From the Sitka Sentinel (Sitka, Alaska) Nov 5, 1980
For President’s Day, a Ronald Reagan montage: It’s just some random things leading up to his Landslide Presidential Victory. The “objectivity” of these articles makes them entertaining to read; it’s really a wonder he ever got elected to anything. Evidently, the people could read between the lines.
$6.74 Billion Calif. Budget Proposed By Gov. Reagan
By BILL STALL
Associated Press Writer
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP)
Gov. Ronald Reagan proposed Tuesday a spartan $6.74 billion state budget which avoids a tax increase mainly by slashing the rate of welfare spending by $700 million annually.
Reagan told the California Legislature that “something must be done and done immediately” about soaring welfare and health care costs.
Proposed welfare spending in Reagan’s budget totals $2.2 billion. The state’s share would be 676.5 million — down $65.2 million from the current year.
The Republican governor’s proposed 1971-72 budget, 2 percent larger than the current one, cuts spending in many areas, hold the University of California to the current $337 million of state support and denies state workers the annual cost-of-living salary increases they have enjoyed for the past decade.
HEAVIER TEACHER LOAD
Reagan told the state’s college and university faculty members they would have to spend more time teaching to handle a heavier classroom load.
Reagan predicted in an address to the Republican state convention Sunday the budget would bring “resistance and cries of anguish.”
Referring to welfare, he said “When many snouts are threatened with forcible withdrawal from the public trough, it makes waves.”
Reagan shunned both the deficit financing of President Nixon’s new federal budget and new taxes such as those proposed by New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller to balance his state’s $8.45 billion budget.
FACES BIG PROBLEM
California had a bigger state budget than New York when Reagan first took office four years ago.
The Republican governor faces major problems in getting the budget, and its companion reform legislation, through a legislature controlled by Democrats: 43 to 37 in the Assembly and 20 to 19 in the Senate.
Reagan will propose administrative and legislative changes that will cut welfare spending by a projected $606 million of state, county and federal funds in the budget year beginning July 1. This will be done by tightening up on eligibility and doing away with a number of allowances considered by the Reagan administration to be frills. Details will be revealed in a welfare message to go to the legislature soon.
To save another $100 million, Reagan will ask the legislature to cut back the free health care given by the state to 2.5 million welfare recipients and medically needy in California’s Medi-Cal program.
Reagan proposes to limit Medi-Cal spending to what an average citizen who pays for his own health needs lays out during a year. This is estimated at about $300 by state officials. California has been paying an average $517 for each Medi-Cal patient, Reagan said.
The Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania) Feb 3, 1971
Image from the Graham Owen Gallery
Reagan Prepares For “Hawk” Tour
By BILL BOYARSKY
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) —
Gov. Ronald Reagan is getting ready for his first nationwide political tour as a full-fledged hawk on Vietnam and closer then ever to campaigning actively for the Republican presidential nomination.
Less than three weeks before his speechmaking trip through Illinois, South Carolina and Wisconsin, Reagan made his toughest statement so far on the war, asking for a sharp escalation.
“I don’t think the full technological power of the United States is being used,” Reagan told a news conference Tuesday.
He said he didn’t think nuclear weapons are needed to win but insisted “the enemy should be frightened that we might” use them.
The Gettysburg Times (Gettysburg, Pennsylvania) Sep 13, 1967
Brown: Reagan ‘Last Hope’ of Extremists
Gubernatorial Nominee Likened to Death Valley
SACRAMENTO (UPI) — Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sunday attacked his Republican opponent, actor-politician Ronald Reagan, as “the best and perhaps last hope” of right wing extremists for an attractive candidate who shares their philosophy.
In a speech prepared for a meeting of the Democratic State Central Committee, Brown said Reagan’s backers include ultra-conservatives from throughout the nation, not just California.
“They will spend whatever they must, and they will resort to whatever tactics they must,” the Democratic governor said.
“And they will do this because they know that Ronald Reagan is their best and perhaps last hope of inflicting on this nation a revolution of the right.”
Ignored Fight
Brown’s text concentrated on Reagan and ignored a bitter fight for selection of a new Democratic state chairman.
Committee members, almost 1,000 of them, were to choose between Mrs. Carmen Warschaw and Assemblyman Charles Warren, both of Los Angeles.
Brown is backing Mrs. Warschaw, currently the party’s southern California chairman. Lt. Gov. Glenn M. Anderson and most of the liberal wing are supporting Warren.
Supporters of Mrs. Warschaw have warned delegates that a Warren victory would be interpreted as a slap in the face of the governor. [SLAP! They chose Warren]
Brown said Reagan was trying to gloss over his earlier right-wing pronouncements. But the governor said Democrats would not let him do so.
‘Quaint Place”
“The people are going to find that Mr. Reagan’s philosophy is not unlike the landscape of Death Valley — threatening, barren and forbidding. And they will not let him remodel California in that image. Death Valley might be a quaint place to visit — but who wants to live there?”
(In Santa Monica, Reagan told a news conference Saturday the Democrats were trying to tie an extremist label on him ‘because they don’t dare run on their record.”)
The governor’s prepared remarks made no mention of his proposal, unveiled Saturday, for creation of a bipartisan committee to study the controversial Rumford Open Housing Law and recommend amendments or a substitute.
Platform
The Democratic state convention, in a platform adopted a few hours after the governor made the proposal, ignored it completely.
The platform said Democrats were “ready at all times to amend or improve” civil rights laws including the Rumford Act which prohibits racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.
But it said the party opposes repeal of any of the laws against discrimination.
In another speech prepared for the central committee, Democratic National Committeeman Eugene L. Wyman said Reagan was basing his campaign on information fed to him by “the behavioral scientists, the pollsters and the public relations experts.”
“They tell him the Rumford Act is unpopular, and Mr. Reagan calls for its repeal,” Wyman said. “They probe for the hidden fears and prejudices of the people, and Mr. Reagan goes on television to exploit those deep-seated emotions as coldly and cynically as the extremists of the left and right who would rule by mass manipulation of the mobs.”
Nevada State Journal (Reno, Nevada) Aug 15, 1966
California GOP Leaders Fear Future
Don’t Like Reagan For Governor but Have No Candidate
WASHINGTON —
Republican fat cats met secretly in Los Angeles Dec. 17 to hear an audacious proposal from money men backing moderate George Christopher, former Mayor of San Francisco, for governor.
Christopher’s bankrollers agreed that unrestrained blood-spilling in primary elections has helped debilitate the Republican party in California. Instead of another expensive primary, they continued, the money men should agree on one candidate for Governor: George Christopher.
The audacity of this proposal stems from the fact that in statewide polls, Christopher runs far behind Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, darling of California’s Goldwater movement. Naturally then, Reagan’s financial backer were not about to capitulate. The Dec. 17 meeting adjourned with nothing accomplished.
End Of an Era
This story illustrates the desperate straits of California moderate Republicans trying to salvage the Hiram Johnson – Earl Warren tradition in their party. The increasingly likely nomination of Reagan might well destroy whatever remains of that tradition. Yet, leading moderates looked to that Dec. 17 meeting as a last hope of beating Reagan by cutting away financial support.
Reliance on so doubtful a maneuver is part of the Cherry Orchard syndrome. After Barry Goldwater’s nomination in 1964, journalist Murray Kempton compared anti-Goldwater moderates to the impoverished Russian aristocrats in Chekhov’s play, “The Cherry Orchard” — foolishly waiting for somebody to save them as they edged inexorably toward the abyss. The Cherry Orchard analogy is equally applicable to California today.
Looked to Kuchel
Although Reagan’s candidacy was building all through 1965, the moderates waited for somebody to save them — specifically, for Sen. Thomas Kuchel to come home and run for governor. Kuchel, Earl Warren’s last political protege, kept the hope alive by refusing to say yes or no. when he finally said no in September, the moderates were left with Christopher.
A progressive who was an excellent mayor of San Francisco, Christopher failed to catch on in populous southern California during two previous losing statewide races. Many moderates believed aggressive, young state Rep. Robert Monagan, Republican leader of the state assembly, would run better against Reagan.
So progressive and excellent, he couldn’t get elected anywhere other than San Francisco!
Monagan has been the subject of a low-paced build-up since September (coming to Washington last month to see officials of the Council of Republican Organizations, a national coalition of moderate groups.) But so long as the better-known Christopher is running, Monagan is stymied.
Here again the Cherry Orchard mentality was at work. Some moderates hoped Kuchel would convince Christopher to step aside for Monagan. Based on a cordial private conversation between Richard M. Nixon and Monagan in September, other moderates hoped Nixon would do the same. These were but dreams.
Nowadays, there are even Zombies in The Cherry Orchard! If we only had a Zombie Reagan, we could save the Cherry Orchard.
Seek Nixon’s Help
With Monagan’s candidacy still-born and Christopher determined to run hard, California’s Cherry Orchard moderates now are seeking outside help for Christopher from two influential members of the party’s old Nixon wing: Sen. George Murphy and former Nixon aide Robert Finch. Neither has much us for Reagan. Either could do him damage.
It is, however, naive to believe either will Murphy, who upset Pierre Salinger in 1964 as an apostle of party unity, sticks to that theme.The highly astute Finch is not likely to endanger his unimpeded road to the nomination for lieutenant governor and an excellent chance against the weak Democratic incumbent by attacking Reagan.
This leaves many moderates reduced to the wish that Christopher’s money men somehow will talk Reagan’s money men into quitting. They are praying Reagan will drop, or at least fail to gain in the next statewide opinion polls. Christopher’s fat cats then could argue that the polls prove Reagan has only hard-core right wing support and would be a goner against Democratic Gov. Pat Brown.
This is relying on providence. Reagan instead relies on his political management firm, Spencer, Roberts and Associates, which plans for Reagan to announce his candidacy on the same day California pollsters will have interviewers in the field. The reason publicity generated by Reagan’s announcement will help him in the polls.
Forgetting Reagan’s neanderthal ideology,** nobody can say his campaign hasn’t outplanned, out-thought, and outfought the Chekhovesque moderates. It’s 1964 all over again.
(Copyright 1965)
Post Crescent (Appleton, Wisconsin) Jan 5, 1966
** NEANDERTHAL? No journalistic bias there!
Post Crescent (Appleton, WI) Jun 3, 1965
Kinda funny, the paper’s name is the Post Crescent. Supposedly, this paper leans right, according to MondoTimes. Based on the preceding article from the Post Crescent, that doesn’t really appear to be the case.
From the Coshocton Tribune (Coshocton, OH) Nov 16, 1947
Who doesn’t love Shirley Temple?
1941
Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman peddle cigarettes, and look so good doing it!
From the Nevada State Journal (Reno, NV) Aug 11, 1939
A hint of things to come? “To Keep You Safe, They Risk Their Lives!”
Ronald Reagan, the Life Saver!
From the Lima News (Lima, OH) Jul 3, 1937
YesterYear Once More 