My friend and fellow BD contributor Matt Hall has provided an interesting, but woefully incomplete, history of Ronald Reagan, in an attempt to claim the party is so different that it would reject him in 2016. Frankly, I find this sort of thing to be a waste of time: pulling historical figures into the present tends to distort both – which is exactly what Hall did, albeit unintentionally.
Let’s start with Reagan’s tax record. Yes, there were tax increases, and contrary to what we have all apparently forgotten since then, it upset quite a few Republicans back then, too. Jack Kemp flatly told the president – to his face – that it was the wrong thing to do (CNN). However, none of the tax hikes (and the 1982 one is still the largest in real dollars in American history) compare to the income tax reductions in 1981, and the tax reform of 1986 – which lowered income tax rates even further while eliminating deductions and credits to maintain revenue neutrality. In fact, it was Reagan’s 1986 tax reform that earned Grover Norquist’s support, and led him to form both Americans for Tax Reform and the Taxpayer Protection Pledge that is the group’s hallmark. The tax hikes to which Reagan agreed are almost never placed in their proper context.
Moreover, we need to remember when – and critically, why – opposition to tax hikes became so important to Republicans. It wasn’t Norquist, or fundraisers, or anyone else outside the corridors of power that forced the issue. It was Reagan’s own successor and former rival – George Herbert Walker Bush – who publicly told the entire nation, “Read my lips; no new taxes” during his 1988 campaign. In 1990, he famously broke his own promise to strike a budget deal with Democrats – one that supposedly got $2 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax hikes. The result? The tax hike exacerbated the 1990 recessions and slowed the subsequent recovery to a crawl, wiping out over 80% of the projected increase in revenue. Meanwhile, the spending cuts never materialized. Politically, the effect was even worse. To this day, no incumbent running for re-election ever won less than the 38% Bush scored in 1992.
Bush and the Republican Party were burned, badly, by the Democrats’ welching and by the effect of the tax increase. When his successor tried a similar formula in 1993 (tax hikes here and now, spending cuts there in the future, sometime), one of the first to criticize it was…you guessed it…Ronald Reagan (New York Times).
This also bleeds into Hall’s concern about Republicans being unable to “work with our Democratic friends and govern.” As the aforementioned example shows, it takes two to tango. Democrats in 1990 revealed themselves to be – shall we say – less than trustworthy. With President Obama, it’s even worse. Lest we forget, during the halcyon days of 2011, Republicans proposed $800 billion in tax hikes, which he readily took. Two days later, he reneged and asked for another $400 billion (Los Angeles Times). I don’t recall Tip O’Neill or Dan Rostonkowski doing that.
Even Democrats who have crossed the president have come away bewildered and furious. Remember Trade Promotion Authority (HuffPo)?
But the president’s 11th-hour pitch may have backfired. Some of the Democrats leaving the meeting said Obama promptly insulted their integrity, took no questions and left.
“Basically, the president tried to both guilt people and then impugn their integrity,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.). “There were a number of us who were insulted by the approach.”
Lest we forget, it was largely Republicans – both in elected office and in the punditry – who championed TPA. That didn’t stop the president from excoriating us or questioning our motives when the subject changed.
Finally, there is the matter of the 1986 immigration reform, which everyone who discusses it seems to forget was enacted…in 1986. Back then, Mexico was a semi-tyrannical basket case; Latin America was a front-line region in the Cold War; and the rest of the world was far less democratic than it is today. Escapees to the United States could hardly be portrayed as “economic migrants” – and everyone knew it. Moreover, immigrating to the United States without authorization was only a civil offense, not a criminal one. That changed in 2005 – yes, that was George W. Bush who signed that law.
What also changed was the nature of the Republican Party – but not in the way Matt and others think. The party didn’t “shift to the right” as much as build up support among lower income Americans, whose nominal wages are most immediately impacted by immigration. In the 1980s, Republicans were still the party of the wealthy and middle classes, and thus could take the longer view on immigration and recognize the beneficial effect of lower prices and more human capital overall. The voters most affected by Reagan’s “amnesty” weren’t voting in his party’s primaries yet. Could Reagan have won them over? I suspect he could have, but we’ll never know.
In short, we can’t take a record from the 1980s out of the 1980s without causing serious distortions. Yes, Ronald Reagan raised taxes, but not as much as he cut them. Yes, he worked with Democrats, and we should too, when they’re not reneging on deals and using invective and shaming as a substitute for negotiation. Yes, Ronald Reagan provided amnesty to millions of unauthorized immigrants, but the alternative was sending them back to tyrannies and war zones, and the voters most upset by it were largely Democrats at the time, which is not the case now.
If Ronald Reagan did manage to make it to 105, find some currently unknown treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, and then decide to run for office again, odds are he would not hold the same positions as fellow who served as President in the 1980s. After all, Reagan changed his mind on a number of issues between 1966 (when he was elected Governor of California) and 1980. The party chose him as their nominee anyway because they knew he was still all about finding ways to keep government from restraining American enterprise.
I would humbly submit that the GOP of 2016 would understand that, too.
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