More Reagan Than Reagan

Victor Davis Hanson has a great post at the NRO blog on his hope that "the present primary race does not keep descending into monotonous boasts of who is the more Reaganesque of the candidates."  As VDH points out, Reagan as president did make mistakes and there were some things that "he was sometimes just plain naive or wrong about."  Here is more:

George Bush’s Alito and Roberts appointments were far more conservative than either Reagan’s O’Connor or Kennedy. In a matter of a few years, Reagan’s disastrous 1986 blanket amnesty for illegal aliens changed the very fabric of the American southwest and was the source of much of the present financial and legal mess. Well apart from Iran-Contra, he was lax in going after the bombers of the Marine barracks in Lebanon and had utopian spasms about nuclear disarmament. As far as taxes and big government, he signed payroll and gas tax increases, and added a secretary of veterans’ affairs. He was not a budget balancer in the Ike mode. His earlier record as California governor — especially on abortion and taxes — was often flip-floppy. Haig, Regan, Deaver, MacFarlane, Poindexter, and others were not always models of White House unity or even, in some cases, probity. So we have reached the surreal when a present flip-flop is derided as something Ronald Reagan would never do.

One thing to point out would be that Reagan also nominated Antonin Scalia and unsucessfuly tried to nominate Robert Bork who, even with his adherence to legal positivsm, would have made a much better justice than Kennedy.  The fury that the Left laid upon Bork most definitely affected the Reagan Administration's tactics and unfortunately caused them to nominate a judge of a lesser caliber than what Reagan originally had in mind. 

On a larger point, I think we loose something important when in virtually every Republican debate thus far most, if not all of the candidates, seem to hold Reagan and everything he did in office as the standard of what it means to be a true conservative.  I think something is lost when we do that because, as VDH rightly points out, Reagan would have failed his own test.  Even with that said, this is not to diminish Reagan in the least because even with his flaws and failures, he was still one of the greatest presidents in American history.  I think Reagan probably would not have wanted himself to be the political standard for the Republican party; rather, he would have wanted the standard to be what he based his politics on:  the laws of nature and nature's God.