The Republican Presidents and the Tea Party

Newsweek has a piece gloating that the Tea Party has moved the Republicans so far to the right that even Reagan would not be acceptable today. It gives a rundown of the last five Republican presidents and scores them on behalf of conservatives. The point of the piece is to comfort liberals that the Republicans will not regain power because they have moved too far to the right. Accordingly, the list deserves a closer look.

The first president on the list is Richard Nixon. There is no question that he was too liberal to be a modern Republicans. He was one of the most liberal men to hold that office and possibly the most liberal president of the last 50 years (possible contenders - LBJ and Obama). The country had a brief flirtation with hard-core liberalism in the 1960s and recoiled.

The next on the list is Gerald Ford, out country's only unelected president. He was defeated in his only national election. A big factor in his defeat was Reagan. While Ford won the 1976 primary, Reagan attracted large and passionate support. There is little question that modern Republicans would reject him. If he hadn't been a (sort-of) incumbent he would never have made it on the ticket in the first place.

I'm going to skip to George H. W. Bush. He got the VP slot on Reagan's ticket by placing second to Reagan in the primaries. In 1988, he won the presidency as Reagan's successor. While he had been skeptical of Reagonomics in 1980, he claimed that he had seen the light while Reagan's VP. While president, he reneged on his promises and raised taxes. He also increased spending, cut the military, and expanded government supervision into such things as how much water a toilet could use to flush. He supported the ADA and legislation on sulfur-dioxide (acid rain). He almost passed a sweeping health care initiative similar to what Obama proposed during the 2008 campaign. In addition to all of this, he was also a one-term president. Yes, Reagan Republicans would reject him but most of the country rejected him in 1992.

Reagan Republicans never liked George W. Bush and he never liked them. His only take from the Reagan years was cutting taxes. Otherwise, many of the things that today's conservatives hate about the Obama administration began with the Bush administration. Given Bush's poor performance rating when he left office, it is hard to see what Republicans would gain by embracing him.

That leaves the sainted Reagan. Would he be acceptable to today's Republicans? Almost certainly he would. They had not deserted him by the end of his term. True, he did not cut the size of government or the deficit, but conservatives are willing to cut him some slack for these. He did slow the growth of government. The size of the Federal Register increased less during the Reagan administration than any other time in the last fifty years. Granted Reagan sponsored an amnesty program for illegal immigrants and  most conservatives are against today. The reason conservatives are against it today is because Reagan tried it and it did not work (not because they hate immigrants in general as Newsweek claims). Given the total failure of Reagan's amnesty program, I doubt that he would support it again.

So, of the last five Republican presidents, only one would be acceptable to today's conservatives. Before we conclude that this makes them hopelessly polarized, let's take a quick look at the Democrats.

While Nixon was too liberal to be a Republican today, Kennedy was too conservative to be a Democrat. He was pro-defense and anti-communist. He cut taxes. His support for civil rights legislation was, at best, lukewarm. He even allowed the FBI to investigate Martin Luther King jr and other civil rights leaders.

Socially LBJ is acceptable to today's liberals/progressives but they never talk about him because of Viet Nam.

Carter is popular now because of his years as an anti-Bush spokesman but no one seeks to bring back the glory days of the carter administration. The biggest insult than many Republicans can heap on Obama is to compare his foreign policy to Carter's.

Clinton was the Democrat's only two-term president since FDR (Truman served most of FDR's 4th term and one of his own). You would think that the Democrats would love him. In fact, many felt betrayed during his presidency. He was a moderate and adopted many Republican issues as his own. His wife, Hillary, had to run to his left when she ran as president. The fact that she lost shows that Bill Clinton is not held in the same esteem in his party that Reagan is held by the Republicans.

In 2008, Democrats embraced Obama because they recognized a true liberal. He still won a convincing victory. Republicans hope to do the same thing. Obama's victory shows that a candidate can be well out of the center and still win an election.