re: #78 Blind Frog Belly White

I’ll give him his due - he wasn’t nearly as crazy as he pretended to be.

My take is that he learned negotiation from being a Union President - you start out by asking for the moon, so that at the end of the negotiation, you’ve ‘reluctantly’ allowed yourself to be pushed into accepting what you wanted in the first place.

The thing is, the Right bases its worship of him on his overblown rhetoric, and not the significantly more moderate way he governed. Yes, he started the whole ‘Tax Cut’ thing, but he also presided over the biggest tax INCREASE in history to that point. Yes, he blathered on about ‘Welfare Queens’, but he also signed into law the Earned Income Tax Credit. Yes, he talked about the Evil Empire, but then bent over backwards negotiating with Gorbachev.

But the Right only remembers the swagger and the tax cuts. Not the deficits, the tax increases, Iran Contra, or his support for the Assault Weapons ban and the Brady Bill. Nor his signature on the bill making abortion legal in California.

They all want to be the next “Reagan” but they have no desire to actually govern like he did.