Favorite Presidents

FAVORITE PRESIDENTS….At a recent debate, all the candidates for RNC chairman named Reagan as their favorite Republican. Ezra Klein comments:

It’s really weird that Republican candidates for high office almost never named Abraham Lincoln as their favorite Republican president. He was, after all, a Republican. And he was inarguably more consequential than Reagan, no matter how enamored you are of Reagan’s tenure. Indeed, most historians consider him America’s greatest president.

Ezra chalks this up to coded racism, and maybe that’s right. I guess I’d guess be a little more generous, though, and attribute it instead to the different valences of favorite vs. greatest, figuring that Lincoln would be more likely to come up if these guys were asked who the greatest Republican was. Maybe.

But this is really just an excuse to observe the weird fact that for modern conservative Republicans, Reagan isn’t merely their most frequently named favorite, he’s pretty much their only possible answer to this question. Bush Jr. is obviously damaged goods. Bush Sr., Ford, and Eisenhower are more or less considered closet Democrats these days. Nixon was a crook. Hoover — ’nuff said. Coolidge and Harding were do-nothings. If you’re restricting yourself to the past century, you’re basically stuck with Reagan and no one else.

Democrats have it way better. Sure, most Dems of the past century produce mixed sentiments (especially Wilson and LBJ) but virtually every one of them is at least a plausible candidate for “favorite Democrat.” Modern liberals haven’t excommunicated any of them.

Why is this? Why is it that Republicans have produced only one president in the past century that they’re still enthusiastic about?