McCain's Move to Canonize "St. Ronnie"

Will Bunch
HuffPost

"The former president is certainly a suitable subject for public debate. His supporters credit him with forcing down the Iron Curtain, so it is odd that some of them have helped create the Soviet-style chill embedded in the idea that we, as a nation, will not allow critical portrayals of one of our own recent leaders." -- New York Times editorial, Nov. 5, 2003.

Anyone feeling a cold blast tonight? I am, and it's coming courtesy of Sen. John McCain, the man who might have been sitting in the Oval Office tonight as the 44th president -- if the economy had only waited two months longer to tank, and had Sarah Palin not made the acquaintance of one Katie Couric. In his race for the White House, McCain's effort to prove to the GOP's right wing that he wasn't really a moderate-to-conservative-to-liberal-to-conservative-again flip flopper led him to grab the Ronald Reagan mantle so hard he practically ripped it right out the fireplace.

He said he'd been a foot soldier in the "Reagan Revolution" and made a fantastical claim about celebrating Reagan's political ascent from his Hanoi prison cell. But as I learned when I was researching my book "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," McCain was ignoring the reality that as a center-right newcomer to Congress in the 1980s, he frequently criticized the Gipper and opposed him as often as one-third of the time. Whatever..it was politics, and it still didn't get him to the White House.

(More here.)