The New York Times op-ed page brought in reinforcements today for David Brooks. Lou Cannon tries to defend Reagan (and support David Brooks) without really confronting the arguments of Krugman and Herbert that Reagan made deliberate appeals to racists as part of the Republican Party's Southern Strategy.
Many younger readers may not remember Lou Cannon. Cannon gained fame and fortune in the 1980s as a political reporter covering Reagan for the L.A. Times in the 1980s mostly through frequent television appearances in which he softened Reagan's image for moderates and liberals while earning scoops from the Administration and later publishing a largely favorable biography -- a case of access journalism that many reporters have emulated since then.
Of course, Cannon does not get to the substance of the argument that Reagan and his political advisers sought to exploit issues of race to advance his and the Republican Party's electoral fortunes in the South. Instead, he argues 1)Reagan personally was not a bigot and 2) the decision to begin his campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi was not effective politically. None of this negates the broader point that Reagan made tactical appeals to bigots as part of the Republican Party's Southern Strategy. Whatever his personal beliefs and whether it was politically effective or not, the decision to begin Reagan's Presidential campaign in a place where three civil rights workers had been murdered with an appeal to "states' rights" was undoubtedly part of this.
What was most typical of Cannon's career as a Reagan smoother and softener (essentially, a canonizer enabler) was Cannon's very brief mention of how Reagan was wrong on the most important efforts to remedy America's de jure and de facto systems of racial segregation and discrimination -- the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Cannon goes into detail about all things Reagan did during his life (mostly in the 1930s and 1940s) to demonstrate that Reagan was not a bigot, and then includes the following in a parenthetical:
"(Mr. Reagan was understandably anathema in the black community not because of his personal views but because of his consistent opposition to federal civil rights legislation, most notably the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.)"
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Same old Lou.