St. Ronald of Reagan

Click here for an article in Salon from February 16, 2016, by Brady Carlson, entitled "They're trying to deify Ronald Reagan: Inside the right-wing plot to turn the Gipper into a modern-day God." It describes Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project.

Norquist, of course, famously said ""I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." I used to consider Norquist to be the most influential non-elected Republican; he's faded from the limelight in recent years, even though he's a mere 67 years old. I guess his poisonous conservative views are considered to be too moderate for the MAGA crowd.

Carlson says: "If the public thought of Reagan, as Norquist did, as a top-tier historic figure, there would be a Reagan mantle for modern conservatives to claim as their own."

Not everyone is enamored of Norquist's project:

Even some staunch Reaganites joined in the criticism; commentator George Will wrote there was “something un-Reaganesque about trying to plaster his name all over the country the way Lenin was plastered over Eastern Europe, Mao over China and Saddam Hussein all over Iraq.”

The project has indisputably been successful:

In 2000, when the Legacy Project was just a few years old, Gallup Poll respondents ranked Reagan as a better-than-average US president; today, he usually ranks near the top, with John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln.

Sigh.