John Kerry is a canny enough politician to say only gracious things about Ronald Reagan this week. But at the Weekly Standard, Katherine Mangu-Ward has compiled a list of Kerry’s previous statements about Reagan—and they were anything but gracious: Kerry on Reagan.

* In November 2002, U.S. News & World Report carried this Kerry assessment of Reagan’s presidency: “You roll out the president one time a day. One exposure to all of you [the media]. No big in-depth inquiries. Put him in his brown jacket and his blue jeans, put him on a ranch, let him cock his head, give you a smile, and it looks like America’s OK.”

He repeated the same sentiments in an interview with Vogue last year, this time drawing a parallel to Bush: “They have managed him the same way they managed Ronald Reagan,” Kerry contended. “They send him out to the press for one event a day. They put him in a brown jacket and jeans and get him to move some hay or drive a truck, and all of a sudden, he’s the Marlboro Man.”

* That’s not the only time Kerry has offered unflattering Bush-Reagan comparisons. In an interview last September with the Manchester Union-Leader, Kerry said, “We’ve seen governors come to Washington, … and they don’t have the experience in foreign policy, and they get in trouble pretty fast. Look at Ronald Reagan. Look at Jimmy Carter and, now, obviously, George Bush.”

* In 1992 Kerry said, “Ronald Reagan certainly was never in combat. I mean, many of his movies depicted him there. And he may have believed he was, but he never was. And the fact is that he sent Americans off to die.”

* After his first major political battle in the Senate over Reagan’s support for the Nicaraguan contras in 1985, Kerry said “I think it was a silly and rather immature approach,” of Reagan’s dismissal of a “peace offer” from Sandinista junta leader Daniel Ortega.

* Last year Kerry said to the Democratic National Committee: “I’m proud that I stood against Ronald Reagan, not with him, when his intelligence agencies were abusing the Constitution of the United States and when he was running an illegal war in Central America.”