The GOP: Too extreme for Reagan?

Jeb Bush caused a stir by saying that neither Ronald Reagan nor his father would have been nominated as president by today's GOP.

Jeb Bush is “on a quest to push his party away from the political extreme,” said Aaron Blake in The Washington Post. The former Florida governor, who is son and brother to the 41st and 43rd presidents, respectively, caused a stir last week by saying that today’s GOP has moved so far to the right that neither Ronald Reagan nor his father could be nominated as president. Both Reagan and Bush Sr., he said, were able to solve the nation’s problems by compromising and “finding some degree of common ground” with Democrats in Congress. But today’s Republican Party, he said, has an “orthodoxy” that prevents any political deals on budgets, taxes, or any other issue. Bush was promptly attacked for his apostasy by champions of conservative orthodoxy, such as anti-tax campaigner Grover Norquist, said former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett in The Fiscal Times. Norquist called Bush’s comments “foolish” and “bizarre.” But Jeb is right about Reagan. After he passed a major tax cut and the federal budget deficit ballooned, Reagan “supported tax increases and signed 11 of them into law.” Reagan also granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants. If Reagan were seeking the Republican nomination today, that record would get him “expelled for treason.”

That’s “revisionist history,” said Jon Healey in the Los Angeles Times. Reagan was no eager-to-please moderate, but a fiercely partisan conservative whose “political mission was to push the GOP to the right.” He ultimately succeeded in that mission, but in the 1980s, he had to compromise with liberals on taxes, spending, and other issues in order to govern. Today, with conservatives firmly established, he’d undoubtedly run as “the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.” Besides, the evidence contradicts the claim that the GOP has become “too rigid and ideological for even the Gipper,” said Jonah Goldberg, also in the Los Angeles Times. Look at the “crazy right-wingers” we’ve nominated for president recently—the centrist maverick McCain in 2008 and, now, the “Massachusetts moderate” Mitt Romney. “Any rational person would conclude that Reagan couldn’t get elected today because the party has become too liberal.”

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