Leonard Benardo and Jennifer Weiss: The Ghosts of Presidencies Past. How Today's Republicans Need To Memorialise Reagan and Banish Bush

You wouldn’t be faulted for thinking the year was 1985. Republican presidential hopefuls have been tripping over one-another to invoke Ronald Reagan’s name and cast themselves as his heir apparent. Hardly an opportunity is missed for candidates to fasten themselves to the Reagan legacy, trumpeting his two terms as a watershed moment in the history of the executive branch. Reagan, in the eyes of GOP aspirants, has become a saintly, sanitized figure—a vessel for myth-making in the absence of any clear conservative ideology.

 

Merely by associating themselves with The Great Communicator, the current crop of candidates strive to get the Reagan bump. Newt Gingrich leads the Reagan-citers, laying personal claim to the Reagan mantle and often taking credit for the former president’s achievements. Mitt Romney calls his proposal for a multinational trade agreement the “Reagan Economic Zone,” and more recently craftily deployed Reagan’s pro-choice to pro-life shift to shield his own flip-flop on the issue. And Rick Santorum argues that “Ronald Reagan was courageous enough to go out and speak out about the forces of evil not just around the world but… in this country,” to deflect criticism of his own assertion that Satan would want to attack the US.

 

While the fortieth president gets top billing, the Republican candidates’ immediate predecessor— another GOP two-term president— has been given the ultimate silent treatment. Completely shut out from discussion during the raft of presidential debates, George W Bush fails to register even a mention from the competing presidential crowd. The silence is deafening. Not even an elephant in the room, the former president instead has been relegated to the Invisible Man, his 8 years in office neatly expunged from the record.

 

What happened to the man who exited the White House only a few years ago?..