It isn't worth counting the number of times Ronald Reagan's name
was invoked at the two Republican primary debates (but for those
interested, the number is 27). The addiction to the gratuitous
Gipper name-drop reveals a tendency among today's Republicans to
romanticize a past which, however imperfect, appears in retrospect
to be so eminently superior to the present. This tendency is
revealed also by the platitudes the candidates speak.

In last Tuesday night's debate, Republican congressman Tom
Tancredo claimed that the GOP has "lost the mantle of fiscal
responsibility" it once held dear. Virtually every candidate has in
some way expressed this same view, i.e., that the GOP used to be
fiscally responsible up until recently. Sen. John McCain said in
both debates that Republicans spend money "like a drunken sailor,"
as if the profligacy were somehow a new phenomenon. It is a
familiar gripe, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Whenever Republicans cite their party's long-lost fiscal
sobriety, they're giving themselves too much credit. The claim is
refuted by asking one question: When was this golden era? Or: When
exactly were Republicans so fiscally prudent?

"Fiscal responsibility" is an elastic concept, but fundamentally
it means balancing the federal budget. Democrats want to do this by
raising taxes, whereas Republicans want to lower taxes and curb
government spending. Before Reagan came along and made this
approach the centerpiece of the Republican credo, Republican
economics spoke the language of balanced budgets and fiscal
austerity, which were to be achieved at all costs, whether through
spending cuts or tax hikes. Deficit hawks, not supply-siders,
dominated the party.

As Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of a
Conservative, "[S]pending cuts must come before tax cuts. If
we reduce taxes before firm, principled decisions are made about
expenditures, we will court deficit spending and the inflationary
effects that invariably follow." It was on these grounds that the
Arizona senator opposed President Kennedy's tax cuts, fiscally
irresponsible as he thought them to be.

Today's Republicans certainly can't be nostalgic for the
preceding decade, the Fat Fifties. Eisenhower shaped his fiscal
policies around what Goldwater would later deride as "me-too
Republicanism," and the results were what one would expect from a
willing inheritor of the New Deal. In 1957, Eisenhower, happy to
pile up one bill after another for domestic expenditures, submitted
what was at the time the largest peacetime budget in American
history ($73.3 billion), a move which National Review
called "an extremely dangerous policy." He made the same decision
the next two years, only with more proposed spending.

Surely the candidates do not mean to hark back to the Nixon
years, hardly the epitome of responsible governance. The Nixon
presidency was supposed to represent a virulent pro-business
ideology, but instead it adapted to the prevailing liberal
orthodoxies of the day. Economist Herbert Stein, who served on
Nixon's Council of Economic Advisers, later said, "The
administration that was against expanding the budget expanded it
greatly."

Nixon enforced wage and price controls, embraced the Keynesian
doctrine of government spending, revalued the dollar, and expanded
welfare entitlements. Under his reign, for the first time ever
social spending eclipsed military spending, skyrocketing from $55
billion in 1970 to $132 billion five years later. Some
restraint.

It is no wonder that the New York Times praised Nixon for his "abandonment of outmoded
conservative doctrine." He had earned it. As the Times
noted, Nixon left conservative Republicans in a prickly situation.
"After the Nixon Administration's record, Republican candidates can
no longer inveigh against big government, budget deficits,
government subsidies or Federal regulation of the economy."

The Reagan years brought about a drastic revision of
conservative economic philosophy, but the results were not
flawless. Reaganomics worked wonders for the country, reducing
inflation and unemployment and leading to unprecedented economic
growth. However, as Attorney General Ed Meese would say almost a
decade after Reagan left office, "The country is still waiting for
the spending reductions." His rhetoric and best intentions
notwithstanding, Reagan left office with the United States $1.5
trillion deeper in debt and with the deficit having risen by some
$150 billion. "What's the sense of having a Republican
administration," asked Senator William Armstrong, "if the best we
can do is a $200 billion deficit?"

From the conservative point of view, the record of Reagan's
successor, George Bush Sr., is one not only of recklessness but of
infidelity as well. Bush 41 raised taxes, thereby repudiating the
Reaganite model, and on top of that the federal government under
his stewardship also spent more, resulting in larger deficits and,
in due course, a recession. Spending as a percentage of GNP rose
from 22.3% in 1989 to over 25% in 1991 -- that, even with the
pennies saved by the so-called "peace dividend."

That leaves the Gingrich-led revolutionaries. They prided
themselves on reining in Big Government, and they had some
successes. Yet, insofar as they exercised fiscal propriety, they
did so with a Democrat occupying the White House. As they soon
discovered, it is easy to oppose spending sprees when the other
branch is your adversary. If this arrangement is the formula for
fiscal rectitude, well, then, there isn't much reason to vote a
Republican into the White House after all. Perhaps this is why the
candidates resort to platitudes in the first place -- to avoid
having to explain what the concept of fiscal responsibility
actually entails.

It is easy to find faults in the economic legacies bequeathed by
past Republican officeholders. But even easier, and more credulous,
is pretending that there once was some mythical state of economic
bliss which can be magically re-created, provided one casts the
right vote. If you associate yourself with an idealized past, then
you don't have to answer for the imperfections of the present -- at
least that is the hope. Talking the talk is better than no rhetoric
at all, seeing as responsible behavior is unlikely without even the
pretense of it. But just as the 40th president cannot be
reincarnated by uttering his name, fiscal responsibility cannot be
realized by mistaking the ideal for an idea, or the past for the
future. Envisioning the latter should not mean revising the
former.