Saturday, June 20, 2009

Grover Norquist's work on Ronald Reagan's legacy

From Crooks and Liars:
One of the more down-to-earth tributes was written by Norquist, who said: “Every conservative knows that we will win radical tax reform and reduction as soon as we elect a president who will sign the bill. The flow of history is with us. Our victories can be delayed, but not denied. This is the change wrought by Ronald Reagan.” Norquist all but revealed one of his missions in the coming two years — finding a presidential candidate who would assume the Reagan mantle in a way that neither Bush 41 nor Dole ever could — but not the other. His second big push was practically a guerrilla marketing campaign to make sure that the less-engaged Middle America would get the message that Reagan belonged in the pantheon of all-time greats right next to Lincoln, Washington and FDR. Norquist had learned the lessons of Normandy and of the Brandenburg Gate, which was that powerful symbols can mean a lot more than words (especially in a little-read policy journal), that a motorist under the big Sunbelt sky of Ronald Reagan Boulevard will absorb the message of the Gipper’s greatness without ever pondering if ketchup should be a vegetable in federally funded school lunches or if “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers” in Central America were drug-dealing thugs, the kind of stubborn things that popped up in those newspaper articles ranking the presidents.
I've never understood the 'worship' of Saint Ronnie, but now I can see who was force feeding the public the load of tripe about him.

2 comments:

Steve Bates said...

Forget St. Ronald. Give me Saint Arnold... arguably our best local not-so-micro-brewery.

Seriously: Norquist is a True Believer, and like all True Believers, he frightens me.

ellroon said...

He scares the crap outta me just because Republicans hang on his very words... We aren't through with the Neocon Agenda by a long shot.

We need more sunshine, garlic and silver crosses....