It was no surprise to find Martin Peretz making the case for "Gore, a Fiscal Conservative," in the pages of the Wall Street Journal last week. The editor-in-chief of the New Republic is also the press corps's Gore-booster-in-chief. What did come as a surprise for those who read the endorsement with care was the line about President Reagan: "Ronald Reagan was my favorite Republican president of this century, and at the idiosyncratically liberal New Republic we admired his vigorous anticommunism." Favorite? Admired?
Well, it's true that THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Fred Barnes and our contributing editor Charles Krauthammer penned some Reagan-admiring pieces for that magazine in the 1980s. But the editorials tell a different story.
Let's see. Here was the idiosyncratically liberal reaction to Reagan's famous speech at the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando in 1983: "According to Ronald Reagan, history is reaching a climax. He portrayed his country as embattled, set upon by enemies from without and within, fighting for nothing less than its reason for being. The enemy without is Communism, which the President described as 'the focus of evil in the modern world'; the speech left friends and foes around the world with the impression that the President of the United States was contemplating holy war."
And here is an idiosyncratic editorial reaction to a 1984 Reagan speech: "Ronald Reagan is making fools of the American people. We can draw no other conclusion from the President's speech last week on nuclear weapons and the state of Soviet-American relations. The speech must be compared with his other important orations in office, specifically the 'Star Wars' speech and the 'empire of evil' speech, both of them delivered last spring. He was lying then or he is lying now."
And there was this highly idiosyncratic October 1986 New Republic editorial: "When Reagan retires, . . . Americans will begin rubbing their eyes in rueful wonder at the aftermath of his eight-year national fiesta. Then, the question will be: How did he get away with it?"
We don't doubt that Mr. Peretz wishes to remember the 1980s differently. As a friend points out, the French have a name for this: maquis d'apres-guerre.