My friend Matthew Sheffield at Newsbusters has a good piece on this.
Contrary to Media Myth, Today’s GOP Is Less Conservative Compared to History — Newsbusters
It’s become a pretty much a staple of modern Democratic political rhetoric to say that today’s Republicans have departed from their predecessors in being more obstructionist toward liberal policy objectives. Since it’s something Democrats say a lot, it’s also a frequently repeated talking point in the self-described mainstream press as well.
Even some Republicans, like Bob Dole for instance, appear to believe this notion. Too bad it’s entirely a myth.
It’s particularly unfortunate to hear Dole buying into the myth because he was actually there and ought to remember how things were. When asked to reflect on some contrasts between the modern Republican Party and the one of his day, here’s what Dole had to say on the May 26 edition of Fox News Sunday.
“Reagan wouldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, because he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.”
It’s not hard to see where Dole would get such ideas. This line of thought is something that media liberals and their Democratic counterparts have been pushing for decades. Bill Clinton described himself as an “Eisenhower Republican” frequently. In 2008, liberals such as New York Times columnist Gail Collins tried to portray former leftist activist Barack Obama as some sort of moderate because he wasn’t calling for communist revolution in his speeches. Failed former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham called him a “raging moderate” a few years later.
The talking point has become almost unavoidable recently after Obama himself embraced it at the perfect place to make such an argument, a convention for customers of the Associated Press, the powerful wire service which actually has a greater reach and influence than the New York Times or any television channel.