Today’s fun comes from the pollsters.
Ronald Reagan beat out Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the president Americans would like to bring back from the grave to lead America out of the mess we’re in, according to a survey made by “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair — or paid for by them, anyway.
Thirty-six percent wanted Reagan back. Twenty-nine picked FDR. Harry Truman won 8 percent of the vote and William Henry Harrison, who died a month after taking office in 1841 came in last with 1 percent.
Neither “60 Minutes” nor Vanity Fair held a successful seance to visit with the Gipper or FDR to ask what they would do to straighten things out, if they found themselves back in the Oval Office.
Just as well. Reagan might claim that his 11 tax increases were responsible for the fact that the economy finally did revive while he was president and say that that’s the remedy he would try again — which would bring a call from Speaker Boehner to send him back to the nether world. (Isn’t it easy to forget what an unorthodox Republican Reagan really was? And who can forget that interest rates rose to 20 percent under his regime, bringing business to a screeching halt.)
The Democrats who would conjure Franklin Delano back to Washington to work his magic on the economy should read the history of the 1930s again. The economy was in tatters when Roosevelt came to power in 1932 — and then got worse. It is generally agreed that World War II gets the credit for the return of prosperity. Powerful medicine. Intolerable side effects.
To be serious for a paragraph, Reagan and Roosevelt had one quality of leadership in common: both were incurable optimists who radiated hope and cheer. Both also had the good fortune to have Congressional majorities that supported their initiatives, allowed them to be the leaders the people wanted. It will take quite a sorcerer to do as much for whomever they bring back across the Styx to lead us to a new Utopia in 2012.
AT LEAST AS amusing was the poll taken by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune, which showed Herman Cain a point ahead of Texan Gov. Rick Perry in the GOP nomination race, with Ron Paul, who is also a Texan, in third.
Not only did Cain best Perry — who has never lost a race in his home state — but neither rose much above a quarter of the vote. Cain had 27 percent; Perry 26.
What in the world is going on?
Voting in the presidential primaries will start in January. By June, one of the candidates is likely to have the nomination nailed down. Yet, with 2012 just two months away, Perry can’t even get Texans to vote for a hometown boy and Cain, who truly doesn’t have a chance to win the nomination and may never have been to Texas for more than a flyover, runs right beside him, a whisker ahead.
Paul, by the way, whose libertarian views turn off 90 percent of the American voters who actually read them, did better in Texas than Mitt Romney — the probable winner — Newt Gingrich and the rest of the pack.
Makes you laugh; makes you cry.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
