Today’s Republicans all live in hope of “another Reagan.” Not a chance, says lawyer Ann Coulter. It could never happen. And you can think the campaign-finance laws for that.
I ask: How many Reagans have we lost to campaign-finance reform?
Coulter goes through the progress of Reagan from the first time that businessman Holmes Tuttle approached him with an offer to help finance him in a run for office.
At every step along the way, from the first $1,000 a plate fundraiser (now illegal at the inflated cost of about $7,000 a plate) to the nationwide broadcast of his speech “Rendezvous with History,” his run for the governership of California and his run for president, Reagan and his backers would have been stymied by the limits and the bookkeeping of modern campaign finance law.
It is appropriate, is it not, that the Republican presumptive nominee for president is an author of a campaign finance law. What a coincidence. It reminds me of the McGovern reforms of the nominating rules of the Democratic Party after the debacle of 1968. Funny how McGovern turned out to the first beneficiary of those rules.
Coulter reckons that only four kinds of people can now run for office:
- High-school fatties like Bill Clinton
- Billionaires or near billionaires like Mitt Romney
- Celebrities like Arnold
- MSM-anointed candidates like McCain and Obama
Er, well yes. But wasn’t Reagan something of a celebrity in his day? B-movie actor and TV host?
Back to the drawing boards.
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