Philadelphia
Democrats are mourning the passing of the party of Reagan.
Speakers evoked the Republican giant throughout the week at the Democratic National Convention, idolizing him as the conservative that once was in contrast to the GOP nominee that America now faces.
“Ronald Reagan called America ‘a shining city on a hill,'” President Barack Obama said Wednesday during his convention speech, which some said channeled Reagan’s signature optimism. “Donald Trump calls it ‘a divided crime scene’ that only he can fix.”
Earlier Wednesday night, California lieutenant governor Gavin Newsom lamented that Reagan’s hopefulness had been replaced with Trump’s pessimism.
“Trump strangled the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan and replaced ‘tear down that wall’ with the cynical bigotry of ‘build that wall,'” Newsom said.
Democratic lawmakers also looked to the Cold War leader for foreign policy guidance, faced simultaneously with suspicions that the Kremlin had breached the Democratic party’s servers and an administration proposal to increase cooperation with Russia in Syria.
“Trust but verify, as some great president once said,” Illinois senator Dick Durbin told THE WEEKLY STANDARD Wednesday when asked how the lack of trust between Russia and the U.S. would influence the administration’s Syria strategy.
Delaware senator Tom Carper cited the same saying.
“What did President Reagan used to say? Trust but verify,” Carper told TWS.
California representative Adam Schiff, ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, evoked Reagan Thursday to emphasize the divergence of Trump’s foreign policy stance from the conservative norm.
“He is signaling to Putin that … he may very well support the repeal of the sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, that he may look the other way and not honor the obligations under the NATO treaty if [Putin] were to intervene in the Baltic nations or Poland,” Schiff said Thursday during an event hosted by Politico. “These are astounding things for any major candidate to say, particularly one coming from the so-called party of Reagan.”
Some have noted that Democrats are taking on features that were once typical of conservatives, such as skepticism of Russia and an expert focus on national security. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is also seen by many as a foreign policy hawk.
Doug Elmets, a former member of the Reagan administration, was scheduled to speak Thursday at the Democratic convention.
