The Col:

> Aside from Watergate , he was a pretty good President IMO. I would love to hear his thoughts of the current Republican party

I heard an interesting comment in the radio today. A political commentator quoted George H.W. Bush as saying that with the current ideological current in the Republican Party it would have been impossible for himself (Bush) or Ronald Reagan to be nominated for the Republican ticket. The reason is that the Republican Party has become radicalized to the right to such an extent that more "moderate" vies such as those of Republican presidents of the past would have been unacceptable to the Party caucuses.

I see Mitt Romney as a sort of compromise. On the one hand he represents the entrenched, powerful, traditional Republicans of the Reagan era. However, he also has to satisfy the extreme right wing views of the Tea Party and the likes of Newt Gingrich. Mitt Romney is stuck in between and the potential nomination of Ron Paul as VP is a symptom of that.

When I said that Romney reminds me of Nixon, it is because of certain inflexions of speech and his way of projecting himself politically. However, Mitt Romney is in many ways a polar opposite of Nixon.

Reading a little about Nixon, it is obvious that he would be labelled a "liberal" by today's Republicans. Consider these snippets of his career as a president:

"After he won reelection, Nixon found inflation returning. He reimposed price controls in June 1973. The price controls became unpopular with the public and businesspeople, who saw powerful labor unions as preferable to the price board bureaucracy."

Obviously the Price Control Board was an example of "big government".

"Nixon was a late convert to the conservation movement. Environmental policy had not been a significant issue in the 1968 election; the candidates were rarely asked for their views on the subject. He saw that the first Earth Day in April 1970 presaged a wave of voter interest on the subject, and sought to use that to his benefit; in June he announced the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)."

Nixon created the EPA, which is now seen as an "enemy" by those who call for indescriminate drilling withint the USA.

"In 1971, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts proposed a plan for universal federally run health insurance, partly motivated by dramatic rises in public and private health care expenditures. In response, Nixon proposed a health care plan which would provide insurance for low-income families, and require that all employees be provided with health care. As this still would have left some forty million people uncovered, Kennedy and the other Democrats declined to support it, and the measure failed, though a Nixon proposal for increased use of health maintenance organizations passed Congress in 1973."

Is it just me or did Nixon propose something akin to Obamacare?

Well, the true right wing nature of Nixon was more evident in his foreign policy in Asia, Africa and Latin America where he supported fascist dictators in an effort to fight Communism. It as the pursuit of fascist imperialist foregin policy that identifies Nixon as a right winger, otherwise his domestic poilicy was quite liberal in nature.

As for Ronald Reagan, it is interesting that he was divorced in 1948, leaving Janet Wyman and their to children, then remarrying in 1949 to Nancy Reagan (nee Davis) with who he had to children. In today's environment he would probably have failed to attract many voters because of his divorce, although some candiadates have been divorced and remarried.

Regan is known for lowering taxes, particularly for the higher income brackets of American society; however, we have the following:

"Conversely, Congress passed and Reagan signed into law tax increases of some nature in every year from 1981 to 1987 to continue funding such government programs as Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA), Social Security, and the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984 (DEFRA). Despite the fact that TEFRA was the "largest peacetime tax increase in American history", Reagan is better known for his tax cuts and lower-taxes philosophy."

If a candidate had proposed those tax increases to offset tax cuts, he would be labelled a liberal.

Of course, if we look at Democrat presidents, we will find actions which would contradict their "liberal" ideology. The reason is that presidents work within the limitations of the bipartisan system.