The GOP needs to be less concerned with moving beyond Reagan and more concerned with moving beyond RINO.

What is Pawlenty proposing to offer the under 40s? Why should they be attracted to the Republican Party?

He wants to talk about "updated orthodoxy" without having the courage to say what that means: abandonment of failed Republican policies.

It's just a constant "Step 3: Profit!" joke with these guys.

Al, how does it feel to be a republican, now that the GOP's leader is a narcotics abusing, sex touring AM talk radio show host?

What happened to your morals and values?

of course reagan, who raised taxes six times, would be thrown out of today's gop as "unreagan."

Even if Pawlenty has few ideas, at least he's trying to start a discussion.
But once again, Limbaugh is enforcing reactionary orthodoxy on anyone who moves half a toe off the line. As we saw in an earlier blog, all in the GOP must bend over and grab their ankles,
"Giddown on yo knees an squeal lak a pig!"

If you want to truly see the difference between the reality of Reagan and the myth of him that has been hoisted upon us you should read the book Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future by Will Bunch. It is very enlightening.

He is the Elvis of the GOP.

http://velvetpaintings.com/Velvet/JALBUM%20ALL-Pages/Image0.html

Conservatives by nature do not look forward. They preserve the past.

This is obviously the only way out for the Republicans. Pawlenty knows that he has to be ginger in discussing what a post-Reagan agenda would look like. Early on perhaps the best that can happen is cultivate vague discussion of why Reaganism has grown tiresome.

It may take an election cycle or two before the moderates can speak with any degree of confidence -- and thus clarity.

Even if Pawlenty has few ideas, at least he's trying to start a discussion.

Is he? Because I read every word of that Bloomberg story, and except for the reporter's paraphase ("The old Republican orthodoxy of limited government, lower taxes and conservative social policies needs an update if the party hopes to challenge Democrats on issues such as health care, energy and education, he said"), I not only didn't see any specifics, I didn't even see any generalities about what the GOP needs to change.

There was plenty of yap about learning to talk to working people and speaking the language of minorities and so forth, though.

You're probably right, Dr Lemming. But it's still hilarious to think of what a thrashing Pawlenty's going to take from his own party for this milquetoast commentary.

...stressing the need to "continue to honor and respect and remember Ronald Reagan."

Rushpublicanism is a cult. They were hoping to upgrade the image with Shrubwit but he was just too stupid and hollow to fill the bill. And of course, he didn't pardon Libby.

So the whole creepy organization becomes a reliquary that will cradle the bits and pieces and received wisdom of their high priest, El-Ronbo.

Limbaugh v. Steele was a sad matchup. Totally a forgone outcome. I'd like to see Limbaugh and Rev. Moon get after it. That would be a smackdown for the ages.

On this note, did anyone see David Brooks's steaming pile of Reaganomics in the NYT this morning? His line is that Obama is going overboard by raising taxes on the rich (to historically moderate levels) and increasing spending, and that the United states "has never been a country riven by class resentment." (What? Ever hear of the labor movement, David? Or 19th-century populism, for that matter? A big wealth gap gets a political reaction in ANY healthy country.) Poor Dave has built his reputation as a savant (such as it is) on Reaganism, and now thinks that's the moderate position, rather than the "revolution" it was claimed to be at the time. If that's the orthodoxy of the "moderate" Republicans, then folks like Pawlenty are just voices crying in the wilderness.

You know the party is in serious trouble when, just this morning, Pat Buchanan is defending the very public conservative v. GOP infighting as a clear sign that the party is stronger and more united than he believed a month ago. Buchanan then went on to talk about how united the GOP is and that it's the Dems who are truly splintered and divided. Heh.

Shorter Pawlenty: We wont be able to stop the progressive agenda by being knuckle-draggers. Instead, we should try to dilute it as much as possible by making realistic compromise positions.

Most of the de-evolution of the GOP can be laid at the feet of Karl Rove. There were mainstream presidential candidates in the 2000 GOP primaries who were then regarded by most within the GOP to be acceptable, viable Republicans who would now be considered outright traitors. This is mainly a consequence of Rove's use of mindless and vicious personal attack as a substitute for a coherent philosophy, and of his kowtowing to the least-educated elements in the Republican party, the so-called "base."

If Pawlenty is looking for a Ronald Reagan 2.0, I suggest he look no further than Ron Reagan, the biological 2.0 of the GOP's saint. If the started listening to him, the world would be a better place.

OOhhh boy, T-Paw is getting all uppity on pimp daddy Rush. T-Paw is David Stroms bitch. (Strom is our home grown Grover Nordquist)

I suggest he look no further than Ron Reagan

I doubt that Ron Reagan wants a role inside any part of the modern Republican party.

They will continue to beat the drum of Reaganism as the age of affluence recedes further and further in attempt to arose the feeling of nostalgia for the good old days. Those days were of course an elaborate neo liberal ponzi scheme, nevertheless most people won't realize that and will instead remember the halcyon days when they had money in their 401k, a good chunk of equity, and a job sitting around pushing paper.

A new era is coming and it's coming hard and fast.

It's very simple -- Reagan was a winner. Never mind that he raised taxes, cut and ran from Lebanon, sold arms to Iran or slighted the fundamentalists; movement conservatives perceive him as a winner, and their entire pathology is based on not feeling like a loser.

Which is why, I think the losses in 2006 and '08 were highly significant towards the reductions in those self-identifying as Republicans, and why a drubbing in '10 will hasten the trend.

And why the current Limbaugh wars are even more amusing -- every Republican pol who takes on Limbaugh winds up looking like a loser, despite the fact that they're entirely correct than embracing that gasbag is electoral poison. They lose either way, and Rush's ego is helping destroy the Republican Party.

Remember when people suggested that Obama's mentioning Limbaugh by name was a mistake? Heh.

Rush Limbaugh castigated those conservatives who are "trying to throw Reagan out."

Wow---thanks for reminding me. I haven't created my daily Reagan voodoo doll, filled it with spike nails, and thrown it into the garbage can yet---and today is trash day!

As an aside, It's worth noting that El FlushBo isn't endearing himself to the RR folks with his rhetoric, what with setting up graven images (Reagan) and all, y'know....

Perhaps, Pawlenty has not learned something from Michael "You Da the Grovel Man" that the Russian Army used female snipers to follow their troops into battle in The Great War. No, not to shoot at the Wehrmacht, but, to kill any retreating Russian soldiers.

I am so, so sorry. Looking back at the transcript, I don't know what I was saying. I was just babbling, really. I want to apologize to Rush and all his listeners.

40? 50. At least. I was 20 when Reagan was first elected.

And I love the way that Limbaugh's audience doesn't get those crappy fake apologies, they get the real ones. I want to hear one of those smarmy "I regret that I may have offended some of the mouth-breathers who hang on every word from your drug-addled lips" apologies.

I hereby nominate Rush Limbaugh for runner-up MVP of the Democratic party. If he keeps up his purity trolling long enough, pretty soon the GOP will be just a bunch of redneck losers meeting at Dennys arguing about how the South almost won the Civil War.

And Gregory beat me to the point that Reagan sold some of our finest weapons to our enemies, and then lied his ass off about it. Once cornered, he had to resort to telling everyone that he was too stupid to realize what he was doing. That's the model they want to follow???

As you so often begin your attacks, "With all due respect", Mr O'Reilly, Rush has turned you into chopped liver.

Don't forget, Rush Limbaugh never voted for Ronald Reagan. He didn't bother to vote for anybody until after Reagan was re-elected.

Not entirely relevant to his arguments; I just like pointing out how much of a lazy-ass Rush Limbaugh is (or was).

Thanks God Reagan lived long enough to realize that he wasn't the worst President ever, assuming that he was capable of realizing something.

of course reagan, who raised taxes six times, would be thrown out of today's gop as "unreagan."

More likely, just as they (in some cases, the same people) did at the time, the cheerleaders of the conservative movement would talk around the Reagan tax increases and pretend they didn't really count as tax increases.

To digress a little, borrowing from above I'm wondering if anyone else is as intrigued as I am by Brush's full-on kitsch, his black velvet Charles Foster Kane, his Suburban Elvis Superman, his narcotic lithium sneer and snarl, his Il Duce by way of Barnum and Bailey? Is he about to go big (bigger) time? Are we seeing the real face and rise of American fascism? Technically, according to Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism" the conditions in this country are just about right, and one might be able to make the case that the Father Coughlins of pre-WWII America begat the Joseph McCarthy's, which begat the rise of modern 'conservatism' and Bush era corporate/military authoritarianism. There's something about how Brush comported himself this time around - the visuals, the rhetoric, the spectacle of grown men groveling at his feet - that seems to signal a new era of authoritarianism, less proto-fascist, and thus emergent, than fascist in process. And as Paxton makes clear, fascism is more a process than coherent ideology. In fact, I think it's safe to say that "coherent ideology" and "fascism" are essentially incompatible, as fascism is if nothing else a system of rationalization for extreme (clinically, one might say extremely antisocial, or, sociopathic) behavior. Seems as though a number of Paxton's conditions sufficient for the realization of such a system and concomitant behavior exist at this time. I'm keeping my eyes open.

And not that it's really necessary, but I really like the Wiki definition of 'kitsch":

"Kitsch is...art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art....art whose aesthetics convey exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama...types of art that are like-wise æsthetically deficient...making it a creative gesture that merely imitates the superficial appearances of art (via repeated conventions and formulae), thus, it is uncreative and unoriginal...æsthetically pretentious to the degree of being in poor taste, and to industrially-produced art-items that are considered trite and crass."

I do think this concept is important, actually, because I think it fairly accurately limns a picture of why so...many...people fall for Brush's scam. If: one is caught in a semiotic web in which the highest aesthetic is as described above, then psychically what sense of self, and self in the world, does that imply? Particularly in a culture which presents, no, demands as its ideal, its highest aspiration that you (yes, YOU) "live life to the fullest," "fulfill your potential," "be all you can be," in a culture which at the same time floods you with highly synthetic images/ideas/models (one might say simulacra) of how this is done (of course, it's all for show, staged, painted, Potemkin Villages stretched through time and space, but that's all part of the game, the show, we're hip, we're cool. right? right?) I guess in short I'm suggesting that such a positioning might engender a tendency towards self and other hatred because of the impossibility of such coercion, which might, ummmm maybe itself engender some 'righteous' (see kitsch, above) anger. Just sayin.'

The problem for the GOP vis-a-vis Gov. Reagan is that, unlike their aging membership's hagiography (and Mr. Limbaugh's recitation) of the fortieth President, younger Americans will have to go to their history books and there they will discover that, although only eight years of GWB makes him look good, the real President Reagan was not the man so many worship today.

Yes, the Reaganauts were successful with using the term "user fees", instead of tax increases.

howard,

"of course reagan, who raised taxes six times..."

You're not supposed to bring that up. It spoils the Purple Kool-Aid fantasy that cutting tax rates brings in more revenue.

"(I was 15 when he left office)"

Then do yourself a favor and read:

On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency by Mark Hertsgaard

reagan was an unmitigated disaster for this country. A sunny savage who hired others to work in the shadows to slaughter covertly in our name (can you say Roberto D'Aubuisson?)

he was no deity. He was one of the worst presidents we ever had. He empowered the worst elements of his party, with the result that we see all around us: catastrophe for the American people he claimed to love so much.

Phooey. The man was a disaster.

Reality will force fiscal conservatism. People are starting to look at Obama with shock. Surely we needed change from a warmonger like Bush who dishonored the nation, but what did we get in his place? Only time will tell, but to some of us it looks like only a miracle will save us from bankrupcy with the age of Pelosi upon us. The Chinese are going to loan us money equivalent roughly to what we transferred to them in the last twenty years to bring them out of poverty so they can go back to poverty?