WSJ Columnist: If Americans only knew Reagan, we'd all be Republicans and live happily ever after

[BurtWorm]

Never mind that Bushism was Reaganism unfettered by a Democratic Congress and the nation's economic difficulties can be traced directly back to all-out Republican control of the government and media. All we need now is a sunny old simpleton to sugar coat crass capitalism and it will be like morning in America again.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123621098187034487.html







Has Obama Buried Reagan?
The GOP is faltering in its defense of Republican ideals.


By DANIEL HENNINGER

...

If the Democrats are willing to bet the entire U.S. economy on a 1931 theory known as the Keynesian multiplier, surely Republicans can excavate and relearn the core idea handed down to them by Ronald Reagan. That idea was known as economic growth.

Freed to choose between these two competing ideas, I'm guessing many voters would go for growth. All that's needed is just one Republican who can explain this idea halfway as well as Ronald Reagan.

...

Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many feeling undone. There isn't much in his plan to stir the national soul. It's about "sacrifice" now so that we can live for a future of small electric cars and windmills. This may move the Democratic Party's faith communities, but it cannot revive a great nation. If the Democrats want to embrace market failure as a basis for their ideology, let them have it. As politics, it's a downer.

What Ronald Reagan knew and they don't is that what moves a nation is the vital, teeming life of the private economy -- work, ideas, innovation, the excitement of production, getting bigger. Growth. In the past this world was depicted as blast furnaces and factory chimneys. Today the economy's sinews are harder to see, but they exist in tens of thousands of small-cap, mid-cap and fat-cap companies.

...

What Rush Limbaugh was trying to tell that conservative audience in so many words was, Don't be embarrassed. Don't be embarrassed about embracing the world of free markets, competition, entrepreneurship and profit. If you don't know how to talk about it, reread the apostles and evangelists of private economic growth -- Ronald Reagan's "A Life in Letters," Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose," Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson."

Politics, it has been recently demonstrated, is about ideas and language. The conservative movement is not at a loss for proven ideas, and in the U.S. the most powerful of these -- running in an upward line since the Industrial Revolution -- is the idea of private economic growth. The Democrats don't want the private economy anymore and conservatives have forgotten how to talk about it. Democrats are betting their opponents will forget even where Ronald Reagan is buried. They should be so lucky.

[NavyDavy]

1. what did you expect from a repuke rag like the WSJ

[infidel dog]

12. Honestly, I expect just the sort of drivel this Henninger spews. What a f***ing jerk-off.

[WCGreen]

2. And the Ronnies Raiders, the rich folks who turned a relatively

egalitarian society into Wild West economy that owes more to the robber barrons of ealry 20th century than anything our fore fathers, well except for Alexander Hamilton, could have imagined, had all the answers now didn't they...

[fascisthunter]

3. I Know Reagan Enough to Know He was a Fascist

a prick who catered to the wealthy elite who could give two shits about the majority in this nation.

[Cary]

8. Oh come on!

You didn't just love it when he donned that Rambo outfit, jumped the Berlin Wall, attacked the Soviet Union, and single-handedly crashed the Soviet government?

[Zhade]

32. LOL

NT!

[Cary]

4. Oy

"All that's needed is just one Republican who can explain this idea halfway as well as Ronald Reagan."

Right. Like we really need someone to come along, yet again, telling us that cutting taxes for the rich will generate more tax revenue.

"Beyond the stock market, there is a reason why, despite much goodwill toward his presidency, the Obama response to the faltering economy has left many feeling undone."

Of course there is. "Conservatives" are undone. The fact that they "feel" that way is only evidence that they have some tenuous grasp of reality.

[BurtWorm]

6. You know this jerk thinks that only Rush is doing anything like explaining Reaganism

half as well as Reagan. I wonder if he thinks Rush should run against Obama in 2012.

[Ernesto]

5. "Take down this myth"

[Solly Mack]

7. Pull!

I slay me

[serrano2008]

9. Funny...he forgot to mention Reagan's economic stimulus or his tax increases.

Oops, I'm sure they left those out by mistake.

[ShortnFiery]

22. OR that Saint Ronnie's redistribution of wealth to the ultra-rich, TRIPLED our national debt.

Ooopsie! :eyes:

[Xolodno]

27. And....

He forgot how quickly Reagan was always ready to slap trade protections the minute he thought another country wasn't playing fair and then force them to come to his terms....such as when he through a 100% tarrif on Japanese cars.

Oh and he forgot that despite his "bravado"...he was willing to negotiate with "evil empires".

Reagan's largest mistake? Having G.H. Bush as his V.P. The guy was probably sitting there the whole time throwing a fit that this RINO, salivating at the chance he could take control once his term was up.

[Politicalboi]

35. Once his term was up

I think Bush had Hinkley try and kill Reagan but it failed. Bush is good at having people killed, but that time it didn't happen.

[Johonny]

28. or Reagans "growth" was lower than Carters

the Banks failed, the country then went into a big recession... it's almost like we are reliving history.

[Lasher]

10. George W Bush was no Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan was no Ronald Reagan either.



http://newsbyus.com/more.php?id=10960_0_1_0_M

"Mr. Carter is acting as if he hasn't been in charge for the past three and a half years; as if someone else was responsible for the largest deficit in American history." - Ronald Reagan, nationally televised campaign speech, October 24, 1980. (Federal deficits totaled $252 billion under Mr. Carter. By the end of Mr. Reagan's presidency, federal deficits would total over 1.4 trillion.)

http://www.geocities.com/thereaganyears/index.htm

[guitar man]

11. Has Obama Buried Reagan?

We can only hope. Fuck Reagan, the SOB's economic policies made me homeless. :grr:

[JHB]

13. Reagan buried himself...

...but what the New Deal built was so robust that his acolytes have been able skip from one sector to the next, undermining the supports while keeping the facade all spiffy, in their quest for "More Loot For ME!".

Now the facades are falling, and this dope thinks that if they just find someone who can make people forget that they've seen The Emperor's Big Fat Ass Hanging Out, we can go back to wearing clothes of the finest cloth, from the finest thread.

[damntexdem]

14. Well, if all Americans had Alzheimers, that might be true.

And after all, knowing Reagan wasn't the problem -- it was the long-term nation-destroying power of his political ideology that was the problem.

[RaleighNCDUer]

15. If the economy's sinews are harder to see today, it's because the

factories and chimneys are in CHINA. There can be NO industrial economy without an industrial base, and we have sent that overseas.

A 'service economy' cannot sustain itself - it simply does not employ enough people at mid-levels of income.

Talking about economic growth without an industrial base is like talking about farming without topsoil.

[indepat]

16. 'pukey hokum

:P

[Ikonoklast]

17. A Sad Epistle From One Of The Last True Believers Of A Failed Religion.

The only thing that Friedman economics and his followers accomplished was using the capitalist system as the cover for the largest theft of wealth this world has ever seen from the working class to the wealthy.

St. Ronnie the Dim was nothing more than a useful tool of the ruling class, an amiable dunce.

[geardaddy]

18. WSJ

Rightwing "Re-:puke:" rag.

[anonymous171]

19. Ronald Reagan was a tool of the elite and a class warrior.

If Americans knew the truth about him instead of the mythology established by the RW media, they would all be democrats.

[daa]

20. This guy is an idiot

he talks about the market tanking because of Obama, totally ignoring what happened to the market under Chimpy. Look, 75% of the national debt of this country was wrung up by Reagan, Bush and Bush, 3 dumb asses that spent like drunken sailors, using someone else's credit card.
And now they whine about "the children" will have to pay it back. The thing about these republicans is watch what they do not what they say.

[omega minimo]

21. Alex Keaton writes for the WSJ?

[Vinca]

23. Yep, good old Reagan trickle-down economics.

It took decades, but it finally reached us. Too bad it isn't money I feel swirling around my feet.:hurts:

[PM Martin]

24. If everyone knew the real Reagan.

there would be far fewer Republicans in the world.

[Lasher]

39. That is exactly why I go ballistic when I get emails worshiping the mythical Saint Ronnie of Reagan

These people are stooges for the wealthy elite, helping them pretend the meaning of life is tax cuts for the wealthiest 10%.

[Blue_Tires]

25. once again the WSJ takes a major piss...

[southasiawatch]

26. what we need

is zombie-reagan.

[Deja Q]

30. Yes. Goes great in soups. Just like powdered garlic.

[old mark]

29. "Know Reagan, Know Peace..." Was the Journal always this

stupid?
I kind of remember them being respected, but maybe I was hallucinating that year.....


mark:crazy:

[Zhade]

31. That fucking monster? Please.

NT!

[SoCalDem]

33. Maybe if GWB had not embargoed St. Ronnie's official papers on Jan 20, 2001,

we'd "know" him better..:evilgrin:

It's insanity.. a president whose term ended on Jan 20, 1989..TWENTY YEARS AGO...and all we have seen of his "papers" are the love-poems he wrote Nancy, and the lame books , lovingly written ABOUT him.. Is it any wonder the public does not yet "know the real Reagan"..
Righties better watch what they wish for.. Someday, we MAY know A LOT about him..

[Canuckistanian]

34. I'm reminded of a scene in "Back to the Future"

Where the girl asks McFly who the president is in the future, he replies "Ronald Reagan".

Then the girl says "The actor? Then who's the vice-president? Jerry Lewis?"

[Politicalboi]

37. You better rewatch the movie

It was the professor Jim from Taxi that said that to him. I don't know the man's name.

[Canuckistanian]

38. Oh, you're right

It was "Doc", played by Christopher Lloyd.

[muriel_volestrangler]

36. Shorter Henninger: Rescuing the economy makes baby Reagan cry (nt)