One Bush ended the Reagan Revolution; another hopes we forget it

May 6, 12:02 PMPhoenix Conservative ExaminerScott Martin

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Michael Devine, The Charlotte Law & Politics Examiner, has a good piece up about the Jeb Bush kerfuffle. As you may know, Jeb Bush made some comments recently that suggested that Republicans needed to stop being nostalgic about the past (ie, Ronald Reagan) and move forward.

This teed off many conservatives, who believe that our party's failures are the direct result of ignoring everything that Reagan stood for. I couldn't agree more. Yet, Bush has had his defenders the past couple days, who say that he meant no such thing. Mike Devine is having none of this talk, and rips that idea to pieces. You can (and should) read it here.

Jeb says of the 2008 campaign:

"I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia for the good old days in the messaging and, you know, it's great, but it doesn't draw people towards your cause."

What campaign was he watching? I can't think of more than a half-dozen people who call themselves Republicans who had less in common philosophically with The Gipper than John McCain did. But you know who one of those six is? Jeb's Dad, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan's Vice President. You may remember him as the man who single-handedly ended the Reagan Revolution after the American people read his lips, compared his words to his actions, and found him lacking.

Is Jeb Bush working public relations for his father? Does he hope that if he can shake the Grand Old Party's love affair with Ronaldus Magnus that the same people will forget that HW took the best starting point of a presidency since George Washington and still ended up giving it up to a young, horndog Democrat from Arkansas just four years later? 

The only time the McCain campaign "looked back" it was to show John McCain's courage as a POW in Vietnam. Certainly honorable and inspirational, but I wouldn't exactly call it "nostalgia for the good old days."

In fact, the only person who made a repeated point of looking back at the Reagan years and aspiring to return to that same sort of mindset was Barack Obama. It is Barack Obama who said the following:

I do think that for example the 1980 was different.  I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.  He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.  I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.  I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

It is Barack Obama who honors Reagan by changing up his quotes to fit today's circumstances. It is Obama who famously said that unlike Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton didn't transform the country in a fundamental way, and it was Obama who said that he would have a foreign policy like Ronald Reagan.

Fortunately for Barack Obama, and less so for our country, the American people don't much know what exactly Reagan did to rescue America from Jimmy Carter's lunacy. So a man who wants to do the exact opposite of what Reagan did gets elected for a job that only a Reaganite could properly do.

That's not the fault of conservatives. That's the fault of politicians like Jeb Bush who haven't bothered to illustrate conservatism themselves, to remind their constituents of what conservative ideas and ideals have meant to this nation, and instead run PR for the old man who betrayed those very ideals.