Ronald Wilson Reagan was 12 feet tall, shot laser beams from his eyes, and wiped out communism with the devastating charm of his smile alone.
Thus every conservative pundit pines for him, every right-wing voter waits for his reincarnation, every GOP debate is darkened by his shadow, and every Republican candidate tries desperately to be whatever legend has it he used to be. For Fred Thompson, trading in Reaganostalgia seems to be a key strategy — and his new PR team are to be commended for seeing that the theme is wound throughout the New York Times’s post-announcement profile.
It’s a good article in how it lays out Thompson’s minor points of heresy from a conservative perspective — he has drifted from the correct line at times on campaign finance, affirmative action, so-called “tort reform,” and, most alarmingly, abortion — even while suggesting that the real point of the Thompson candidacy is its vague appeal to conservatives’ sense of self-worth, inspiration, and electability. It’s performative conservatism, and that, not policy positioning, is the true essence of Reaganism.
Not everyone buys it:
Martin Anderson, a longtime associate and a biographer of Reagan, said he liked Mr. Thompson but was baffled by the comparisons to Reagan. When Reagan ran for the presidency, Mr. Anderson said, he laid out a clear agenda of what he intended to do, starting with systematic reductions in taxes.
“I don’t know where Thompson is on any of these things; I don’t know what he is going to do,” Mr. Anderson said. “Everyone says they are like Reagan. So far, the only way I’ve seen that Thompson is like Reagan is that he did some acting.”
Another analyst points out that by the time he made his successful 1980 run, Reagan was building off a 30-year relationship with the conservative movement. Thompson has nothing like that.
But then, the movement isn’t what it used to be. If it spent those 30 years looking forward to someone like Reagan, it has spent the last 20 looking back at him. There’s an air of desperation to the right’s Reaganostalgia, especially as it becomes, increasingly, a cocoon to shelter conservatives from their association with the past six and a half years of disastrous — for the country and for their movement — Bush government. One gets the sense that they’re a good deal more willing to suspend their disbelief and let a mediocrity like Thompson tell them he’s the Gipper made flesh again.
David Corn wonders if Thompson will “be able to pull off a Reagan revival as rightwingers like [Richard] Viguerie cry foul….” But Richard Viguerie cried foul over Reagan, too. He’s a professional foul-crier of the ultra-purist right. The point is, while it’s true that Thompson is no movement conservative, neither are his deviations from the standard right line so egregious that they can’t be overlooked. What matters to conservatives, and what always mattered about Reagan, is performativity. It isn’t that they don’t care about policy — they have an entire network of think-tanks and communications outfits and so on to enforce their policy aims. But when it comes to unifying the party, what they really seem to want is an actor.
Even if it’s an actor acting the part of another actor.
Something to say?
