Ronnie JiuJitsu

by digby

Following up on Tristero’s post below where he says that nobody who openly criticized Reagan would be taken seriously by the Very Serious People who decide who’s allowed in the Serious club, it occurred to me that perhaps St. Ronnie himself is the best person to show us how to deal with such situations:

Here’s how he did it. From Reagan’s 1980 convention speech:

And, the time is now to redeem promises once made to the American people by another candidate, in another time and another place. He said, “For three years I have been going up and down this country preaching that government–federal, state, and local–costs too much. I shall not stop that preaching. As an immediate program of action, we must abolish useless offices. We must eliminate unnecessary functions of government…we must consolidate subdivisions of government and, like the private citizen, give up luxuries which we can no longer afford.”

“I propose to you, my friends, and through you that government of all kinds, big and little be made solvent and that the example be set by the president of the United States and his Cabinet.” So said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention in July 1932.

He used FDR to advance his own philosophy. It’s a great trick and I would hope that all the Democratic candidates have someone combing Republican presidents’ speeches for examples of their own. (I’m partial to Perlstein’s suggestion that they use Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon as the basis for saying they have a “Reagan foreign policy,” if only to see neocon heads explode all over Washington.)

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