Speaking of Reagan, the Bush White House and the GOP are making every effort to tie the current president to the “Reagan legacy,” but criticism of the comparison is coming from an interesting place: Reagan’s family.
The New York Times had a good article today noting the obvious hostily from Nancy Reagan, Patti Davis, and Ron Jr. towards Bush.
Nancy and Patti, for example, haven’t been shy about expressing their disapproval of Bush’s stem-cell policies.
[Kenneth M. Duberstein, Mr. Reagan’s former chief of staff], who is close to Nancy Reagan and guided her in her advocacy of stem-cell research while her husband was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, said that did not mean Mrs. Reagan would let the stem-cell issue subside.
“Nancy Reagan is not somebody who walks away from anything,” Mr. Duberstein said. “When she takes on a cause and a belief, she is very much like her husband. I think this one is very dear to her heart.”
It is also dear to her family. Ms. Davis wrote passionately about her father’s illness in the online version of Newsweek, this week and last month. “A messy, horrible war that has spun out of control could very well determine the next election,” Ms. Davis wrote before her father’s death. “So should the miracle of stem-cell research — a miracle the Bush White House thinks it can block.”
And Ron Jr. used his eulogy last week to take a subtle slap at Bush by chastising politicians who use religion “to gain political advantage.” It was the latest in a series of harsh criticisms.
[A] friend of the Reagan family, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Reagan, who did not return a call seeking comment on Monday, was deeply uncomfortable with the way the Bush administration intertwined religion and politics and felt compelled to say so at the burial of his father, a ceremony watched by millions.
“I think he was making a more profound statement about style,” this friend said, “and the danger of religion in politics.”
The funny part about this is that it isn’t particularly new — the Reagans have never seemed fond of Bush.
Ron Reagan, a television commentator who has frequently been critical of Mr. Bush, has already said as much. In 2000, he fired a shot at Mr. Bush in Philadelphia during the Republican convention, which featured a tribute to his father. “What’s his accomplishment?” Mr. Reagan asked then. “That he’s no longer an obnoxious drunk?”
If anything, these remarks were mild when compared to what Ron Jr. told Salon a year ago.
In an interview with Salon in April 2003, Ron Reagan was much less subtle in his assessment of the Bush presidency, denouncing it as “overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don’t trust these people.”
Reagan’s scorn for the man who would be his father was withering: “My father was a man — that’s the difference between him and Bush. To paraphrase Jack Palance, my father crapped bigger ones than George Bush.”
I guess we won’t be seeing Ron Jr. at the Republican National Convention this summer.