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has been getting a real buffing ever since the election ended?
The Republicans are in serious nostalgia mode...sad about their losses...longing for a return to the days when it was easy to put a Republican in the office on the basis of his public image and his widespread personal appeal alone.
They have convinced themselves that their problem is that they have no sunny, cheery figurehead to help them sell their current failed policies...they tell themselves, "If only we had another Reagan, we could sell these proles sh** and they'd be convinced it was caviar."
The truth is, they don't feel that their policies have failed at all. The only thing that failed, in their eyes, was the sales job. Why? Because they lacked an effective salesman. Georgie the Little Kid Playing Cowboy was OK for a while, but he eventually botched it. Like a nervous kid with stage fright in the school play, he forgot his lines, turned red and ran offstage, leaving the play in a shambles, the audience's sense of disbelief no longer suspended. Now, many of them are stampeding out of the theater, descending on the box office, demanding a refund on their tickets.
Ronnie, they tell themselves, would NEVER have done such a thing. Ronnie was a pro. Ronnie could take the worst B-movie script and deliver it as if it were Shakespeare. Ronnie could have SOLD that war in Iraq. Not only could he have sold it--could he have had the best and brightest young Americans eagerly lining up to go to war and die for Iraqi democracy--he could have sent the extras to Iran! And they would go, gladly! And their parents would send them off with a tear of pride and a swelling of the chest!
With Ronnie on stage, people thought it was morning in America even when it was midnight! Forget that Iran-contra thing, heh heh. Let me tell you this story about a letter I got from a grandmother in Des Moines...
Make no mistake. Even now, they are casting about, trying to figure out who they can make into their next Ronnie. Someone who need not have any more of the real, genuine merits to be president than Reagan did, no more of a family man, no more of a policy wonk. The image is all. If they can just find the right raw material to work with, they will fashion a new Ronnie: one they can sell to both Republicans, Democrats and the Great Undecided as Ronnie II, The Sequel. And they will get him in there for a full eight years if they can.
That's why, all of a sudden, the name "Reagan" is on every Republican's lips. He's the last taste of decisive presidential victory their party has ever known and a president even some people on the other side of the fence look back on fondly (because they too have sort of forgotten what he really did, and they themselves were doing well financially in the eighties, what the heck). The Bushes, both father and son, proved to be but pale pretenders to the Ronnie throne. But the Republicans will find themselves a worthy successor, one they can get elected and keep there...so that when HE takes away habeas corpus, tortures people, and sends young Americans off to their deaths overseas for a lost cause, we'll all just relax and enjoy it.
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