rickyp wrote:really? because here's a republican Primary debate where every candidate said they would refuse a 10 to one deal....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKzGZj32LYc

Milbank was making the point with Reagans words that at one time there was room for compromise. Do you think these republican candidates are demonstrating that they are capable of compromise? 10 to 1 NOT 3 to 1....

This means bubkas

I guess I'm known as a RINO now, which means a Republican in name only, because, I guess, of social views, perhaps, or common sense would be another one, which seems to escape members of our party," Simpson said. "For heaven’s sake, you have Grover Norquist wandering the earth in his white robes saying that if you raise taxes one penny, he’ll defeat you. He can’t murder you. He can’t burn your house. The only thing he can do to you, as an elected official, is defeat you for reelection. And if that means more to you than your country when we need patriots to come out in a situation when we’re in extremity, you shouldn’t even be in Congress."

The Commission made recommendations and the President shelved the whole thing

Archduke Russell John wrote:This means bubkas. Show me where Ron Reagan in either 76 or 80 said he would be willing to compromise on raising taxes for spending cuts then you might have a comparison to make. If anything, the opposite is true like while running for reelection in '84 he specifically said he wouldn't raise taxes in his second term.

Until you can show Reagan said during a primary/general campaign speech he was willing to raise taxes, you are comparing apples to oranges.

rickyp wrote:steve

The Commission made recommendations and the President shelved the whole thing

.

If you are talking about Bowles Simpson, a budget based on it, was voted down...

Sassenach wrote:I think the point that Dan and Ricky are making about Reagan is that the policies he carried out in the 80s, which were seen as radically conservative at the time, would now be seen as pretty solidly centrist and would be unlikely to gain any traction among the Tea Party types who are currently ascendant in the Republican Party. It's not intended as an argument that Reagan was really a Democrat so much as an illustration of how far to the right the modern Republicans have drifted.

Of course, Reagan was a man of his time and were he President today he'd probably be enacting far more radical policies than he did in the 80s, but nevertheless I do think Dan and Ricky have a point even if they are overstating it.

rickyp wrote:Au contraire. It means, quite obviously, that none of them were willing to make a compromise. and all were willing to take a hard line publicly.

danivon wrote:I didn't address Reagan the Communicator because I thought we were talking about policy.

Specifically taxes. If it's just about who is a better figurehead, who gives better PR, then it's at best a superficial comparison.

As Sass says, I'm not saying Reagan was a Democrat, I'm saying that Presdient Reagan (as opposed, perhaps, to Candidate Reagan) did things that are becoming 'un-Republican'.

danivon wrote:Bah, Steve. You are behaving in exactly the way that you claim others do in regard to Obama, just for Reagan instead. I'm not trying to 'destroy his reputation', but I wish his fanboys would be more appreciative of the reality of Ronald Reagan.

He was not a moderate on all counts, but he was prepared to compromise.

Democratic Rep. William Clay of Missouri charged that Reagan was “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from Mein Kampf.” The Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad drew a panel depicting Reagan plotting a fascist putsch in a darkened Munich beer hall. Harry Stein (later a conservative convert) wrote in Esquire that the voters who supported Reagan were like the “good Germans” in “Hitler’s Germany.”

There was ample academic support for this theme. John Roth, a Holocaust scholar at Claremont College, wrote:

I could not help remembering how 40 years ago economic turmoil had conspired with Nazi nationalism and militarism—all intensified by Germany’s defeat in World War I—to send the world reeling into catastrophe. . . . It is not entirely mistaken to contemplate our postelection state with fear and trembling.

Eddie Williams, head of what the Washington Post described as “the respected black think tank, the Joint Center for Political Studies,” reacted to Reagan’s election thus: “When you consider that in the climate we’re in—rising violence, the Ku Klux Klan—it is exceedingly frightening.” (This was not far removed from Fidel Castro’s opinion about Reagan, offered right before the election: “We sometimes have the feeling that we are living in the time preceding the election of Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany.”) In the Nation, Alan Wolfe wrote that “the United States has embarked on a course so deeply reactionary, so negative and mean-spirited, so chauvinistic and self-deceptive that our times may soon rival the McCarthy era.”

As for the supposed sweetness and light between Reagan and Tip O’Neill, it was mostly blarney. The two had numerous tense phone calls and meetings. In private they called each other’s views “crap” on more than one occasion; as the budget talks in 1982 headed to a climax, Reagan told O’Neill, “you can get me to crap a pineapple, but you can’t get me to crap a cactus.” O’Neill publicly called Reagan “callous . . . a real Ebenezer Scrooge,” whose program was “for the selfish, the greedy, and the affluent.” In his diary, Reagan wrote: “Tip O’Neil [sic] is getting rough; saw him on TV telling the United Steelworkers U. that I am going to destroy the nation.” He also told his diary that “Tip is a true pol. He can really like you personally & be a friend while politically trying to beat your head in.” That was Reagan at his most charitable. He noted once that in a White House meeting where O’Neill “sounded off in a very partisan manner,” “I almost let go the controls but I didn’t,” and on another occasion he described one of O’Neill’s public claims as “the most vicious pack of lies I’ve ever seen.”

Reagan had in mind such O’Neill gems as his remarks in 1981 on ABC that Reagan “has no concern, no regard, no care for the little man in America. And I understand that. Because of his lifestyle, he never meets those people.” This was a mere warm-up for O’Neill’s blast at Reagan during the 1984 campaign:

The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.

Geraldine Ferraro, Mondale’s running mate, felt free to challenge Reagan’s religious bona fides: “The President walks around calling himself a good Christian, but I don’t for one minute believe it because the policies are so terribly unfair.” Jesse Jackson, who routinely referred to Reagan’s administration as a “repressive regime,” said, “Reagan is closer to Herod than he would be to the family of Jesus.”

Nor should we forget the Reagan-the-warmonger theme. Senator Alan Cranston said, “Reagan is a trigger-happy president [with a] simplistic and paranoid worldview leading us toward a nuclear collision that could end us all.” And Texas Democrat Henry Gonzalez said in 1986: “Nothing is going to change President Reagan. He wants war, he is getting war . . . and he is not going to leave office without having war against Nicaragua and a direct invasion.”

When NATO deployed medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe, millions of demonstrators not only filled the streets of Western capitals, but hundreds of thousands of Americans became passionate advocates of a so-called nuclear freeze, with nationwide campus teach-ins in 1982 and 1983. One of them was a Columbia undergraduate named Barack Obama, who wrote in 1983:

By organizing and educating the Columbia community, such activities lay the foundation for future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country. . . . The Reagan administration’s stalling at the Geneva talks on nuclear weapons has thus already caused severe tension and could ultimately bring about a dangerous rift between the United States and Western Europe.

Danivon wrote:He sometimes sold a vision of himself and his aims that was at variance with his actions, but because he was such a good salesman - a great communicator - he was able to do things he'd promised not to and still appear consistent. Good for him.

On comparisons to other presidents, you make a good point (if crassly) - although the current Democrat administration has also intervened in Libya and in Pakistan and that hasn't presented much of a problem for the incumbent in his primaries, so maybe you are a little off on some of it.

The intent is not to denigrate Reagan, it's to show that the present-day GOP are in danger of becoming far too ideologically entrenched. The Democrats are not immune, either, by the way.