Is it possible for one of the Republican candidates to trump Donald Trump?
If so, I predict, it’ll be the candidate who figures out a way to articulate the “big tent” conservatism of Ronald Reagan.
The Gipper never resorted to any xenophobia of the kind Trump used in speaking of Mexican immigrants.
He appealed to the better instincts blue-collar voters. He’d been, as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a labor-union leader. He understood the contribution unions made to the defeat of Communism.
Reagan’s strategy was to include labor. Oh, he could be tough as nails with an errant labor union, as he was with the air-traffic controllers when they went on an illegal strike.
But he never evinced a hatred of organized labor. The same president who fired the air-traffic controllers awarded the Medal of Freedom to the great anti-Communist labor organizer Irving Brown of the AFL-CIO.
Reagan’s strategic goal was to win over — and keep — what came to be called the “Reagan Democrats.” They didn’t like to see America retreat overseas. They wanted an economy that produced jobs.
Reagan understood — and explained over and over — how jobs are produced by economic growth. He also understood that once we had such growth, we would need the immigrant labor so many complained about.
The one-time movie actor the Democrats liked to portray as a dunce turned out also to have studied economics. He’d long since honed a way of talking about sophisticated problems in simple terms.
In Reagan’s day, it was a tax problem called “bracket creep” — the way inflation pushed ordinary wage earners into brackets designed for millionaires.
Now it’s the way near-zero interest rates have derailed what should have been a jobs boom.
Trump’s demagoguery has, for the moment, eclipsed our most successful governors, including Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, John Kasich and Scott Walker, and most brilliant senators, such as Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Reagan would’ve met Trump with plain talk on economics.
Reagan eschewed bombast. It’s hard to imagine him boasting about being rich or having done well at Wharton. Or about our own leaders being stupid. Or even about Mexicans “taking our jobs.”
Oh, he could assert himself in debate. “I am paying for this microphone,” he famously quipped. And he once summed up his Cold War policy against the Communists as “We win, they lose.” But he had an extraordinary feel for language.
This was nailed after his presidency in the book “Reagan in His Own Hand,” about how he wrote his own commentaries. He was a master of the heart-warming homily and the self-deprecating joke.
(My own favorite is his yarn about the GOP candidate who, seeking a spot from which to address some farmers, climbed onto a pile of manure and announced it was the first time he’d made a Republican speech from a Democratic platform.)
He was also a master of visionary language — “the shining city on a hill.”
Most of all, he was a master of optimism, of making Americans feel not worse about other people, but better about themselves.
Reagan, incidentally, was also a master negotiator and understood the strategic balance down to the ground. Yet no one within the GOP has made much of an issue of this.
President Gerald Ford, after all, had pursued and President Jimmy Carter signed the SALT II nuclear-arms-limitation treaty with the Soviet camarilla. But, much like the Iran pact today, it couldn’t get anywhere near ratification in the Senate.
Reagan refused to be bound by SALT II, even though Carter had signed it, if Soviet violations were found. Yet none of this history has been brought into the current contest.
The big tent led to astounding success for Reagan. He won 44 states in 1980 and 49 in 1984. New York went for the GOP candidate both times.
No one was left outside the tent to challenge him with an independent run.
That fate fell to his successor, George H.W. Bush, when, in 1992, Ross Perot won 19 percent of the vote. He split off enough Republicans — and Reagan Democrats — to hand the victory to Bill Clinton.
A big tent is the way for the GOP candidate to prevent Donald Trump from trying the same stunt. Take it from The Gipper.
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