I suppose I’m getting to be pretty decent at this stuff, as Bill and I ran over the usual 10 minutes a guest gets. I’m a little heartbroken that he had to skip the Rush Morning Update on my account, but we’ll all make it through regardless.
Made a list of about seven talking points to go over but we ended up doing two or three. I knew we’d talk about the First District Congressional race and how negative it’s become. While we briefly touched on the low-key campaign Wayne has had as he watches his two main opponents beat on each other, lately I have noticed the Gilchrest campaign finally getting into the act as far as negativity goes. In a radio spot I’ve heard a few times lately the claim is that both Harris and Pipkin “vote with O’Malley 85% of the time.”
That may be true, but it’s for the same reason that the majority of legislative votes in Maryland seem to be unanimous or almost so – there are things that the General Assembly has to do in order to keep counties running. Governor O’Malley, just as Governor Ehrlich did before him, signs dozens of bills after the session that deal with small matters like this. In turn this ratchets up the percentage of time that Harris and Pipkin vote “with” O’Malley. I’m sure the case can be made that they voted with Governor Ehrlich a vast percentage of the time too, but that doesn’t sound nearly as bad to a Republican.
The other key talking point I got into was the GOP Presidential field. It’s hard to believe that for 20 years we have dealt with a legacy on our side, the sometimes larger-than-life presidency of Ronald Wilson Reagan. Truly they broke the mold with him, and we may never again see a Republican president carry 49 states, including Maryland. It was impossible to steal or create enough votes in Baltimore to overcome the love and respect people in this state and throughout the nation expressed at the ballot box for this man in 1984. (And yes, having an opponent who vowed to raise taxes didn’t hurt either.)
It got me to thinking after the show was over, hence this extended post. When John Kennedy was elected in 1960, it was in the same timeframe to Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 that we in 2008 have to Reagan’s initial 1980 election. But in Kennedy the nation saw his youth and optimism, plus he had the attitude that while things in America certainly were good, they could be even better. He didn’t really go back to reflecting on the impact that a well-liked, multi-term President of his party had on the nation when he took office in troubled times; rather JFK looked at what could be.
Of course, I wasn’t yet born when Kennedy was shot so I have no point of reference to him. But I do have a point of reference in Ronald Reagan, who was the first President I ever voted for. None of this year’s GOP field is truly comparable to Reagan, nor could they be since we’re now going on memories of his life and term of office and we tend to forget the bad things. In ideological terms, perhaps the two candidates closest to Reagan in the 2008 race were Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter, but they’re both early casualties.
In the two decades since Reagan left office, we’ve gone through two Bushes and a Clinton, with the possibility of another Clinton waiting in the wings. While the ideals of smaller government enjoyed a brief reprise in the mid-1990’s, we saw that slowly erode over time much as a jagged rock becomes rounded with exposure to the elements. So it is with Reaganism until we get what we have today.
It’s why I call myself a “reinventionist” Republican. Ronald Reagan left us a tremendous legacy, but in the end it appears that Foggy Bottom has triumphed yet again. In remaking the movement toward smaller, more Constitutionally-based government, the time is right for new leaders to step up. It appears the best we can hope for in 2008 is to tread water, but I see an opportunity in the making for a new leader to step up. The trick is figuring out who that leader will be.
