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January 19, 2008

Frank Rich: Ronald Reagan Is Still Dead

Filed under: Commentary — Volt @ 11:20 pm

 

Frank Rich, The New York Times, January 20, 2008

Contemplating the Clinton-Obama racial war, some Republicans were so excited you’d have thought Ronald Reagan had risen from the dead to slap around a welfare deadbeat.

Never mind that the G.O.P. is running on empty, with no ideas beyond the incessant repetition of Reagan’s name. A battle over race-and-gender identity politics among the Democrats, with its acrid scent from the 1960s, might be just the spark for a Republican comeback. (As long as the G.O.P.’s own identity politics, over religion, don’t flare up.)

Alas, these hopes faded on Tuesday night. First, the debating Democrats declared a truce, however fragile, in their racial brawl. Then Republicans in Michigan reconstituted their party’s election-year chaos by temporarily revivifying yet another candidate, Mitt Romney, who had been left for dead.

The playing of the race card by Hillary Clinton’s surrogates to diminish Barack Obama was sinister. But the Clintons are hardly bigots, and the Democratic candidates all have a history of fighting strenuously for inclusiveness. By contrast, the Romney victory in Michigan is another reminder of how Republicans aren’t even playing in the same multiracial American sandbox.

The conservatives who hyperventilated about the Democrats’ explosion of identity politics seemed to forget that Mr. Romney also dragged Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. into this campaign — claiming that he “saw” his father, a civil-rights minded governor of Michigan, march with King in the 1960s. The point of Mitt Romney’s invocation of the race card was to inoculate himself against legitimate charges of racial insensitivity; he had never spoken out about his own church’s discrimination against blacks, which didn’t end until 1978. Instead, the tactic ended up backfiring. Late last month The Boston Phoenix exposed this touching anecdote as a fraud. George Romney and King never marched together.

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3 Comments

  1. All of the GOP candidates already do remind me of old Ronnie — the way he is now, lifeless and brain dead.

    Among independents and Republicans I’ve talked to, the only GOP candidates who stir any interest is Ron Paul and, to a much lesser extent, Mike Huckabee, but that was before Huckleberry wanted to rewrite the Constitution according to the wishes of his ‘living God.’

    Comment by RS Janes — January 20, 2008 @ 7:25 am

  2. What if Mitt Romney does win not only the nomination, but the election as well? Would Americans opt to move to Canada? I heard Canada was ramping up its immigration centers in expectation of another wave of “Blue Staters” in the event of a Republican victory: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/index.asp
    In the independent film “Blue State,” the protagonist does exactly that. He decides to flee the United States after another republican victory in 2004, due to strong liberal ideals: http://www.bluestate.com

    Comment by NinaBr — January 22, 2008 @ 7:40 am

  3. Nobody is going to see this but,meh…….

    http://www.nytimes.com/learning/aol/onthisday/991224onthisday_big.html

    Look for this to be a common theme come ’09.
    Pardons anyone?

    Comment by Rainlander — January 23, 2008 @ 2:14 am

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