Been there, read that, got the bumper sticker

Peter Heck, on OneNewsNow's Perspectives blog, remembers how the liberal media threw everything it had at Ronald Reagan to try to stop his rise to the presidency thirty years ago. Heck finds the comparison of the media's words and actions then to what they have been trying to do for the last fourteen months to Sarah Palin stunning:

First, the media attempted to downplay Reagan's intellect. They called him a buffoon, an empty suit, dim. They said this despite Reagan's articulate approach to issues and his effective leadership of the country's most populous state. Surely no one needs to be reminded of the Tina Fey parodies, the New York Times' references to "Caribou Barbie," or Newsweek's declaration that Palin was an "ill-informed, inarticulate, shopaholic" to see how little has changed in the left's playbook. They said all this of Palin despite her breadth of knowledge on key domestic issues like energy and her effective leadership of the country's largest state.

The old media also denounced Reagan as unqualified. He was just a "B-movie actor" who spent more time focusing on campus athletics at his second-rate college than he did academics. That sounds startlingly similar to CNN's Fareed Zakaria who wrote, "Sarah Palin is utterly unqualified to be vice president," and other left-wing media sources that scoffed at her degree from the "substandard" University of Idaho.

The parallels don't end there:

Reagan was the target of ageism (New York Times Magazine in 1976 proclaimed Reagan "too old to run"), while Palin is the target of sexism (the Today Show, Washington Post, and PBS all suggested Palin should be staying home with her kids).

Reagan was proclaimed politically dead after his term as governor ended (Newsweek in a 1971 piece called "Ronald Reagan's Slow Fade" said that Sacramento would "mark the end of Ronald Reagan's political road"), while Palin has been labeled finished after resigning the governorship of Alaska (David Shuster on MSNBC prophesied, "I've said it before, I'll say it again, Sarah Palin will never recover from this....she has no future").

Read it. Read it all.

- JP