In his early Hollywood years, through dozens of films and his tenure as Screen Actors Guild president, Ronald Reagan was a Democrat.
After a political conversion that began with his relationship with Nancy Davis and the General Electric Theater, and culminated in his heroic conservative movement status as the 40th president of the United States, the Democratic Party wants him back.
At least through the November presidential election.
The White House has been deploying Reagan’s name in earnest as it tries to make a case for tax fairness and the Buffett Rule, and as President Obama and Co. attempt to prove on the campaign trail that the Republican Party is now further to the right than its modern-day idol.
Obama has long made a practice of name-dropping Republican presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Dwight Eisenhower has even made it into the game as an excuse for “investment spending” because he built the interstate highway system.
“I’m a Democrat,” Obama said in his January State of the Union address. “But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”
What was Honest Abe serving as a plug for? “That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and states,” Obama continued. “That’s why we’re getting rid of regulations that don’t work. That’s why our health care law relies on a reformed private market, not a government program.”
Two weeks ago, on a campaign stop in Vermont, Obama said that Lincoln “couldn’t win the nomination for the Republican primary right now,” and lauded Roosevelt for wanting a progressive income tax.
Reagan, however, is a relatively recent entry into the repertoire of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.
Obama brought him up multiple times in his April 3 speech at an Associated Press luncheon, trying to make his party extremism argument.
“Ronald Reagan, who, as I recall, is not accused of being a tax-and-spend socialist, understood repeatedly that when the deficit started to get out of control, that for him to make a deal he would have to propose both spending cuts and tax increases,” Obama said. “Did it multiple times. He could not get through a Republican primary today.”
But then, as it would be a painful stretch to insinuate that Lincoln supported the Buffett Rule, the White House deployed two 1985 Reagan speeches (here and here) as proof that he ascribed to their brand of tax fairness.
Obama even said this week that he’d change the Buffett Rule to the “Reagan Rule” if it helped get GOP support for passage when it comes to the Senate floor Monday.
The president said Wednesday that his Oval Office predecessor supported the same notion that wealthy executives shouldn’t pay more in taxes than their secretaries. “That wild-eyed socialist, tax-hiking, class warrior was Ronald Reagan,” Obama said. “He thought that in America the wealthiest should pay their fair share and he said so.”
Obama cited a Reagan speech where he said it was “crazy that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multi-millionaires to pay nothing while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary.”
“Pay nothing” is a clear indicator that Reagan was talking about avoiding taxes altogether, and sure enough, when taken in full context, Reagan was advocating elimination of tax shelters, simplification of the tax code, and tax cuts for all.
Reagan once said, “Reducing the percentage that government takes out of the private sector is the best service government can perform for the people.”
“No country has ever long survived a tax burden that reached one third of its citizens’ earnings,” Reagan also once said in a speech. “Indeed, the first signs of disintegration begin when the total tax burden hits 25 percent.”
The Buffett Rule, as introduced in the Senate by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), would set a minimum tax of at least 30 percent on the wealthy. It targets mainly investment income that is currently taxed at a lower rate, not tax shelters. It rests on the argument that it’s morally right to take more money from those who earn more, not on the Reagan principle that overtaxation will eventually unravel the free enterprise society.
Yet Democrats continue to use Reagan in their arguments for the Buffett Rule, as recently as Biden campaigning yesterday in New Hampshire.
“Ronald Reagan, Warren Buffett… the president — nobody that I know, no reasonable person, at least in my view thinks this is the American way,” Biden said. “In America, we’re not supposed to have a system that’s rigged. We’re not supposed to have a system with one set of rules for the very wealthy and one set of rules for everybody else.”
To trot out a deceased president’s words and claim that he “traveled across the country pushing for the same concept” as the Buffett Rule, as Obama said Wednesday, is shady political opportunism to say the very least. The shameless out-of-context quoting of a president who, if alive, would have decried the Buffett Rule as overtaxation is a simply means to their desired end.
“Has he always been such a fan of Ronald Reagan’s?” a reporter asked White House press secretary Jay Carney at Wednesday’s press briefing, where the spokesman dropped Reagan’s name a full dozen times.
“Look, I think President Obama is an admirer of sensible leadership,” Carney said. “And that doesn’t mean he agrees with every of one of his predecessors on every issue, but he does not look at this through an ideological lens.”
Perhaps that lens can train on a prescient speech Reagan made in 1973 as California governor, a rising Republican star whose impassioned belief in free society and smaller government inspired the congressional opponents whom Obama derides today.
“Government should do everything it can to reduce that intolerable burden [of taxes],” Reagan said. “Our opponents advocate solutions that will mean higher taxes and more and more Big Brother control over the lives of our people.”
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