Hopefuls should out-Reagan Reagan
The Gipper failed to stop the growth of government spending; 2008's candidates should aim to deliver what their hero couldn't.
The shock of Republicans' repudiation in the November 2006 midterm elections has not worn off -- and one year later, it is shaping how they contest the 2008 elections. The lesson the GOP believes it learned is especially clear on domestic policy. Between the big, expensive programs inspired by compassionate conservatism and pork-barrel spending on bridges to nowhere, "we lost our brand," one Republican official lamented. "We are in the wilderness because we walked away from the limited-government principles that minted the Republican Congress," Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana told his GOP colleagues after the midterms.
In response, the men seeking the 2008 GOP presidential nomination have largely turned that race into a contest over which candidate can best remind primary voters of Ronald Reagan, the model small-government Republican. Mitt Romney says, "We must return to the common-sense Reagan Republican ideals." "What we're lacking is strong, aggressive, bold leadership, like we had with Ronald Reagan," observes Rudy Giuliani. As for Fred Thompson, one of his campaign aides says there is "no reason to force the comparison with Reagan" because it speaks for itself. Indeed, one of the "draft Fred" websites that appeared over the summer was anotherronaldreagan.com.
The competing claims to be a "Reagan conservative" reflect the candidates' efforts to identify themselves as the most ardent "limited-government conservative." But in doing so, they make a mistake. What they fail to understand is that Reagan himself was not a terribly effective Reaganite, and that despite his rhetoric, his success at limiting government was itself pretty limited.
In his inaugural address in 1981, Reagan said, "It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people." In his farewell address eight years later, the president said, "[M]an is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts."
But in between the two speeches, government did nothing but expand. In 1981, the federal government spent $678 billion; in 1989 it spent $1.144 trillion. Factoring out inflation, that was an increase of 19% in real spending. Republicans never expected that Reagan would leave office with a "federal establishment" one-fifth larger than when he arrived.
