“The political world as a whole” has awakened to “the greatness in Reagan,” said Byron York in WashingtonExaminer.com. As we approach the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Americans live in a nation and a world transformed by his “deep belief in liberty, free enterprise, and American exceptionalism.” Every potential GOP 2012 presidential candidate claims to be a “Reagan Republican,” and in a real sense they all are: Thirty years ago, he wrenched the party away from the “country club” moderates who sneered at true conservatives. Among Reagan’s unabashed admirers is a certain “Ivy League lawyer from Hawaii,” said Michael Scherer in Time. President Obama has studied Reagan’s presidency as a model of transformational leadership and political evolution; like Reagan, he has responded to a recession and a plunge in the polls with a strategic move to the middle.
The fond tributes to the Gipper are justified, said Ryan L. Cole in The American Spectator. But I take offense at seeing the Reagan legacy “appropriated” by the wrong people—like the current Democratic president. Liberals are suddenly keen to have us forget that they once heaped “histrionic levels of disgust” on Reagan, denigrating him as an “amiable dunce” fixated on free markets and anti-communism. We can’t let Democrats now smooth out Reagan’s “prickly partisan edges” in an effort to turn him into a “warm and cuddly” centrist. Sure, he made some compromises with the opposition; what president hasn’t? But “his triumphs were caused by his conservatism, not in spite of it.”
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