When I interviewed Ronald Reagan back in 1975, I did not see what the Conservative Political Action Conference saw in him. I had not yet heard about the Democrats’ “bankruptcy of ideas.” But then, I was writing for my high-school paper and living in a GOP-dominated town, a town that is still a Republican stronghold, though now for Tea Party social conservatives. Back then I was more struck more by how my Republican relatives got Reagan (who had just served two terms as governor) all wrong, since I could not see any conservative charm.
What struck me at Reagan’s poorly attended Bakersfield Hilton event was less the lack of partisan charm than how “his people” didn’t shoo me off. Reagan may have reenergized the right years before his successful run in 1980, for all I knew. Reagan may have been responsible for calling “surf’s up” as this so-called “tide of history” was moving “irresistibly” in the direction of the right. But I don’t remember any reference in our interview to “regirding the loins,” like the one made today by Donald J. Devine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union.
And as a teenaged girl, I think I would have remembered and reported any references to sex, no matter how Biblical. Reproductive rights were the rage, and this conservative town must have been enraged after the 1973 Roe v. Wade pro-choice ruling. Still, it’s hard to imagine even Reagan being so crude as to get lost in public in this new GOP neotribal language about loins.
Professor Ruth O’Brien, who earned her Ph.D. in political science at UCLA, joined the Graduate Center’s doctoral faculty in 1997 and, in 2004, founded the “Writing Politics” specialization in political science. She also serves as an adjunct affiliated scholar with the Center for American Progress. In her research and books, she focuses on American politics, law, political theory without national borders, globalism, and American/global dichotomy. She edits the award-winning “Public Square” series for Princeton University Press, showcasing public intellectuals such as Jill Lepore, Jeff Madrick, Anne Norton, Martha Nussbaum, and Joan Scott. O’Brien is also launching “Heretical Thought,” an Oxford University Press political-theory series that is global in outlook. Her latest book, Out of Many One: Obama and the Third American Political Tradition (2013), with a foreword by journalist Thomas Byrnes Edsall, distinguished professor at Columbia’s School of Journalism, was honored with a 2013 “Author Meets Critic” American Political Science Association convention session. She also wrote Bodies in Revolt: Gender, Disability, and a Workplace Ethic of Care (2005), Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001), which received an honorable mention from Gustavus Meyers Center for the Study of Human Rights and Bigotry (“Meyers Center”), and Workers’ Paradox: The Republican Origins of the New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935 (1998). “Writing Politics” emanated from two books she contributed to and edited: Telling Stories out of Court: Narratives about Women and Workplace Discrimination (2008) and Voices from the Edge: Narratives about the Americans with Disabilities Act (2004), which earned another honorable mention from the Meyers Center. O’Brien’s controversial blog led Rush Limbaugh to dub her a “professorette.”
