his campaign, his image is largely that of the role-playing actor — pleasant on stage, but ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights. Reagan does not yet project the presidential image. He is not seen as a serious man.” • Manchester Union-Leader (a conservative New Hampshire paper): Reagan “lacks the charisma and conviction needed to win.” • Pravda, the official newspaper of the Soviet Union: Reagan is a “dinosaur from the ‘cold war.’… It is strange that there are still fish in the sea that are tempered by this putrid bait.” |
| And that’s just a sample from the media. Then there were the views of those stalwarts of the Republican Party Establishment: • The Ripon Society: “The nomination of Ronald Reagan would McGovernize the Republican Party.” • Vice President Nelson Rockefeller dismissed Reagan as “a minority of a minority” who “has been taking some extreme positions.” • New York’s Republican Senator Jacob Javits: Reagan’s positions are “so extreme that they would alter our country’s very economic and social structure and our place in the world to such a degree as to make our country’s place at home and abroad, as we know it, a thing of the past.” • Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy said Reagan’s candidacy was “foolhardy” and would lead to a “crushing defeat” for the Republican Party. “It could signal the beginning of the end of our party as an effective force in American political life.” • Former President Gerald Ford: “I hear more and more often that we don’t want, can’t afford to have a replay of 1964.” If the Republican Party nominates Ronald Reagan “it would be an impossible situation” because Reagan “is perceived as a most conservative Republican. A very conservative Republican can’t win in a national election.” Asked if that meant Ford thought Reagan can’t win, Ford replied to the New York Times: “That’s right.” The Times story went on to observe that Ford thought “Mr. Reagan would be a sure-loser in November” and that Reagan held “extreme and too-simple views.” Much of this is recorded, it is ironic to note, in volume one of a massive two-volume history titled The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964-1980 by historian Steven F. Hayward. Hayward’s second volume is titled: The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989. |
| In other words Hayward’s massive two-book history is about the man all those fancy media people of the day, not to mention those Establishment Republicans, named above — and they were far from alone — insisted could never, ever win the presidency. A Reagan presidency was a “fantasy” of a “simple-minded” too “extreme” man who was a “minority of a minority.” If Reagan were ever nominated it would “signal the beginning of the end” of the Republican Party not to mention he was “ill-equipped for the real world beyond the footlights” and was not a “serious man.” Now? Now every Republican candidate out there kneels at the altar of Ronald Reagan, mumbling his name like a version of a conservative rosary — yet once done with that they move on in the fashion of what Reagan himself disdained as “fraternal order” Republicans. And now once again a candidate has appeared that is drawing the same reaction that Reagan once drew. That would be, of course, Donald Trump. |