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Great Guys

ABC News provides the latest and greatest on the great and would be great, and how reincarnations of Your Name Here are thick on the campaign trail.

The Long Courtship

Ike’s Republican granddaughter has endorsed Barack Obama.

Susan Eisenhower got placed on the Washington Post op-ed page on a Saturday, and one suspects it will be portrayed as lacking the torchlight passing magic of the Caroline n’ Ted event last week.

Unmentioned is her husband Roald Sagdeev, Russian scientist and Hero of Socialist Labor.

Negative Barometer

Just in time for yet another gathering at the Reagan Library, the Los Angeles Times reports that incessant Reagan name checks have a negative correlation with Republican primary success. At least for Rudy Giuliani.

“My frame of reference is what works”

Thank goodness Barack Obama isn’t invested in the 60s like those tiresome boomers.

But he appears to replace their obsessions with his own free-floating grab bag of Time “Man of the Year” cliches. If he doesn’t care for the 60s perhaps he can catch up on the 80s.

Obama’s Reagan Mania recalls the grimly practical Deng Xiaoping, ”It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

And has Democratic Hall Monitor Paul Krugman points out, the Reagan Era wasn’t such a buoyant time, boyish charm aside.

“… the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan…Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.”

Truth & Consequences

Ronald Reagan’s miracle working powers are a staple of Republican writing and rhetoric .

Now comes a theory that the infectious optimism from beyond can smote Democrats, even from the grave. OpenLeft’s Matt Stoller suggests that “swing liberals” heard Barack Obama’s comments on the sunlit days of the Reagan Era, and that was enough to flip them to Hillary Clinton.

“We have been fighting Ronald Reagan’s psychologically diseased followers and predecessors since, well, since they called themselves the Confederacy and fought for slavery. And we will keep fighting them if we are to retain a republic. That’s why the self-identified very liberal Democrats swung away from Obama and took Nevada from him. Because he very self-consciously explained that he is not part of that fight, and they want a leader who is.”

Days of Yore