You can point out Palin’s folly all you want, it won’t change a thing by trying to say that attacking Palin is identical to attacking Reagan.
FioRINO would not be endorsed by Reagan in any sense. He was smart, owned up to his mistakes and adapted. He would not attack any RINO in particular but would define what the RINO phenomemon is and attack it generally. He would then withhold any endorsements of RINOs or packaged faux conservatives.
Palin on the other hand has not and cannot own up to her mistake because she has entered into personal territory, once a personal mistake is made it is not possible to backtrack, until after the election outcome, just as Gingrich apologized for his dumb endorsement of Scozzafava AFTER the election when it no longer mattered.
And yes my countering counterfactuals to the lame counterfactuals of the Palinistas here is apropro because Reaganites always eschewed the desperate hypotheticals posed by morons of the ‘gotcha’ games.
We don’t know what Reagan would have thought about Fiorino, and we must not set up Reagan as this paladin of conservatism, immune from all liberal influence. After all, his wife and children are liberals. On the issue of abortion, Reagan gave less than he received from the Pro-life party. he had to consider than many of the people in his administration gave only lip service to the cause or were themselves pro-choice. The Party was and remains divided on the issue.