
Claudia Montecinos
Director, Media Relations
While the current GOP presidential candidates pledge allegiance to Ronald Reagan, the 40th president’s record shows much more pragmatism and willingness to compromise than today’s Republican Party.
On September 16, the Republican presidential candidates will gather at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, for the second debate in the 2016 Republican primary process. It will be an opportunity for the candidates to pay homage to President Reagan, who to this day remains an idol and a paragon of conservatism to Republicans even though he left the Oval Office in 1989—nearly three decades ago. A 2012 Gallup poll showed that 90 percent of Republicans viewed Reagan as an outstanding or above average president, more favorably than any other recent president. And this year, 30 Republican governors signed proclamations recognizing February 6 as Ronald Reagan Day. As presidential historian Douglas Brinkley explained, Reagan has “become a folklore president.”
Clearly, part of the Reagan mystique is tied to the fact that he found a way to achieve something elusive to subsequent conservatives on the national stage: the ability to appeal to independents and Democrats and win the popular vote in presidential elections. Republicans have achieved this feat just twice in the seven elections that have followed the Reagan presidency. In fact, President Reagan enjoys an overall high favorability rating—60 percent of Americans approve of Reagan, more so than any of the current GOP candidates.
How did Ronald Reagan appeal to Americans beyond his conservative base of supporters? Part of the answer is that President Reagan was able to mix pragmatism with conservatism. And at critical moments on critical issues, Reagan took positions that are anathema to the leaders of today’s Republican Party—advancing sensible immigration reform, supporting pollution control, curbing nuclear arms, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, and advocating gun background checks. As president, Reagan passed immigration reform with a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants. He also passed a landmark treaty on the climate and raised taxes 11 times. He even negotiated with America’s main adversary, the Soviet Union, signing a treaty with the communist nation to reduce nuclear weapons.
To be clear, President Reagan would never be confused as a progressive. Indeed, he championed many destructive, conservative policies that are often embraced by contemporary Republicans. His philosophy of trickle-down economics, still pervasive in today’s GOP, has repeatedly failed to help anyone except the highest-income earners. Meanwhile, Reagan’s false narrative of the so-called welfare queen poisoned the public’s view of people who receive public assistance and still exists today. He also weakened a number of initiatives intended to help the environment, including gutting President Jimmy Carter’s clean energy and energy efficiency efforts and rolling back fuel-economy standards. Additionally, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan violated an arms embargo with Iran and sold weapons to the country in exchange for the return of American hostages. He then lied to the American public and denied the deal ever took place.
Yet while President Reagan can hardly be described as a progressive, he also was not a pure ideologue who was unwilling to negotiate and work across the aisle. His former chief of staff, James Baker—who was quoted recently in an Eno Center for Transportation publication recalling the Reagan years—explained it well: “If Reagan told me once, he told me fifteen thousand times—I’d rather get 80 percent of what I want than go over the cliff with my flags flying.” In practice, this philosophy meant that President Reagan adopted more moderate, bipartisan stances on several important policy positions than those of today’s conservatives. In fact, Reagan championed the notion that the GOP should be a “big tent” and considered opposing points of view. This report surveys six issues on which Reagan adopted a commonsense, bipartisan stance—political positions that the current presidential contenders would find abhorrent. During and after his presidency, President Reagan:
Given President Reagan’s iconic status, it is not surprising that GOP presidential hopefuls desire to be seen as the next successor of Reagan’s conservative mantle. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker explains that “Reagan’s influence is a key part of who I am today” and goes so far as to say that he only remembers his own wedding anniversary because it falls on the same day as Ronald Reagan’s birthday. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio calls Reagan’s rise to national prominence “a movement that transformed America.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has asserted that Reagan won two presidential elections by sticking to his conservative principles and, in a 2014 New Yorker interview, said that “every time” Republicans compromise “we lose.” Donald Trump, who has combatted the Republican establishment on numerous occasions, recently stated that the Reagan administration was the last time “you felt proud to be an American.” Yet despite the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls’ worship of Reagan, they have missed or ignored Reagan’s record of bipartisan compromise and his ability and willingness to work across the aisle. Instead, on issue after issue from immigration to spending to climate, the GOP candidates have staked out uncompromising, ideological positions that stand far to the right of President Reagan.
Whether it is a lack of courage, common sense, or the capacity to lead the conservative base instead of being led by it, today’s Republican candidates demonstrate almost universal intransigence on the issues on which President Ronald Reagan chose to lead. Unlike Reagan, the vast majority of the 2016 GOP presidential contenders:
A willingness to negotiate and work across the aisle to achieve pragmatic, bipartisan solutions is not the only thing differentiating President Reagan from the current GOP presidential candidates. The current GOP hopefuls’ adoption of intransigent, far-right positions also means that they will have difficulty appealing to the broader American public. And while the “Gipper” found success at the polls, come Election Day, the current crop of GOP contenders will find themselves joining that long list of forgotten candidates who were unable to appeal to a majority of the American people.
The following report takes a closer look at the bipartisan, commonsense positions President Reagan adopted on six issues that are in direct conflict with today’s GOP presidential candidates. Despite the folklore, it is hard to imagine any of these candidates claiming fidelity to Reagan and his principles in a way that the 40th president could embrace.
Charles Posner is the Policy Manager at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Molly Cain is a Research Associate in the CAP Action War Room. Anna Chu is the Vice President of Policy and Research at CAP Action.
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Policy Manager
Senior Researcher
Vice President, Policy and Research