Steve Kornacki: Meet the Newest Reagan Revisionism Hall of Fame Inductee
[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.]
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jim Kessler: the latest pundit to use hindsight to invent nonexistent differences between Ronald Reagan's political standing in 1982 and Barack Obama's today.
Kessler, who is identified as vice-president of Third Way, penned an Op-Ed in Sunday's Washington Post under the headline, "To keep the 2010 midterms from repeating 1994, Democrats can learn from Reagan." In Kessler's telling, Reagan faced similar political peril heading into his first midterm -- soaring unemployment and declining popularity -- but ended up scoring a "triumph" in the '82 midterms by rallying "Americans behind his optimism ('Don't let anyone tell you that America's best days are behind her') and faith in American exceptionalism ('the last, best hope of man on Earth')."
Oh, come on.
The "triumph" that Kessler describes involved a loss of 26 House seats for the GOP. Yes, 26 is probably fewer than Obama's Democrats will lose this year -- but the GOP only had 191 total seats heading into the '82 midterms, 64 fewer than Democrats have today. The GOP also lost seven governorships, giving Democrats control of a total of 34, and nearly a dozen state legislative chambers. And while it's true that they did break even in Senate races, maintaining their majority, this was not the momentous development Kessler describes. Instead, it was a tribute to the GOP's (now pretty much extinct) liberal wing: Without left-of-center Republicans like Lowell Weicker and John Chafee, thorns in Reagan's side both, hanging on in their liberal states, the Senate would have been lost for the GOP....
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Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jim Kessler: the latest pundit to use hindsight to invent nonexistent differences between Ronald Reagan's political standing in 1982 and Barack Obama's today.
Kessler, who is identified as vice-president of Third Way, penned an Op-Ed in Sunday's Washington Post under the headline, "To keep the 2010 midterms from repeating 1994, Democrats can learn from Reagan." In Kessler's telling, Reagan faced similar political peril heading into his first midterm -- soaring unemployment and declining popularity -- but ended up scoring a "triumph" in the '82 midterms by rallying "Americans behind his optimism ('Don't let anyone tell you that America's best days are behind her') and faith in American exceptionalism ('the last, best hope of man on Earth')."
Oh, come on.
The "triumph" that Kessler describes involved a loss of 26 House seats for the GOP. Yes, 26 is probably fewer than Obama's Democrats will lose this year -- but the GOP only had 191 total seats heading into the '82 midterms, 64 fewer than Democrats have today. The GOP also lost seven governorships, giving Democrats control of a total of 34, and nearly a dozen state legislative chambers. And while it's true that they did break even in Senate races, maintaining their majority, this was not the momentous development Kessler describes. Instead, it was a tribute to the GOP's (now pretty much extinct) liberal wing: Without left-of-center Republicans like Lowell Weicker and John Chafee, thorns in Reagan's side both, hanging on in their liberal states, the Senate would have been lost for the GOP....