Rush and the Reagan Future
by Lisa Fabrizio
Issue 101 - February 13, 2008

As one left-wing blogger put it, “Republicans are a collection of ‘Lost Boys’ right now, desperately looking for a national leader in the wake of the Bush disaster.” Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday rejoiced that “there’s not a re-assembling of the Reagan Coalition.”

From the right, movie critic and radio talk-show host Mike Medved has concluded that, “The big loser in South Carolina was, in fact, talk radio: a medium that has unmistakably collapsed in terms of impact, influence and credibility because of its hysterical and one-dimensional involvement in the GOP nomination fight,” going on to explain that, “[John] McCain and [Mike] Huckabee are both decent and principled conservatives.”

I don’t know about you, but a Republican who recently called the U.S. Constitution “a living breathing document” and another who is the icon of those who seek to curtail political free speech don’t represent my idea of conservatism.

In a charming piece titled, Ronald Reagan Is Still Dead, Frank Rich opines: “The G.O.P. presidential field’s lack of demographic diversity by age, gender, ethnicity or even wardrobe, let alone race, is simply the leading indicator of how out of touch its brand has become.”

So far we’ve heard that the Reagan Coalition is dead, conservatism is in tatters and the influence of talk radio giants like Rush Limbaugh has gone belly up. As to the first charge, it’s true that none of the current roster of candidates is Ronald Reagan; but that’s akin to saying that the GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln because there’s no Honest Abe in the race. What has changed is that, just as we have let the opposition obscure the fact that it was Republicans, and not Democrats, who supported and passed the Civil Rights Act, we have also allowed them to define conservatism for us.

So why are McCain and Huckabee garnering all the ink and airwaves? The answer is simple: conservatism is not dead. If it was truly dying, its opponents would do more to attack its principles and tenets instead of propping up its false practitioners on the basis of their personal magnetism or populist allure.

If the Reagan Revolution is stalled in this election cycle, it is because those at the head of the movement have stopped emphasizing its personal appeal to the average American. This is not the fault of Limbaugh--who is rightly perturbed that he must constantly spell out a candidate’s conservative bona fides or lack thereof--but of those who forget that conservative ideals can resonate with voters in a way that liberalism cannot.

While folks who listen to Limbaugh can proclaim their core beliefs from the rooftops, liberal ‘values’ must be slowly indoctrinated into the mainstream. This is why liberal talk radio is such a failure. Except for their radical base, not many people can take the left-wing mantra straight up. To succeed, they must cloak their message in pleasant euphemisms like 'choice' and 'equal rights'.

Whatever polls may say, the majority of the American people do not embrace higher taxes, the culture of perpetual victimhood, government intervention in their lives, the taking of innocent life and the defeat of our military at the hands of those who would see us all dead. The first candidate who speaks up for these liberal positions straight out rather than using euphemisms can prove that Reagan conservatism is dead. Otherwise, it is all media mush.

Lisa Fabrizio is a columnist who hails from Connecticut.