Rare News Desk
If he were still alive today, William F. Buckley might have words for Sen. Ted Cruz.
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Last week, Cruz (R-Texas) stated his foreign policy views were more in line with the late President Ronald Reagan, than GOP favorite Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky). The two Republican senators finished first and second in the 2014 CPAC straw poll, though Cruz in a distant second.
The two traded barbs before and after the conservative activist ballots were counted.
“On one side you have the views of John McCain. The other end of the spectrum, you have the views of Rand Paul,” Cruz said. “Now, with respect, my views are very much the views of Ronald Reagan, which I would suggest is a third point on the triangle,” Cruz told the audience at a National Security Action Summit, after he had spoken at CPAC.
This echoed President George W. Bush’s Goldilocks strategy for selling tax cuts. Some say they are “too large,” some say they are “too small,” Bush said, but he thought they were “just right.” For “just right,” Cruz substituted “Ronald Reagan.”
Paul responded in his Breitbart News column, “Every Republican likes to think he or she is the next Ronald Reagan. Some who say this do so for lack of their own ideas and agenda.”
Ouch!
Paul continued, “Reagan was a great leader and President. But too often people make him into something he wasn’t in order to serve their own political purposes.”
Who is right?
The problem with invoking Reagan is that Reagan was a highly successful politician, not a demigod. He changed his mind, made mistakes and wasn’t always easy to pin down.
As president, Reagan didn’t deploy troops very often and in one case where he did — in Beirut — he regretted it and reversed course.
In America’s long Cold War with the Soviet Union, there was always the nuclear question. In “The Reagan I Knew” Buckley recalls praising Reagan at a party in the 1980s, arguing that if he felt the need to “push the button” he would do so.
But maybe not. “Twenty years after saying that,” in the presence of Reagan himself, “I changed my mind,” Buckley wrote.
According to Reagan’s diaries, he hated nuclear weapons. One of the reasons he pushed missile defense technology so hard was that he wanted to find a way to neutralize the threat of nuclear Armageddon.
In a 2013 interview with Rare, Buckley’s brother, former Sen. James Buckley agreed with his brother’s take on Reagan, and applied it to Cruz.
Paul argues that what America needs is not a Reagan acolyte but a “Commander-in-Chief who will defend the country and project strength, but who is also not eager for war.”
In his voting record, Cruz has showed some evidence that he could be that sort of leader. In his speeches? Not so much.
