WWRD

After watching Sarah Palin give her speech at the Republican convention in 2008, I turned to my wife and said, “I felt like I was watching Ronald Reagan in high heels.”  In the Outlook section of the Washington Post (March 7, 2010) Steven Hayward wrote an article, Would Reagan Vote for Sarah Palin?  Hayward wasn’t really trying to answer this question, but was telling those trying to make themselves in Reagan’s image what this man was really about and how he became the leader we all remember.  He reminds us that Reagan voted four times for FDR, the ultimate populist and promoter of big government.  He ends by warning would-be Reagan heirs, “To pull it off, one thing above all is required: Do your homework. Reagan did his.”

After reading Barry Goldwater’s The Conscience of a Conservative in 1960, I finally understood what my father had been trying to explain to me.  FDR’s liberalism, big government, and high taxes were the wrong fork in the road.  Later I realized that Goldwater was both a Conservative and a Libertarian.  (If you wonder where you stand on the political spectrum, take The World’s Smallest Political Quiz.)

Hayward reminds us that Reagan described conservatism in populist term.  In October of 1964 in a speech, A Time for Choosing (worth reading again, I did), supporting Goldwater’s candidacy for President, Reagan warned, "This is the issue of this election, whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that an intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."

As a populist Reagan would have admired the Tea Party movement.  Hayward says, “Reagan would have seen them as reviving the embers of what he called the prairie fire of populist resistance against centralized big government -- resistance that helped touch off the tax revolt of the 1970s. That movement was often dismissed as a tantrum, but when The Washington Post called California's 1978 anti-tax Proposition 13 a skirmish, Reagan replied that if so, then the Chicago fire was a backyard barbecue.”

Of course there is no answer to Hayward’s question on the vote, or the acronym WWRD, What Would Reagan Do?  But he concludes with the thought, “Wittingly or not, Palin hit the nail on the head in her keynote address at the Tea Party Convention last month when she said, Let us not get bogged down in the small squabbles; let us get caught up in the big ideas. To do so would be a fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan.  Hayward writes, “Meaningful limits on the size of government is one such idea, and it offers a substantive opening for Palin and other would-be heirs to Reagan.”   Makes sense to me.