Posted on 05/04/2008 5:37:40 PM PDT by Dawnsblood
WILL: I was at the Truman library in Independence, Mo., last week, and was looking at a black-and-white photograph of Harry Truman giving a speech in a stadium in Los Angeles during the '48 campaign. Seated next to the lectern, right next to Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, is a man who had introduced Truman, and it was a 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. That was probably the last time he voted for a Democrat. And so Sean's right, he was the first Reagan Democrat, but what really made Reagan Democrats were Democratic policies. One of the worst things that ever happened to American education but one of the best things that happened to American conservatism was busing of schoolchildren for racial balance. This just crystallized the sense of a lot of working-class Americans [that] policies were imposed on them by people who had no intention of ever being exposed to them themselves. All these people sending their kids to private schools were telling others which public school their kid should go to.
WILENTZ: To add to that, I would say that what made it fiercer and more passionate was the ways in which the liberal Democrats interpreted the resistance to their policies, which was always to blame the people who were resisting for being narrow-minded or racist, not up to their own enlightened idea of the way Americans ought to be. There was a contempt, there was an elitism that was not a part of the Democratic Party of Harry Truman that came into play in the aftermath of the black-power movement and Vietnam. It's not to say there wasn't racism in America or small-minded people. But you don't go about winning people's votes by saying, "You're a small-minded racist."
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
50 years, and the left still hasn't leaned the lesson.
Rethink? Wouldn’t they need to think first?
50 years, and the left still hasn't leaned the lesson.
Why should they have to? Despite their foolishness and their destructive polices, their guaranteed share of the vote has steadily climbed over the years. Sad, but true.
Next up ...GW wasnt really dumb
Those who generally stay quiet since they years past despised and mocked him and today would rather not remember their own words.
Those on the left who like Obama want to wrap their arms around the “positive concept” of Reagan even though they in all reality stand in complete opposition to everything this man believed in and did.
Sometimes I worry that part of Reagan’s legacy is that “deficits don’t matter”, famously ascribed to Cheney. This is unfair to Reagan, who raised taxes to try to bring balance back to the budget, and it is a betrayal of one of the core values of conservatism.
Fighter pilot, Harvard MBA (with a good GPA), governor of Texas, successful owner of baseball team. Successful in the oil industry.
You have got to love the “unsolicited qualifiers” on every statement about Bush when reading on him in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush
Bottom line: The goal within the media and left has always been to paint him as an idiot. Take out all the hearsay, unsolicited qualifiers, baseless rumors...... and what you end up with is a guy that was a fighter pilot, has an MBA from Harvard where he did good, speaks Spanish well, was successful in oil and as a baseball team owner, and did superb as governor of Texas. We’ll see how he goes down as President. I have a suspicious feeling this be be another case of deja vu as with Reagan; another President disliked by the far left, the media, and many who see themselves as our enemies abroad.
I guess only in America an “idiot” like this can make it that far. /sarc
“Those on the left who like Obama want to wrap their arms around the “positive concept” of Reagan even though they in all reality stand in complete opposition to everything this man believed in and did.”
I think that as they got older and moved up into the higher income brackets, the wisdom of reducing the top tax bracket from 70% to 28% has become clear to them.
Bull crap. If they rethought Reagan, they’d become Republicans. That is what I did...a former left wing nut. I learned how bankrupt the leftist ideology leaves human kind, and I became a CONSERVATIVE.
Glad I did, too.
I knew this liberal coudn't keep it up for long. The deregulation he speaks of was initiated under that liberal paragon of virtue, Jimmuh Cahtuh. Not Reagan.
Well yes but recall that nobody paid 70% unless they had a fool for an accountant. Those were the days of the fabled "tax shelters," labyrinthine regulations that allowed wealthy taxpayers to "shelter" their income by investing or parking their money in favored safe havens.
When the rates dropped to realistic levels part of the deal was that the bulk of those shelters expired. Taken as a whole it was a greatly beneficial reform.
“Well yes but recall that nobody paid 70% unless they had a fool for an accountant.”
I think that’s true for the very rich, but for someone making 100k to 200k a year, the tax reduction was a real boon.
RR wasn’t the only Democrat to abandon the Party after Truman. My parents and grandparents were supporters of FDR and even voted for Harry, but Adlai was too much. The family voted for Ike and has never looked back.
BTTT!
And, to a lesser extent, they do the same thing with Truman.
Harry would not like what his party has become.
I couldn’t care less what “the left” thinks. In fact, if I ever understand the diseased mind of a liberal, just shoot me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.