I read a lot of teeth gnashing about how the Right is having an orgy of patriotic fervor around President Reagan's 100th Birthday celebration. I think there's a lesson for the Left to learn from this.
There's plenty to dump on about Right-wing remembrance of President Reagan versus the reality of his Presidency, as Mike Stark pointed out to Rush Limbaugh earlier this month.
What's missing in all this is the fact that conservatives aren't forgetting the President Reagan's tax hikes of 1982, 1983 and 1986 (though they try to keep it as quiet as possible), but rather the fact President Reagan put their views into the mainstream, such as tax cuts are good for the economy or the welfare state has its limits and the list goes on.
The Right isn't splitting hairs, like the Left does, with regards to what he did versus what the Right has been able to achieve because he gave their agenda an ear.
I think the Left needs to lift this mindset from the Right. Not since JFK and FDR has the Left really heralded a former President, as someone who stood for something they valued, even though other Presidents did try.
The Left seems to focus in, almost entirely, on how Presidents since JFK have failed them and have been very scant with praise for even trying to push their agenda through.
LBJ pushed through the most sweeping liberal domestic agenda, since FDR and the most liberal in the last 50 years, yet his failure with Vietnam overrides the merits of his domestic successes by the Left and he is usually excluded from celebrated Democratic Presidents.
Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was a crook, yet the Right has gone through painstaking effort to rehabilitate President Nixon's reputation, by pointing out his Ping-Pong diplomacy with China and other accomplishments, so people would think about him in broader terms than just Watergate.
President Clinton did try to push through liberal policy goals, early in his Administration, which seriously back fired on him and hurt him politically. The Left does not thank him for trying. Rather they bemoan his failures and his unwillingness to keep trying to push through things, where he didn't have the political backing to succeed. He did try to repeal the military's ban on gays serving in the military, but when that met with serious backlash from the Armed Forces, President Clinton cobbled together the much derided compromise DADT, which gave gays some legal standing to be in the military, where they had none before.
President Clinton also failed in hashing out a national health care plan, but did expand coverage to poor children via sChip, later in his Administration.
Yet the Left still reviles President Clinton over bills like NAFTA.
President Obama passed a health care bill, which the Left hates. Yet, the Left could lift a page from the Right's playbook, if they were smart. Instead of calling the bill a betrayal, they should've heralded it as a declaration that health care is a basic right for every American.
That's what the Right did with President Reagan. Even though his 1981 tax cuts were a disaster and he had to raise taxes in 1982, 1983 and 1986, the idea that lowering the marginal rates boosted the economy was seen as a positive thing.
They let Reagan be their standard bearer. They focus on what he did to advance the Right-wing agenda.
I think the Left would be better served, if they focused on how Democratic President's have improved this country by pushing through liberal policies, since LBJ.
Also, liberals routinely have been kicking the crap out of conservatives on social issues, to the point where you have unmarried, self-identified conservatives, getting divorced and having sex while unmarried with their significant other, i.e. overturning a Judicial Activist-Liberal's legislating from the bench ruling and returning to pre-Grisswold v. Connecticut legal setting, where unmarried adult couples couldn't shack up in a hotel room would destroy their lifestyle.
Yet liberals aren't touting how thoroughly they've won the "culture wars".
The mindset of always losing, by the Left, needs to end. They need to take a page out from Right-wingers and celebrate the successes Democratic President's have had in advancing the liberal agenda.