Ronald Reagan: The original RINO

What President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) “deplored more than each other’s political philosophy was stalemate, and a country that was so polarized by ideology and party politics that it could not move forward. There were tough words and important disagreements. . . yet a stronger commitment to getting things done.”

That observation came from O’Neill’s oldest son, Thomas P. O’Neill, in a 2012 New York Times column entitled, “Frenemies: A Love Story” regarding his Democratic father’s relationship with the Republican president.

O’Neill and Reagan were both of Irish descent. And when disagreements got heated between the two parties, the two men would often meet in a sign of respect with an eye toward (relative) civility. 

“I’m going to cook you some Boston corned beef and I’m going to have an Irish storyteller there,” the Speaker told the president in 1983 during a joint celebration after the House passed a bipartisan Social Security package.

”I’ll have to polish up some new Irish jokes,” Reagan mused in return. 

Despite Democrats controlling the House and Senate at the time, some important things got done through this foreign concept called compromise, which most Americans embrace.

The result? The former actor and California governor won 49 states in the 1984 presidential election. Four years later, Reagan would leave office with an approval rating of 63 percent, the highest of any Republican president in Gallup’s history to this day. 

Fast forward to 2023, and try to imagine, in an age of cable news and social media, leaders of each party working together to address the myriad crises impacting this country. Or try to imagine Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Biden having an adult beverage privately after work to see where compromise could be found. 

And now think of the kind of vitriol these kinds of actions would foment.

Make no mistake: It would be portrayed as weakness, with McCarthy being called an “establishment” “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) and Biden being accused of aiding and abiding extreme ultra-mega-MAGA insurrectionists at a time when democracy itself is in peril. Few in the media would advocate for such a meeting either.

Per a 2022 survey from Pew Research:

“A little more than half of the journalists surveyed (55 percent) say that every side does not always deserve equal coverage in the news. By contrast, 22 percent of Americans overall say the same, whereas about three-quarters (76 percent) say journalists should always strive to give all sides equal coverage.”

Did you get all of that? 55 percent of journalists say equal coverage should not exist, but that number drops 33 points when news consumers are asked the same question. Talk about a disconnect.

So it makes one wonder how Ronald Reagan would fare if sent through time and placed into the running for the 2024 GOP nomination. Would the benign buddy jokes be viewed as not angry and hostile enough? And how would Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) or pundits on MSNBC react to O’Neill promising to work “constructively” with the Reagan administration while saying to his adversary occupying the Oval Office: “In my 50 years of public life, I’ve never seen a man more popular than you are with the American people,” as O’Neill did after Reagan’s reelection in 1984. 

There’s nothing many Republicans fear more than being labeled a RINO. The acronym portrays any GOP member who dares to work with the other side as a traitor and a career politician interested only in holding power and expanding it without regard for what voters want. 

“[Reagan] had a strong set of core values and operated off of those,” GOP strategist and longtime Reagan ally Stuart Spencer told National Public Radio in 2011. “But when push came to shove, he did various things he didn’t like doing, because he knew it was in the best interests of the state or country at the time.”

Among the things Reagan didn’t like doing was raising taxes, which he did in 1982. Two years later, he won 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale’s 13, the biggest electoral landslide ever by a presidential candidate since FDR defeated Alf Landon. Apparently, voters didn’t care much that Reagan got along with the Democratic speaker. The economy was strong, the country was at peace and Washington was functioning as it should. 

So, the question is: Would the 2024 version of Reagan be seriously primaried today? Would he have even earn the Republican Party’s nomination? What would Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) Twitter account look like?

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” argued Greene in a recent tweet that went viral. “Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

Well, that answers that question. 

By the way, once the RINO label is stuck to any GOP lawmaker, it makes it almost impossible to capture the nomination. This may explain why Donald Trump has been attacking Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) as a RINO.

So this is how it’s going to work when the 2024 presidential campaign truly kicks off: Compromise with the other side, or even speak in a civil tone about your opponents, and consider yourself unelectable on a national level. Even if that means mimicking the iconic Ronald Reagan: The very first RINO.

Joe Concha is a media and politics columnist.