The Reagan Pundit Wars

Rachel Maddow's show started off with a good topic today.

The subject: Paul Krugman's new book, "Conscience of a Liberal" and how it has started a string of right wing attacks on Krugman, especially from David Brooks, for daring to criticize Ronald Reagan. Yes, that right wing diety, Ronald Reagan.

Brooks: Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months...

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

Paul Krugman then fires back. Now remember that these men work for the same newspaper, so it's pretty rare that op-eds in the same paper take swipes at each other.

Krugman: So there's a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon's Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that 'I believe in states' rights,' he didn't mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

But was Reagan a racist or does Brooks have it right in saying it is blown out of proportion? Here's Bob Herbert, another op-ed columnist from the same paper!

Herbert: Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew. ...

...And Reagan meant it. He was opposed to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the same year that Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were slaughtered. As president, he actually tried to weaken the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He opposed a national holiday for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He tried to get rid of the federal ban on tax exemptions for private schools that practiced racial discrimination. And in 1988, he vetoed a bill to expand the reach of federal civil rights legislation.

Congress overrode the veto.

Reagan also vetoed the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Congress overrode that veto, too.

So was Reagan a racist? In the meantime, what are all those GOP primary candidates going to do? Keep echoing Reagan's name at every debate as the great leader they think he was or shy away from St. Ronald of the Right Wing?

Timothy Noah at Slate has a more complete history of the feud.