Archive [April 2000]

I first noticed it during the Democrat debates. There was something strange about Algore — I mean, something new. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on it. Whenever the camera was on him, I was conscious of an echo or a distant memory of … what? Whatever it was seemed oddly familiar, yet jarringly out of place.

It was there in a new tilt of the head. It was there the way the shoulders were squared, the upper body slightly turned.

And then I knew. I was seeing the characteristic, confident stance of… Ronaldus Maximus. Algore, the wanna-be Alpha Male, the inventor of the Internet, the champion of Love Canal, the model for “Love Story,” was now pretending to be Ronald Reagan!

The gestures, the mannerism — yes, even the new hairstyle were all copied from the Gipper. Peggy Noonan, the brilliant Reagan speechwriter, noticed Algore reusing Reagan-style “vision statements.” The Vice President even closed a speech with Reagan’s famous line, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

My friends, this is pathological. You need a clinical psychology textbook to explain it. And worst of all, is the deluded expectation that the ruse could somehow work! The carriage, stance, and gestures of Ronald Reagan, a man of honor, cannot be borrowed by a lying, dissembling, corrupt boob. Reagan’s heroism cannot be put on like an overcoat. Just look at any photo of Reagan: his bearing was earned by a lifetime of conviction and strength. It cannot be duplicated by the duplicitous. No weak, vacillating, ineffectual loser could ever pull it off.

So my message to Algore is this, from all those of us who honor the 40th President of the United States: “We know Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is a friend of ours. And you, sir, are no Ronald Reagan.”