There are quite a few embarrassing clips on YouTube of Mitt Romney straying from the traditional Republican line, but among the more damaging has to do with Ronald Reagan. In an October 1994 debate with Ted Kennedy, Romney distanced himself from the 40th president, saying, “I was an independent at the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”
Sunday, Mike Huckabee emphasized Romney’s anti-Reagan past, telling CNN, “He was against Ronald Reagan’s legacy and said he wasn’t a part of that Bush-Reagan thing.” This, of course, led Romney to push back on who can best represent the Reagan legacy.
“I must admit that I find the vision and the direction that Ronald Reagan laid out for this country to be very powerful and very compelling,” Romney told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “I’ll tell you, Ronald Reagan would have never raised taxes like Mike Huckabee did, Ronald Reagan would have never said let’s give tuition breaks to illegals like Mike Huckabee did, Ronald Reagan would have never stood by and pushed for a budget that more than doubled during his term as president.”
“Mike Huckabee as a matter of fact has a very different record than Ronald Reagan, and I’m pretty proud that my record stands up quite well.”
Now, I don’t much care which of these two Republicans most resembles Reagan, and it makes very little difference to me whose attacks are more effective.
But if the GOP is going to fight over Reagan’s record, they should at least try to get it right.
Let’s take yesterday’s claims one at a time. Romney said, “Ronald Reagan would have never raised taxes like Mike Huckabee did.” Actually, Reagan raised taxes far more than Mike Huckabee did.
[R]aising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly — but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year’s reduction. […]
Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives — and probably cost Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection — Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84. […]
Reagan continued these “modest rollbacks” in his second term. The historic Tax Reform Act of 1986, though it achieved the supply side goal of lowering individual income tax rates, was a startlingly progressive reform. The plan imposed the largest corporate tax increase in history — an act utterly unimaginable for any conservative to support today. Just two years after declaring, “there is no justification” for taxing corporate income, Reagan raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and closed corporate tax loopholes worth about $300 billion over that same period.
Romney said, “Ronald Reagan would have never said let’s give tuition breaks to illegals like Mike Huckabee did.” Actually, Reagan did something even more heretical: he supported amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
President Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to illegal immigrants when he signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 that affected mostly Latino immigrants living in the United States since 1982.
Of the nearly 4 million illegal immigrants eligible to apply for legal residency under the 1986 law, 55 percent were from Mexico, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. The law gave immigrants who came to America before 1982 one year, between May 1987 and May 1988, to apply for temporary resident status and permits for employment.
And Romney said, “Ronald Reagan would have never stood by and pushed for a budget that more than doubled during his term as president.” Maybe not, but let’s not pretend that Reagan was some kind of budget-cutter, either.
Though his budgets requested some cuts in some areas of discretionary spending, Reagan rapidly retreated and never seriously pushed them. As Lou Cannon, the Washington Post reporter who covered Reagan’s political career for 25 years, put it in his masterful biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, “For all the fervor they created, the first-term Reagan budgets were mild manifestos devoid of revolutionary purpose. They did not seek to ‘rebuild the foundation of our society’ (the task Reagan set for himself and Congress in a nationally televised speech of February 5, 1981) or even to accomplish the ‘sharp reduction in the spending growth trend’ called for in [his] Economic Recovery Plan.” By Reagan’s second term, the idea of seriously diminishing the budget was, to quote Stockman, “an institutionalized fantasy.” Though in speeches Reagan continued to repeat his bold pledge to “get government out of the way of the people,” government stayed pretty much where it was. […]
In fact, the budget grew significantly under Reagan. All he managed to do was moderately slow its rate of growth. What’s more, the number of workers on the federal payroll rose by 61,000 under Reagan. (By comparison, under Clinton, the number fell by 373,000.)
This isn’t really a defense of Huckabee, so much as it’s a reminder to the GOP that Reagan’s legacy is not quite what the party thinks it is.
