American Way: Republicans tell Barack Obama 'You’re no Ronald Reagan' – Telegraph Blogs

I don't want to be uncivil, nor do I wish to polarize.  The thing I most hope for is a national leader willing to...my GOD I can hardly type the words...a national leader willing to speak his or her mind in a clear, civil way.  I wish for that courage and frankness in our national political dialogue.  Instead, I feel like I'm stuck in a constant cycle of shrunken sound bytes and partial quotes used as stand-alone comments rather than words spoken as part of of a larger statement.

All sides do it.  Hell, I know I do it myself when I fail to catch it.  The thing is, I really hate it when a member of one party invokes the name of a popular former President from the opposing party (usually after getting snookered in the mid-term elections).  This is especially true when the person invoked had actually been dismissed out of hand by the politician who hopes to raise his own poll numbers by quoting a popular former President and quoting him.

So, it is nothing new to find President Obama bringing to mind Ronald Reagan as we near the 100th anniversary of the Gipper's birth.  In fact, it makes sense:  the President wants to pull off politically just what Reagan did once when, after a shellacking in the 1982 midterms, he managed personally to win by a landslide and his party managed to win the midterms.

I know that I will bring upon myself a volley of slings and arrows, but I do hope that those of you who have not been to the Reagan library will hold your arrows at least until you visit.  It was the most powerful moment of my life (at least in the realms of politics, history, etc.), when I visited the newly opened Library and  found myself standing before a REAL section of the wall the Soviets built to keep people from voting with their feet and going to the West.  We wound our way to the massive section of chipped and graffiti - covered Wall. which had been a symbol as well as an actual  physical barrier to freedom and peace.  I felt that we had seen so many appeasers, so many that believed the Cold War would never end.  And then a light came on above the wall -eight or ten feet of the Berlin wall itself - and with it came the voice of President Reagan saying, "Mr Gorbachev, Tear Down this wall!"

So, in me, this article from the Telegraph aligned pretty tidily with my own feelings.  I had enormous respect for President Reagan, but as it clearly would need to be in any viable universe, my favorite Republican President was also the least electable, most liberal Republican President - a roiling ball of contradictions who both started a war and won the Nobel Peace Prize for virtually insisting that Russia and Japan stop their warfare.  And, if you haven't guessed Theodore Roosevelt by now, there it is.  I am most like the man that the party forced to accept the nomination for Vice President even after he declined and said he had no interest.  After all, letting such a reformer as TR hold the office of Governor of New York?  Well, that was just too powerful and important a role for a 'reformer'. 

So, in this particular instance, with my memory of the Berlin Wall and the wonderful and powerful words of President Reagan permanently in my ears, along with the clear and certain knowledge that neither Party would want me, and therefore my opinions are only to be found here, as I blog to my faithful 25,000 or so readers, or perhaps by the neighbors in the apartment next door who overhear when I berate the TV for not getting it quite right.  I'm harmless.

 

American Way: Republicans tell Barack Obama 'You’re no Ronald Reagan' – Telegraph Blogs