Pajamas Media's A.W.R. Hawkins recalls that the Left and the media (the latter being a subset of the former) never stopped pounding away at Ronald Reagan in their attempt to define him as “dumb cowboy”:
But a funny thing happened on the way to Reagan’s bid for re-election. To the media’s chagrin, it became obvious that the “dumb cowboy” was deeply beloved by the citizens of this nation. He beat Walter Mondale in the greatest landslide victory in American history by taking every state but one on election night.Read the full Hawkins op-ed here.
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The specifics of both his domestic agenda and foreign policy notwithstanding, his possession of a tremendous amount of common sense made him a president to whom the people could relate.
Currently, this same kind of common sense is drawing crowds of people to bookstores around the country where they wait in line for hours just to get the chance to shake Palin’s hand after she signs their copy of Going Rogue – which sold 1,000,000 copies in its first two weeks.
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When Palin talks, people from all walks of life listen. When she says we need to be cutting taxes instead of raising them, fighting terrorists instead of babying them, supporting our military instead of second-guessing it, and backing off the seeming endless push for global warming legislation until all the ramifications of Climategate are clear, conservative Americans hear a common-sense approach that sounds very much like Reagan.
This is not to say Palin could be Reagan’s equal. It is to say that if she’s dumb, I hope she’s dumb like Reagan.
- JP
What amazes me about Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in 1984 was that in the state he failed to carry, Minnesota, Reagan lost by only 0.18 percent of the vote. Mondale just barely succeeded not only in carrying his home state, but in not replacing Alf Landon as the candidate who received the fewest electoral votes in a two-way election.
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