Ronald Reagan is dead. He has been for nearly four years. Then again, Princess Diana has been dead for far longer than that, and many in the media still haven't gotten the message.
It may be snide and petty to bring up the dead messiah of the Republican Party, particularly this week, when the tears for patron saint William Buckley Jr. are still fresh. Still, I can't help but hope that, with the Republican nomination all but secured, we are emerging from the long dark night of Reagan-worship.
I don't say this to insult Reagan's memory, or minimize his accomplishments. I did not personally experience his presidency and I don't claim to be able to pick it apart. However, I think the problem for the right is deeper and more worrisome than whether Reagan was wise in increasing the deficit or whether he deployed the cynical Southern Strategy during his campaigns almost 30 years ago.
For me, the issue is that this all happened almost 30 years ago. In an election in which youth voters are turning out in higher numbers than ever before, it would behoove the Republicans to realize that the 18 to 24 year old slice of the electorate is either too young to remember life under Reagan or was not even born when he left office. That slice is going to get bigger as the years wear on, and all the mythologizing in the world of the 40th president isn't going to give young voters the same nostalgia and affection that their parents and grandparents possess.
And what powerful affection it is! The Republican candidates, over the course of their 20-odd debates, invoked Reagan's name so often that it gave me the impression they all wanted to gay-marry him. Over the course of the debates, Romney mentioned him 28 times, McCain 21 times, Huckabee 15 times and Giuliani an astonishing 44 times.
Thankfully, that's all water under the bridge now, but it's indicative of a more serious problem with the Republican Party, both in image and substance. A refusal to reach out to anyone besides that 20 percent of a polling sample that will support President Bush no matter what he does is not a sustainable strategy. At various points, the Republican front-runners chose not to attend the youth-oriented MTV-Myspace debate, the debate at historically black Morgan State University or the NAACP convention. It sends a message, especially because this is a party whose claim to diversity is that one of the middle-aged white men standing behind a podium isn't actually Protestant.
To their credit, all except the demagogic Tom Tancredo participated in the Univision debate; however, their more moderate rhetoric on immigration in front of Hispanic audiences only served to remind the nation (for better or worse) of their games of illegal immigrant-baiting one-upmanship in previous debates. (Curiously, in their rabid condemnations of amnesty, they failed to mention that their hero signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and that he wrote in a signing statement, "The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans.")
If Republicans want to save themselves from being forever the backwards-looking party, they're going to need some work. When a candidate and a party show opposition to gay rights, an unwillingness to confront global warming or even a reluctance to answer questions submitted via YouTube, it sends out a message to voters. It says, "We are behind the times, and we're going to stay there until you drag us kicking and screaming into the present." But I suppose that's why they're called conservatives. Now the question is whether or not it's possible to recreate the glory days of the Reagan coalition - fiscal conservatives, foreign policy hawks and values voters - while still living in the 21st century.
A part of me understands why Republican leaders are desperately clinging to the Great Communicator, especially when the party is lacking in vision, and in such disarray that it reminds one of the Democrats. By all accounts, Ronald Reagan made people feel optimistic. He made them feel good about being Americans again during a period fraught with "national malaise." (Incidentally, there's a current candidate across the aisle that has been accused of having the same qualities.) But he's dead, and continually positing the "What Would Reagan Do?" credo isn't going to bring him back. In fact, it will only hurt the Republican Party in the long run. So when John McCain endlessly boasts of being a foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution, he should try to imagine if the candidates in his first election spent so much time praising a long-dead Calvin Coolidge that they ignored what was happening in front of them.
Sarah Rosenthal '11 supports GPRR: Gay Polygamy for Ronald Reagan.
