Betraying the Reagan Revolution

Posted on Jan. 10, 2006

By Robert Scheer

Oh what a tangled web these no-longer-young Republicans weave when first they practice to deceive!

The plumb line that runs down through the cesspool of the festering Abramoff-DeLay scandal is the conceit that the scions of the Reagan Revolution, a generation of young Republican activists summoned by God and party, were morally superior creatures who had only pure ideological motives for cutting the country’s social safety nets in the name of “small government.”

More than two decades before he pleaded guilty to felonies in two jurisdictions, Jack Abramoff was the hard-nosed chairman of the College Republicans, and his lieutenants were Harvard graduate Grover Norquist, who rose to political power as president of the American Taxpayers Association, and a young Georgia student named Ralph Reed, who would later become the face of the Christian Coalition. “Today, our party readies itself to mount the wave of the future,” Abramoff sermonized as a 25-year-old at the Republican National Convention in 1984, as reported in Mother Jones magazine. “Will we ride that wave to glory, or will it send us crashing ashore? If we’re the party of tax cuts, and not the party of ‘ifs’ and ‘buts,’ then we’re riding our wave.… If we try to outspend big fat Tip O’Neill, or rush to Geneva to cut a deal, we’ll crash ashore.”