Trying to be like the Gipper

Sarah Palin invokes him. Mitt Romney glorifies him. The "tea party" movement hopes to recapture him. And the Republican Party still can't get over him.

Six years after his death, and almost a century since his birth, conservatives are more transfixed than ever by Ronald Reagan. "What would Reagan Do?" is a leading motto for the right. You can get the slogan - or its WWRD acronym - on a bumper sticker, a T-shirt, a coffee mug, a thong.

Such obsessions are not unique to the right: Writing three years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, historian Richard Hofstadter noted that FDR so thoroughly monopolized the liberal imagination that his passing "left American liberalism demoralized and all but helpless."

Reagan was the most popular and successful Republican president of the past century, so it makes sense that he would be the shining model for conservatives, just as FDR has been the gold standard for liberals. (No small irony, since Reagan voted for FDR four times and modeled his statecraft after the Democrat's.)

But you can't assume the Reagan mantle simply by repeating his name ad nauseum or by bickering with primary opponents over who is more like him. That said, there are two largely unrecognized elements of Reagan's statecraft that his imitators should recognize and study if they truly want to emulate him.

The first is the deliberate but unseen crafting of Reagan's public profile. As we have come to learn with the opening over the past decade of Reagan's personal papers, his public style was a product of enormous discipline, hard work and calculation. Long before Palin was ridiculed for writing reminders on her hand, Reagan was derided as the 3-by-5 note card candidate (actually, he used 4-by-6 cards) - but his cards were his means of staying succinctly on point and delivering his message in a compelling way.

The second underappreciated aspect of Reagan's statecraft is his idiosyncratic ideology - entirely a product of his self-study, much of which he concealed. Some of it was orthodox, small-government conservatism (he once stated that "the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism"), but it was leavened with an older liberalism, part of which he inherited from FDR.

Virtually all the criticisms of Palin - calling her an anti-intellectual lightweight who can't name a magazine she reads or a founding father she admires - were lobbed at Reagan before and during his time in the White House, and the critics hailed from both sides of the aisle. The GOP establishment was very uncomfortable with Reagan, even after he'd won two presidential elections in landslides - and who can forget Clark Clifford's "amiable dunce" label?

But while the parallels between them are evident, it is far from clear that Palin appreciates Reagan's discipline and substantive grand strategy. In many of her speeches and media appearances she tends to ramble on, with none of the crispness and rhetorical force of Reagan's formulas. With the partial exception of energy, she has yet to identify a set of signature issues that can carry her particular stamp. And while her reasons for resigning early from Alaska's governorship are plausible, they deprive her of one of Reagan's greatest assets - an extensive executive record.

Palin and the tea partiers might do themselves the most good if they considered Reagan's failures and shortcomings. They should ask themselves: Why didn't the Reagan revolution succeed in erecting lasting barriers to the government gigantism we are seeing today?

Frustrated with his inability to control a sprawling government and anticipating a climate such as today's, late in his second presidential term Reagan began arguing for a package of five constitutional amendments that he called his "Economic Bill of Rights." (Once again he borrowed from FDR, who used the same label for a very different set of ideas in 1944.) Reagan's package included two familiar standbys he'd requested in nearly every State of the Union address he delivered: a balanced budget amendment and a line-item veto. But he added three more proposals: a federal spending limit (revived a few days ago by Republican Reps. Mike Pence and Jeb Hensarling), a "supermajority" vote requirement for Congress to raise taxes and a prohibition on wage and price controls.

Granted, seeking multiple constitutional amendments may not be the most conservative of initiatives, but if the tea party faction wishes to stand for something concrete rather than remain merely a protest movement, it might consider embracing Reagan's Economic Bill of Rights, perhaps with the addition of term limits and an anti-earmark provision to keep the politicians away.

Wittingly or not, Palin hit the nail on the head in her keynote address at the Tea Party Convention last month: "Let us not get bogged down in the small squabbles; let us get caught up in the big ideas. To do so would be a fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan." Meaningful limits on the size of government is one such idea. To pull it off, one thing above all is required: Do your homework. Reagan did his.