MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—There are a couple of very funny lines in the campaign commercials that are now fouling the airwaves. You undoubtedly will be shocked to know that one of them is in a commercial promoting the campaign of Young Marco Rubio. In it, sincerity clinging to him like a fungus, he invites you to return America to what it used to be—"the greatest single greatest nation in all mankind." Yeah, whap.
The other one promotes Tailgunner Ted Cruz and, in it, he tells you that he's going back to "peace through strength," the "Reagan philosophy," in the Middle East, and if you can resist the temptation to yell, "Yeah, let's sell the mullahs more missiles!" at your TV, you're stronger than I am. It was in that spirit that I went Monday evening to the Sweeney American Legion Post on the north side of the city, where they were holding the traditional twilight liturgy of the First Church Of Reagan, Incarnate. Many jars of sacramental beer were being hoisted, and many slices of Eucharistic pizza consumed. And presiding over the rites as high priest was the Tailgunner himself, and all said Amen to him.
Our economy is growing at 1.8 percent. You know the only time in history when it was that low? It was in the years between 1978 and 1982, when we were coming out of the Jimmy Carter years. By his fourth years, it was 7.2 percent.
(Only a heretic would point out that there is more fudge in Cruz's historical account than there is in one of those darling notions shoppes in the White Mountains. For example, he fails to mention that, in 1982, after his first Laffer Curve budget blew a hole in the deficit and the country spun into a vicious recession and his party got its ass kicked in the midterm elections, in order to save his presidency, Reagan cut a deal with House Democrats and passed the biggest peacetime tax increase in the nation's history.)
He said he would defeat Soviet communism. The intelligentsia scoffed at him. But he called the Soviet empire for what it was, and he said it would be consigned to the ash-heap of history. But it wasn't just that. He enacted tax reform and reduced regulations and increased military spending and destroyed the Soviet Union economically.
(Only a heretic would point out that a pointless war in Afghanistan, Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, millions of anonymous Poles and Czechs, and the former Karol Wojtyla had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet bloc than did Arthur Laffer.)
I lived through those days and I never will cease to be amazed at how thoroughly the Mystical Body of Reagan suffuses a Republican candidate's narrative. The make up their own personal Reagans of the mind and, mysteriously, this Reagan always does exactly what they want him to do. I also lived through the days in which conservatives of the Tailgunner's stripe accused the actual Reagan of selling the country out to the wily Mikhail Gorbachev who, in reality, was just trying—and failing—to keep his entire empire from falling on his head. Listening to these guys, I begin to think I'm the most devout member of the entire congregation.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
