Campaign Notes: The Reagan Factor

By John Barron

The Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley California, about an hour north of Los Angeles, was an interesting venue for last week’s Republican candidate debate.

The sprawling hacienda-style complex sits at the top of a winding eucalypt-lined drive, and not only has the sort of video-clip and old suit displays you might expect, but an exact replica of the Oval Office and a massive hangar containing Reagan’s bullet-proof limousine, the Marine One helicopter and the surprisingly basic Air Force One Boeing 747 used by Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan.

On an ordinary day, the Reagan Library looks rather like a Presidential-themed retirement villa, full of tanned and aging Republicans in mobility scooters accompanied by children and grandchildren trying to show an interest in the interests of their inheritance. But this past Wednesday was no ordinary day. The eight Republicans whose polling and fundraising numbers qualify them to be allowed on the debate stage gathered for the next round of the audition to see who will take on Barack Obama next year.

We already know there’ll be a Barack Obama Presidential Library, but twenty years from now will there be a Mitt Romney Presidential Library, a Richard Perry Presidential Library or, just possibly, a Michele Bachman or Jon Huntsman Presidential Library?

Surely the thought crossed the minds of the candidates, in between the final mental rehearsals of scripted answers to anticipated questions. The candidates were shown through the Reagan exhibit for a photo-opportunity in the faux-Oval office and with the real Nancy Reagan, who, despite the many snide attacks during her husband’s Presidency, now enjoys almost universal, Queen Mother-like affection.

It all stands as a reminder that running for the Presidency of the United States is running for a place in history. For the current crop of Republicans will that place be a chapter or a footnote?

Alongside Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Kennedy, Ronald Reagan now inhabits the Presidential Pantheon in the public mind. Reagan is over 20 per cent more popular in death than he was in office. But why? Reagan’s detractors will say he was as empty as those old suits now hanging in glass cases at his Presidential Library. That he was an actor who talked tough and won the Cold War like a billionaire at a poker table: not by playing a great hand, but by putting more chips on the table than anyone could match.

But that is to miss the key to Reagan’s appeal, and his great lesson for those who aspire to follow in his footsteps.

According to his son and namesake Ron Reagan Jr., his father’s secret was his likeability. “He was just a hugely likeable guy,” Reagan Jr. told me recently in Seattle. Even Reagan’s congressional opponents, including the legendary liberal House Speaker Tip O’Neill, found it was impossible not to like President Reagan, even when they fundamentally disagreed with him.

Likeability will be crucial for the success of the next Republican Presidential nominee, and right now Rick Perry seems to have it in spades over Mitt Romney, just as Barack Obama won the likeability stakes over Hillary Clinton in 2008.

But will the kind of older American who wheel around the corridors of the Reagan Library approve of Governor Perry calling social security a “Ponzi scheme,” as he again did at the Reagan debate?

It’s also worth noting, while President Obama’s job approval numbers have slipped into dangerous territory, and approval of his handling of the economy is simply dismal, the majority of Americans still like him [PDF] and he remains more popular than his party, the Congress, and by most measures [PDF] the Republicans who seek to be his successor.

Ultimately, that Reagan Factor of simple likeability could be decisive next year.

13 September 2011