In the push to make Sen. John "F--- You" McCain the Republican presidential nominee, I notice a disturbing trend among "conservative" supporters of the senator from Arizona, the one who won Barry Goldwater's seat.
The trashing of Ronald Reagan as a "compromiser."
Now, I will be the first to note that he did have to compromise. After all, the House of Representatives was decidedly Democrat controlled his whole presidency. The closest Republicans got was 192 seats in the landslide 1980 election which elevated Mr. Reagan to the presidency. By the time Mr. Reagan left office it was down to 177 Republicans.
The senate was a much better place as Republicans had control for the first six years of the Reagan presidency with a high-water mark of 54 down to 45 by the time he left office.If one wants a good understanding of how Mr. Reagan was able to achive all he was able to, read Mark Levin's piece in National Review http://corner.nationalreview.com/.
The fact is that while Mr. Reagan did do some not so conservative things like raise taxes, he was able to achieve tax reform and by the time he left office in 1989, there were only two tax brackets.
In other words, when he did compromise, he did so from the conservative position. He did not accept the view of the other side, the liberal Democrats. He did not accept their positions and work to acheive them. Otherwise, he would have stayed a Democrat.
And, since the term flip-flopper has been used by all Republicans in this campaign, I would remind every single one who uses the term to remember this. The greatest flip-flopper of all was. . .Ronald Reagan!
He was a Democrat up to at least 1960. Yes, he was a leader in Democrats for Nixon, but he did not change party identification until it became clear that as he put it in his manifesto, "Where Is The Rest Of Me" that he did not leave the Democrat party, it left him.
Yet he has become the greatest Republican of the last half of the 20th century.
I accept his "flip-flopping" because he became a conservative, understood what it meant to be a conservative and a Republican. And, many old-line, blue-blood, Rockefeller-type Republicans have hated it ever since.
And the most important thing for those trashing Mr. Reagan to make Sen. "F--- You" McCain look good need to remember.
President Reagan never had to remind conservative Republicans he was one of us. Even when we were mad at him for making compromises, he would come right back and throw some kind of zinger that irritated the liberal Democrats. And, we forgot that he may have made such a mistake in the first place.
Why I, in defense of Mitt Romney, defend his "flip-flops" is because it is coming to the conservative side. He is not apologizing for being a conservative. Believe me, in this political climate it is difficult to defend a lot of what conservatism has become. But, like Ronald Reagan, I believe it is with sincerity that Mr. Romney has embraced more conservative positions. I think that if when all is said and done if Sen. "F--- You" McCain should be the GOP nominee and does lose the presidency, Mr. Romney will be able to prove his chops for the next four years and will emerge as the leader of the conservative wing of the Republican party.
Sen. "F--- You" McCain, for all of his alleged "straight talk" has let his surrogates trash the reputation of the Great Man, Ronald Reagan, to make him look good. And that is bad because Ronald Reagan has left a legacy. Sen. "F--- You" McCain is just leaving carnage in his waste.
