Obama Risks Alienating Republicans By Using Facts

Radical Tactic Sparks Outrage

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In what some critics are calling the most radial tactic ever employed in a State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama risked alienating congressional Republicans last night by repeatedly using facts.

Mr. Obama stirred controversy throughout the speech with his relentless references to facts, data, and things that have actually happened, all long considered the third rail of American politics.

As the President made reference to tax rates and unemployment numbers, as well as sixteen separate mentions of Osama bin Laden, congressional Republicans’ blood began to boil.

After the speech, a furious Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters, “It’s been a longstanding tradition in our politics not to use facts in a State of the Union Address, a tradition the President chose to ignore in an outrageous way tonight.  I won’t stand for it and the American people won’t stand for it.”

“We want to work with the President for the good of the American people,” added House Speaker John Boehner.  “But he’s going to have to take facts off the table.  That’s a deal-breaker for us.”

The President did not mention any of his GOP presidential rivals by name in his speech, but at one point said that government should be “leaner,” a blatant jab at former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

 Borowitz Report.

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The solar storm that showered the Earth on Tuesday, Jan. 24, was one of the strongest such occurrences in recent years.

It was only a minor nuisance for people on Earth, but for some, it was a great chance to catch northern lights or aurora borealis, a natural light effect caused by the collision of solar particles with atoms in the high altitude atmosphere.

One of the most beautiful such videos comes from Helge Mortensen who captured the nature’s light show in Norway.

 Solar Storm Puts Beautiful Northern Lights on Display [VIDEO].

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Ran Paul was detained ‘indefinitely’ after refusing a full body pat-down in

Close

By TIM MAK | 1/23/12 10:37 AM EST Updated: 1/23/2012

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was blocked from boarding a flight Monday by the Transportation Security Administration in Nashville, Tenn., after refusing a full body pat-down, POLITICO has confirmed.

“I spoke with him five minutes ago and he was being detained indefinitely,” Paul spokesperson Moira Bagley said. “The image scan went off; he refused patdown.”

Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), tweeted out news of the incident, saying that there had been an “anomaly” with a body scanner.

“My son @SenRandPaul being detained by TSA for refusing full body pat-down after anomaly in body scanner in Nashville. More details coming,” wrote the authenticated Twitter account of presidential candidate Ron Paul.

The TSA disputed this characterization of the incident.

The Kentucky senator triggered an alarm during routine airport screening and declined to finish the process, said a TSA official, but was “not detained at any point.” A targeted pat-down is usually used to address the alarm.

“Passengers, as in this case, who refuse to comply with security procedures are denied access to the secure gate area. He was escorted out of the screening area by local law enforcement,” the official said.

Shortly before noon, the TSA said Paul had been re-booked on another flight and went through the screening process again without incident.

After he was first stopped, Paul told The AP in a telephone interview that he asked for another scan after setting the scanner off but refused a pat-down, after which he was “detained” at a small cubicle and missed his flight to Washington.

Paul, a Republican, was traveling to Washington, when he was detained. He noted earlier on his Twitter that he was planning to speak at the March for Life.

“Today I’ll speak to the March for Life in DC. A nation cannot long endure w/o respect for the right to Life. Our Liberty depends on it,” tweeted Rand Paul at 9:49 A.M.

The TSA first released a statement to POLITICO without referring to the specific incident.

“When an irregularity is found during the TSA screening process, it must be resolved prior to allowing a passenger to proceed to the secure area of the airport. Passengers who refuse to complete the screening process cannot be granted access to the secure area in order to ensure the safety of others traveling,” said TSA Spokesperson Jonella Culmer.

Ron Paul’s presidential campaign released a strongly worded statement Monday afternoon, blistering the TSA for its practices.

“The police state in this country is growing out of control. One of the ultimate embodiments of this is the TSA that gropes and grabs our children, our seniors and our loved ones and neighbors with disabilities. The TSA does all of this while doing nothing to keep us safe,” it said.

The incident was first disclosed by the senator’s spokesperson on Twitter.

“Just got a call from @senrandpaul. He’s currently being detained by TSA in Nashville,” read her tweet just minutes later, at 9:59 A.M.

Like his father, Rand Paul has libertarian leanings and has been a fierce critic of TSA’s pat-downs of passengers at airports, which he views as government overreach. The senator grilled TSA Administrator John Pistole last year after a 6-year-old girl from Paul’s hometown, was patted down by airport security.

“I guess this little girl would be part of the random pat-downs, this little girl from Bowling Green, Kentucky, one of my constituents,” Paul said, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader. “They’re still quite unhappy with you guys as well as myself and a lot of other Americans who think you’ve gone overboard, you’re missing the boat on terrorism because you’re doing these invasive searches on six-year-old girls.”

Rand Paul detained by TSA – Tim Mak – POLITICO.com.

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Concerned White House Aides Say Obama Has Not Stopped Laughing Since Saturday Night

Staff Mystified by Uncharacteristic Giddiness

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – White House aides are alarmed by uncharacteristic behavior on the part of President Obama, who they say has been laughing uncontrollably since 7 PM Saturday night.

The aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that they heard “unusual howls” coming from the Oval Office just after the seven o’clock hour on Saturday evening, causing them to rush to the President to ascertain the cause of the uproar.

“It was weird,” one aide said.  “He was just watching cable news.”

The staff members thought little of the normally reserved President’s giggle attack until it continued throughout the weekend, which saw Mr. Obama laughing uncontrollably and stopping only to gasp for air.

Ever since Saturday, Mr. Obama has been oddly giddy throughout White House staff meetings, the aide said, and has been seen doodling the initials “N.G.” in the margins of memos “like a love-struck schoolgirl.”

“The only thing we can think of that N.G. might stand for is Not Good,” the aide said.  “But why would he be so happy about something that’s not good?”

Mr. Obama’s high spirits were on evidence today in a brief White House appearance, in which the President made the following statement about the administration’s energy policies: “Going forward, the United States of America will bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha.”

 Borowitz Report.

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Sissela Bok, a senior visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, is the author of, among other books, “Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life.”

UPDATED JANUARY 22, 2012

Few members of the public have any desire to let politicians lie to them. Why, then, don’t they reject candidates shown to have lied? Sometimes they do, if the lie is important and there is clear evidence that it took place. But most of the time, the truth is hard to discern amid the barrage of accusations and counter-accusations about fraud, the broken promises, and the outright lies that fly fast and loose among campaigns.

The worst outcome would be for politicians to lie when they think that they will get away with it, hoping that enough people will be misled and that others won’t hold it against them.

If citizens do not trust what candidates say, then they cannot interpret the information they need to vote. This cuts at the very roots of what we mean by democracy, founded on the consent of the governed.

The worst outcome would be for everyone to give up — for voters to conclude that all politicians lie and for politicians to lie when they think that they will get away with doing so, hoping that enough people will be misled and that others won’t hold it against them.

To reverse course, voters and politicians alike should set their standards for honesty higher. This calls for doing their best to distinguish between lies and honest mistakes; between lies that have been proved and lies that are only suspected; between deception through outright lies, half-truths and silence; between foolish promises or predictions and knowingly false ones; and between slipping into a lie and undertaking a policy of deceit — choosing to be someone who deals with others through deceit.

The temptation is strong, in our partisan climate, for politicians, their supporters and all who have a stake in their victory to view their own misstatements as innocuous compared with those of their opponents. To the extent that they choose to engage in distortion and allow others to carry out smear campaigns on their behalf, they will contribute further to public distrust and to doubts about their personal character and integrity.

 When Lies Become the Norm in Politics – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

January 22, 2012, 11:45 PM

What the Left Gets Right

By THOMAS B. EDSALL

Today’s column is a counterpart to last week’s, in which some thoughtful liberals responded to the question, “What does the right get right?”

This time around, I asked a number of conservative analysts, writers and think-tank scholars the corresponding question, “What does the left get right?”

The praise voiced by liberals in the previous column for some key attributes of conservatism was surprisingly full-throated. The conservatives I spoke to over the past few days, on the other hand, carefully limited the scope of their tributes, even as they acknowledged the virtue of certain liberal values.

A few conservative concessions to liberalism’s strengths were made without qualification; others were begrudging. Nonetheless, in the conservative assessment, common themes emerge:

Liberals recognize the real problems facing the poor, the hardships resulting from economic globalization and the socially destructive force of increasing inequality.

Liberals do not dismiss or treat as ideologically motivated scientific findings, especially the sharpening scientific consensus that human beings contribute significantly to climate change.

Liberals stand with those most in need, and believe in the inclusion of such previously marginalized groups as blacks, Hispanics, women and gays.

As I sifted through the responses, it became clear that a widely shared view among contemporary conservatives is that liberals are all heart and no head, that their policies are misguided — thrown off track by an excessively emotional compassion that fails to recognize the likelihood of unintended consequences.

Conservatives, in this view, should take charge of policy making, leaving the left to contribute from the periphery by advocating for the needs of the poor and marginalized.

Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives under George W. Bush, is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. In reply to a query from The Times, he wrote:

I’m a conservative because I believe conservatism is a right and wise political philosophy, one that does the most to encourage human flourishing, while liberalism — at least modern-day, reactionary liberalism — is a wrong and unwise political philosophy that can impede human flourishing.

That said, what I do credit liberalism (and some liberals) for are certain sentiments and impulses that are admirable and important. They include solidarity with the poor; a clear-eyed view of the effects that globalization and modernization can have on some workers; a willingness to view economic matters through a moral prism; and a belief in the common good rather than merely the individual good.

While the actual policy proposals of the left “are in almost every instance misguided,” Wehner declared, “I do think that liberals are able to force certain issues into the national debate and, as a result, conservatives are forced to grapple with issues they might otherwise ignore.”

Wehner does not give his side a free pass, especially on the issue of science and global warming:

I credit liberals with drawing attention to anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming (AGW). In arguing that Earth’s temperature is warming, and human behavior has contributed to that warming, liberals are firmly on the side of science. Those on the right who insist that AGW is a ‘hoax’ are, I think, wrong, in a way that is harmful to conservatism.

Gerard Alexander, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia, similarly cited the role of liberals in identifying “problems that genuinely need to be addressed.”

Liberals suffer, Alexander argued, from:

an exaggerated sense of what is fixable. But without their prompting, conservatives might have been content to do very little or nothing about a series of shortcomings and failings that are amenable to at least being ameliorated, if not fixed. Prominent examples include segregation, some aspects of poverty and inequality and a number of environmental problems.

Andrew Ferguson, senior editor of the Weekly Standard, was more effusive in his praise. “American liberals are alert to important matters that American conservatives commonly shortchange,” Ferguson wrote. “Liberals agree with Samuel Johnson that a decent provision for the poor is the true test of a civilization.”

Ferguson did not stop there:

Liberals are sensitive to the unsettling potential of income disparities. They are attentive to the overreaching of the federal government through its national security apparatus. They are less likely to pretend that scientific questions – is the planet getting warmer, for example, and if so, why? – are really ideological questions. They understand that the legacies of two centuries of slavery and another of Jim Crow are still active and still debilitating. And they are more realistic about the limits of American military power than many conservatives.

Unlike many of his colleagues on the right, Ferguson did not append repeated qualifications to his comments except to note that “whether liberals respond wisely to the issues that they are alert to is another question which, in our spirit of transideological friendship, I won’t address.”

Perhaps in part because of his background in Britain, Patrick N. Allitt, Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University and author of “The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History,” has a view of the virtues of liberalism that many others on the American right do not share. He stressed three areas where he joins liberals in parting company with the right:

First, they are justified in favoring a national health care system. Just as we regard it as reasonable in a wealthy society to offer everyone twelve years of education at government expense, in the belief that the society as a whole will benefit, so we should take steps to make sure everyone is reasonably healthy.

Second, liberals are right to favor gun control — in my view the more the better…. Conservatives ought to feel a sense of outrage that citizens can so easily kill one another.

Third, liberals understand that industrial societies are vulnerable to the business cycle and that, sometimes, large numbers of people become unemployed through no fault of their own. Although the operation of the free market will probably eventually create new employment opportunities, government alone has the resources to care for their welfare in the meantime. I think it’s a thoroughly conservative principle to believe that industrial societies should develop comprehensive welfare states.

One of the virtues of liberals, in the view of Craig Shirley, author of “Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America,” is that they correctly assess the failure of the Republican Party to live up to conservative principles.

“Liberals are right in thinking that the current G.O.P. is for all intents and purposes controlled by marauding consultants whose only interest is power and the access and money that comes with that power,” Shirley wrote. “What liberals get right is much of the intellectualism inside the G.O.P has been drained out over the past ten years.”

Peggy Noonan, a Wall Street Journal columnist and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, and William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, voiced affection for the liberalism of the past, but had little positive to say about contemporary liberalism.

“We can all agree it’s good to be on the side of those who need encouragement, yes? And I have very warm memories of thinking of the Democratic Party as representing that encouragement when I was a kid, and at its best the party still reflects some of that glow,” Noonan said.

Furthermore, she argued, “Liberals have been more welcoming – ‘Come in, join our club, join our movement.’ Conservatives have by nature and tradition been less summoning, less welcoming, as if they don’t know politics is a game of addition.” In the end, Noonan said, “Sympathy and warmth are two things liberalism got right in the 20th century. May they get them right in the 21st.”

Kristol believes that it is up to conservatives to carry forward the liberal banner:

Liberals used to get a lot more right than they do today, in my humble opinion. But today’s liberals can still be helpful in reminding conservatives that not everything that flies under the flag of capitalism should be praised or even defended, that Big Business can do as much damage as Big Labor and Big Finance almost as much as Big Government, and that American politics has to capture the spirit of Tom Paine as well as that of Edmund Burke. Above all, liberals can remind conservatives of the past achievements of liberalism — which it’s today up to conservatives, primarily, to defend.

Thinking over this two-week experiment in “transideological friendship,” as Andrew Ferguson put it, it was impossible not to notice that conservatives were more strategic in their replies, conceding compassion to the left but not political legitimacy. Liberals, in contrast, were less calculating and perhaps more intellectually honest, ceding substantial ground to their adversaries.

In the current environment, strategic calculation is arguably more likely to pay off. Newt Gingrich’s success on Saturday in the South Carolina primary suggests that pulling hard to the right can be a winning strategy — at least temporarily.

In Congress, intransigent Republican opposition to compromise last year successfully forced substantial concessions from Democrats and the Obama administration, justifying Speaker John Boehner’s Aug. 1, 2011 boast at the conclusion of negotiations on the debt ceiling, “I got 98 percent of what I wanted. I’m pretty happy.”

Both political parties are confronting the economics of scarcity and the inevitable austerity measures to come. Cities and states struggle to meet mounting pension obligations. States with balanced budget requirements are being forced to choose between non-trivial benefit cuts or tax hikes reaching beyond the wealthy into the middle class. The federal debt is on track to hit 109 percent of Gross Domestic Product by 2025 and 190 percent of G.D.P. by 2035, breaking historical records. These are not problems that will be resolved by tinkering around the edges of fiscal policy.

The new rules of policy-making will force either constituencies on the left or constituencies on the right to absorb major losses. Under these circumstances, the disposition of conservatives to see choices in zero-sum terms may prove the more clear-eyed approach.

 What the Left Gets Right – NYTimes.com.

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In Confident Sign, Gingrich Changes Facebook Status to ‘In an Open Relationship’

Newt to America: ‘Join Me. Join Me in My Marriage’

CHARLESTON, SC (The Borowitz Report) – In a sign of renewed confidence, just minutes after former House Speaker Newt Gingrich romped to victory in the South Carolina primary he changed his Facebook status to “In an Open Relationship.”

Mr. Gingrich made no reference to his new Facebook status during his victory speech, in which he made an emotional appeal to the American people: “I say to each and every one of you: Join me.  Join me in my marriage.”

The former House Speaker used the speech to highlight the differences between himself and the current resident of the White House: “The American people have a choice: do they want a President who issues food stamps, or one who runs up a $500,000 tab at Tiffany?”

Mr. Gingrich drew cheers and a standing ovation as he concluded his remarks, saying, “In closing, I am staying at the Marriott, Rm. 205. Ladies?”

In yet another boost, Mr. Gingrich received this nod from former rival Herman Cain: “I am not endorsing Newt Gingrich, but I am endorsing Newt Gingrich’s lifestyle.”

At the White House, President Obama made only a glancing reference to the results in South Carolina, telling reporters, “I haven’t been this happy since we smoked bin Laden.”

For his part, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney minimized Mr. Gingrich’s 12% margin of victory: “That’s even less than I pay in taxes.”

 Borowitz Report.

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January 20, 2012, 1:45 PM

Overmisunderestimating Rick Perry

By MIMI SWARTZ

On Thursday night I happened to call a friend just before 10 p.m. and caught her a little tipsy — she had been out celebrating Rick Perry’s ignominious withdrawal from the presidential race.

Not for the first time was I caught with my ambivalence in full flower: I, too, was chipper now that the longest-serving governor of Texas was down and out, but he’d only shown the white flag after months and months of embarrassing the state by reinforcing every negative stereotype that’s been used against us for, well, forever. The swagger, the anti-intellectualism, the boots, the bullying — the only good news is that they didn’t work for Perry as well as they did for his predecessor in the governor’s office. (That would be, in case you’ve forgotten, George W. Bush.)

But even stranger is my own sense of shame: I had been certain that Perry was going to be the next president of the United States. Invited to participate in the flurry of bloviation that followed his announcement last August, I looked into the camera and with a very straight face told the talk TV viewers of America to be very afraid. If they didn’t stop Perry, they’d soon be suffering Texans too: enduring our poor educational standards, our poor health care, our lack of  environmental protections, a shell game budget, and so on. I believed we’d see a President Perry and I wasn’t the only one.

Back in the early days of the Perry campaign, I had lunch with a friend who had worked on former Houston mayor Bill White’s race against him for governor. Talking about a Perry candidacy, we were like two teenage girls sitting around a campfire trying to scare each other to death. “He’ll do anything to win,” she intoned. “Anything.” “I know,” I said. “I know.” How did we get it so wrong about his national prospects?

Let me say in my defense that it wasn’t because I didn’t know who Perry was. Maybe he is a perfectly nice guy in private, but his record as governor showed him to be someone who didn’t really seem to believe in much of anything beyond getting himself elected and then re-elected in order to further the fortunes of his deeply conservative Republican backers. If that meant turning Texas into a backwater, so be it.

But that never seemed to matter here. As one politico explained it to me, “Perry gives the people of Texas just what they want in a government, which is nothing.” More to the point, Perry played expertly over the years to the 750,000 right-wing Republicans who vote in the primary, and kept his job. He sent far more qualified and forward-looking candidates packing in the process; I am still holding a grudge against our senior senator, Kay Bailey Hutchison, who turned tail and ran rather than go up against Perry in the Republican primary race for governor in 2006, when he won with only 39 percent of the vote. (He trounced her four years later, when he had truly become all powerful.)  As someone close to me who refuses to be identified said, “Perry’s been an idiot for a long time and he keeps getting re-elected.”

Because Perry ran the state like the king of a medieval fiefdom, Austin became something of an echo chamber for the oppressed. Forget the slackers who eat cupcakes and samosas from food trucks when they should be in class — I’m talking about the lobbyists, journalists and legislators who all bought into the juggernaut that was supposedly Rick Perry. It’s hard to fault them — they’ve had to play by his rules for more than 11 years, after all — but they are the ones who created and perpetuated the myths that made Perry look bulletproof.

In theory, he reinvented the rules of Texas politics (he didn’t have to debate and he shunned editorial boards!); he was eerily lucky (he beat Kinky Friedman for governor!) and he was, above all, vindictive in the tradition of the best Texas pols. (See: L.B.J. playbook, chapter entitled, “Reward your friends; punish your enemies.”)

That the national press seemed to take these notions as gospel only reinforced my fear. Remember Time magazine’s cover story on Perry last August?  A sample from “Lone Star Warrior”: “If Perry has a secret weapon, it is his appeal to the rainbow coalition that is now the Republican Party — from veterans to fiscal hawks, gun-rights advocates to religious conservatives, Constitution-waving libertarians to America-firsters.”

I also had history on my side. I remember very clearly, back in the late 1990s, telling friends on the East Coast that George W. Bush was going to be our next President. They made it clear that they thought I was nuts. The result: a friend here who went to high school with Bush woke up every morning for eight years thinking George? George is president?

So Perry was going to be Bush redux. He was supposed to stroll into the nomination and the presidency largely because everyone else was just going to stand aside for the big guy. No one imagined that Perry would turn out to be more like another former governor, John Connally, who spent a king’s ransom to win exactly one delegate in his race in 1980.

Then reality set in. It is almost impossible to describe the shock and horror of many Texans as we watched Perry go down in flames. Very few people remembered how badly Perry lost a debate in his first governor’s race — against a man who was no intellectual giant, I assure you. But this was like watching a purported Olympian stumble on “The Biggest Loser.”

I didn’t feel sorry for Perry — he was just a lazy candidate who didn’t do his homework, back pain or no back pain — but I did feel angry for Texas. He’d embarrassed the place he purported to love, throwing up his hands with “Oops!” and going loopy at a speech before some misguided New Hampshirites, after which he clutched a bottle of maple syrup he’d been given like a giggling, greedy second grader.

Even worse, he was a Texan who couldn’t recall that there was a Department of Energy. Seriously? In an effort to try to save her husband’s campaign, his wife, Anita, who had always seemed like a pretty normal person, was out there claiming that God had called Perry to run.

It was all for nothing, of course. By the time Perry withdrew, the former Tea Party heartthrob couldn’t even make the top of the news. That honor went to Newt Gingrich’s ex, with her allegations of the candidate’s plea for an open marriage. (Perry had just thrown his support to Gingrich hours before, further proof of his cluelessness.)

And so today Perry is all ours again. The pundits in Austin are predicting he’ll win a fourth term for governor, and things will go on as before. I’m keeping my opinions to myself.

Mimi Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly.

 Overmisunderestimating Rick Perry – NYTimes.com.

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January 19, 2012, 11:24 PM

There They Go Again

By NEIL J. YOUNG

A week ago, 150 evangelical leaders meeting at a ranch outside Houston backed Rick Santorum’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Presumably, they hoped that their endorsement would pull Mitt Romney back from the front of the race. Saturday’s primary in South Carolina – with evangelicals expected to make up sixty percent of the electorate – provides what seems like a perfect testing ground for disrupting any claims about Romney’s inevitable nomination.

Newt Gingrich is apparently surging once again, taking votes from Romney. Coupled with Rick Perry’s exit, the evangelicals’ blessing of Santorum in Texas could propel him to a surprisingly good showing on Saturday or — who knows? — perhaps even a victory.

Speaking from Texas shortly after the endorsement, Gary Bauer, a prominent social conservative who ran for president in 2000, explained why the evangelicals had rallied behind Santorum: “They were all looking for the best Reagan conservative.”

Dennis Cook/Associated PressRonald Reagan in the Oval Office on Jan. 28, 1986.

For nearly twenty-five years, Ronald Reagan has loomed over every Republican contest. During the debates this campaign season, he has been mentioned four times as often as the most recent Republican president, George W. Bush. At the final debate in South Carolina on Thursday, for example, Newt Gingrich said, “When I became speaker, we went back to the Ronald Reagan play book.” Mitt Romney, for his part, didn’t like to hear Gingrich speaking that way. “I looked at the Reagan diary,” he told Gingrich. “You’re mentioned once.”

This is typical. Across the Republican Party’s political spectrum, candidates continually claim the Reagan mantle, depicting themselves as his most steadfast acolyte and the natural heir to his political legacy. Rick Santorum did it, too, suggesting earlier on Thursday that he was the candidate most likely to fulfill Reagan’s political legacy. “We’re going to win or lose this election based on about 10 states,” he said. “I come from one of those states. I come from a background and a town where there were lots of Reagan Democrats.”

The religious right wing of the Republican Party has clung especially close to the memory of Reagan. In Reagan, religious conservatives remember a president who spiced his speeches with Bible verses, fought for their issues, and championed the nation’s Judeo-Christian heritage. But memory is an unreliable guide, and history in the service of politics often breeds soothing myths that camouflage inconvenient truths.

In reality, religious conservatives were often dissatisfied with Reagan’s presidency. The Christian right of today – and Republicans generally – must stop using a mythic Reagan as their measuring stick for candidates because it drives them away from viable contenders who fall short of an impossible standard that Reagan himself couldn’t have met.

Believing themselves the key constituency that had guaranteed Reagan’s historic win in 1980, Christian conservatives felt the president owed them for their enthusiastic backing. Reagan had courted the nascent political movement on the religious right with a spirited defense of their most cherished political issues, including promises to restore school prayer, to work against the Equal Rights Amendment, and to attack federal abortion rights, legalized just seven years before.

But once in office, the Reagan administration claimed that it first had to address the nation’s weak economy. The social agenda of Christian conservatives would have to wait. In the meantime, the White House planned to muffle their grumbling. “We want to keep the Moral Majority types so close to us they can’t move their arms,” one Reagan staffer explained to the journalist Lou Cannon.

The complaints piled up. Evangelicals pointed out that Reagan had appointed too few of them to positions in government, despite his campaign promise that evangelicals in his administration would mirror their proportional representation in the American population – about forty percent at the time. In light of that snub, Reagan’s selection of Sandra Day O’Connor — who had made several pro-choice votes during her time in the Arizona state legislature — as his first nominee to the Supreme Court stung sharply.

During the campaign, Reagan had won the National Right to Life Committee’s endorsement by pledging that he’d only nominate committed pro-life jurists to the nation’s highest court. Reagan’s tepid and ineffectual support for key school prayer and anti-abortion legislation in Congress during his first administration frustrated and angered religious conservatives who watched various bills die while the president did little.

As the 1984 election approached, Jerry Falwell, the leader of the Moral Majority, confessed he was “a little anxious that we haven’t had some aggressive support” on issues important to the religious right. Sixty-eight percent of pro-life activists judged Reagan’s first four years as “fair to poor” on the abortion issue.

Many Christian conservatives began to publicly question supporting the president’s reelection bid. “If we balance the budget and we still keep murdering a million and a half babies every year, there’s no way we can say we’re better off than we were four years ago,” Moral Majority’s Cal Thomas commented. “Do not take us for granted,” the fundamentalist pastor Bob Jones wrote the president. “We are not going to vote for you in desperation in 1984.”

Still, these chiding messages were meant to prod the Reagan White House into an aggressive defense of their issues rather than to represent a legitimate political threat. Conservative Christians generously contributed to Reagan’s landslide win in 1984. While disheartened by what they saw as the slim accomplishments of the first four years, many Christian conservatives, rather than hold Reagan personally responsible, blamed moderates in the White House, like James Baker, then chief of staff, for blocking their agenda.

Others contended that Reagan would turn to their priorities in his second term, once he was free to pursue their causes after he’d secured re-election. “With the burden of campaigning behind him for good,” a writer for Christianity Today, the nation’s leading evangelical publication, wrote on the eve of the election, “the president may move vigorously toward his unfulfilled 1980 promises.”

Once returned to office, however, Reagan continued to disappoint conservative Christians by his failure to advance their political objectives. Their anger and frustration with the president soon gave way to grief and disillusionment. Shortly after Reagan left the White House,  the influential evangelical intellectual Carl Henry blasted Reagan for having “given little more than lip service” to the concerns of conservative Christians. Looking back on the Reagan presidency and George Bush’s election in 1988, the editors of Christianity Today worried in a headline, “Were Christians Courted for Their Votes or Beliefs?”

The political disappointments and painful realizations that marked the religious right’s rocky relationship with Reagan’s presidency have been replaced by the more powerful seductions of selective memory and wishful fantasy. But like any myth of history, there are small truths within it that alter the memory.

Reagan failed to achieve the religious right’s grandiose objectives, but he delivered on other issues religious conservatives cared about, like cutting taxes and increasing military spending. His full-throated espousal of traditional morals and Christian principles along with symbolic gestures like naming 1983 the “Year of the Bible” looked like crass politics to many observers, but linger as forceful evidence for many conservative Christians of Reagan’s unique example.

If Republicans want to appeal to an American electorate that increasingly has little direct connection to Ronald Reagan, they need to let go of romantic memories that produce only unrealistic expectations. Part of Reagan’s appeal came from his insistence on his own limitations, so Republicans would be wise to stop looking for a savior among a field of mortals.

In reflecting honestly on their own fractious history with Reagan, religious conservatives and other Republicans alike might better evaluate the candidates that stand before them rather than hopelessly praying for the second coming of a president who never really was.

Neil J. Young is the author of the forthcoming book, “We Gather Together: The Rise of the Religious Right and the Challenge of Ecumenical Politics.” He teaches at Princeton.

 There They Go Again – NYTimes.com.

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