Salon's Steve Kornacki responds to Jon Chait:
Liberals are not uniquely “unreasonable”
A widely discussed critique of the left's attitude toward Obama forgets some important historyBy Steve Kornacki
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Take his claim that the historical pattern of despair he describes is a uniquely liberal tradition – that conservatives, because they have “higher levels of respect for and obedience to authority,” don’t exhibit the same level of disappointment with their leaders. This is hard to swallow if you lived through or have spent much time studying Ronald Reagan’s presidency, which featured the same loud and consistent cries of “Betrayal!” from conservative opinion-leaders that we’ve heard from liberals since 2009.
Chait seems to understand this on some level; he acknowledges that the Reagan of the modern conservative imagination is far different from the Reagan who ran the country in the 1980s – a president who “spent most of his administration raising taxes, signing arms-control treaties, and otherwise betraying right-wing dogma.” But what Chait doesn’t grapple with is the fact that conservative leaders of the Reagan-era were very much aware of and appalled by all of this – and didn’t hesitate to say so publicly.
The Reagan story is worth considering because he’s the closest mirror image to Obama among modern Republican presidents. Just like Obama, his party’s base was with him from the very beginning, embracing him as the true believer they’d long been waiting for. Conservatives in the 1980 general election didn’t just vote for Reagan because they wanted to get rid of Jimmy Carter; they also saw an opportunity to impose sweeping conservative change. Liberal voters had similar feelings about Obama in 2008.
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The carping that Baker’s selection prompted set the tone for what was to come, with conservative leaders convinced for much of Reagan’s tenure that they were being sold out by the man in whom they’d invested so much hope. The conservative press wasn’t nearly as well-developed then as it is now – there was no Fox News, no Internet and no Rush Limbaugh – but right-wing organs like Human Events, Conservative Digest and the Evans and Novak syndicated column fed this siege mentality, especially in the early years of Reagan’s tenure. The main critique was identical to the one liberals now make about Obama: that President Reagan had proven to be the kind of compromise-happy incrementalist that candidate Reagan had disdained.
As the painful early ‘80s recession – the last time before the Obama administration that the unemployment rate climbed over 10 percent – dragged down Reagan’s job approval rating, conservative leaders convinced themselves that the Reagan presidency was failing because it had abandoned its ideological mission. In June 1982, for instance, a top Reagan donor and conservative Christian leader, Clymer Wright, convened a meeting of about two dozen “New Right” leaders in Texas. The agenda: figuring out how to convince Reagan to tune out Baker and all of the other non-true believer voices he’d installed in the White House. “We want to hold Ronald Reagan’s feet to the fire Ronald Reagan lighted,” Josh Loftin, the Conservative Digest editor, told Newsweek.
Months later, after Republicans suffered through a miserable midterm election and with Reagan’s approval rating well under 40 percent, a band of conservatives led by Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips called on Reagan not to seek reelection – and began plotting a potential primary challenge against him in case he did run.
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/26/liberals_are_not_uniquely_unreasonable/singleton/ You should go read the entire article. Both Chait & Kornaki's articles do a good job of showing "how modern assessments of presidents often distort their actual records".
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