Tapscott’s Rule One (TRO) states that “the liberal conventional wisdom is always wrong.” (Number Two, by the way, is Always Refer to Number One).
The TRO applies pretty much in every field of human endeavour because there are liberals posing as morally superior beings of unsurpassed wisdom everywhere you look.
But nowhere is the TRO more important than in understanding Republican presidential politics. There, you can hardly turn around in The New York Times or on CNN without bumping into some nostrum that epitomizes the liberal conventional wisdom.
You know what I mean – “Moderate Republicans are the party’s best hope,” “The Social Conservative Issues are losers,” “Republicans are the ‘Party of the Rich,” etc. etc.
Bill McGurn of The Wall Street Journal addresses a bevy of such nostrums this morning in a column entitled “Reagan was a sure loser, too.”
Here’s just one juicy pull-quote from a column that is truly must-reading on a day like today, which just happens to be Super Tuesday:
“Then as now, the chattering classes wondered aloud whether a candidate who could win the Republican nomination could prevail against President Carter in November.
“On March 1, former President Gerald Ford amplified that view when he told a New York Times reporter, ‘every place I go and everything I hear, there is the growing, growing sentiment that Governor Reagan cannot win the election.'”
Reagan, of course, won the 1980 nomination because those crazy conservatives who make up the “Republican base” wouldn’t listen to liberal reason.
And, just as predicted, Reagan went on to lose the election to President Carter in a titanic landslide from which the GOP would not recover until 1996 when the conservative base finally regained its senses and nominated President Bob Dole….
OK, I have somehow stumbled back to reality now.
Anyway, you can read McGurn’s fine column here. You’ll want to refer back to this passage from it tomorrow morning when the legions of talking heads tell us that Mitt Romney is either shamelessly pandering to the GOP base, or can’t be trusted to be a real conservative if he wins the election:
“Yes, the parallels to 1980 take you only so far, and Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan. Still, at this same point in his campaign for the GOP nomination, neither was Reagan.
“The President Reagan we rightly admire for bringing down the Berlin Wall, reviving the U.S. economy, and attracting into the GOP millions of disaffected Democrats was still to come.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
