re: #461 MandyManners

I was young, too but, from what I’ve read, the adults didn’t know about Reagan.

Good morning, Lizards.

(Good morning littleoldlady, goddess.)

Reagan actually was a known quantity in 1976, as he had already been a candidate for the GOP’s presidential nomination once before, in 1972, saying that Nixon was not doing an acceptable job as President, specifically in economic and foreign policy. (He derided Nixon’s so-called “secret plan” for getting out of Vietnam, accurately stating that it amounted to unilateral withdrawal and leaving the people of South Vietnam to twist in the wind.) Nixon was renominated, and beat McGovern because as much as most Americans disliked Nixon, they considered McGovern a disaster waiting to happen. (32 years later, a similar fate would befall Eternal Lieutenant Kerry.)

In 1976, he got as far as the second ballot at the convention, but in the end, the GOP leadership’s loyalty to the Washington in-crowd (which Ford, as good a man as he was, was a member of, and Reagan was not), as well as most party leaders’ tendency to “dance with the one who brung ‘em” (a malady both major parties share) ended with Ford’s nomination, and defeat in November.

Reagan was not really an “unknown quantity” in 1976. But he definitely was not a “member of the club” in Washington power circles. It was, however, that very outsider aura that brought him back into the party’s center of power in 1980, and ended with him in the White House.

Today, Sarah Palin is the most “Reaganesque” individual in the GOP. Anyone who thinks that she has been subjected to some bizarre “criticisms” by the MSM has never looked up what they said about the Gipper.

For the record, at age 51, I’m old enough to remember every U.S. President back to Eisenhower (at age 2, I watched the Nixon/JFK debate, including Nixon’s infamous gaffes), and I’ve voted in every Presidential election since 1976. The morning after, I was driving from home to my college (a 35-mile trip one way), and on the CB the joke was “We’ll be eating peanuts for the next four years.”

Would that that had been the worst that happened. (I like peanuts- just not as much as I like cheese.)

cheers

eon