Since he left office, Republicans running for president have been trying to claim the mantle of Ronald Reagan in order to connect to the bulk of GOP voters who still have great admiration and affection for the Gipper.As Stephen Hayward points out in this piece in the Washington Post, Reagan's pragmatic idealism, his ease in public, and his heartfelt conservatism would have made him a fan of Sarah Palin:This populist undercurrent is why I am certain that Reagan would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the tea party movement. While the tea partiers confuse the media and annoy the establishments of both political parties, Reagan would have seen them as reviving the embers of what he called the "prairie fire" of populist resistance against centralized big government -- resistance that helped touch off the tax revolt of the 1970s. That movement was often dismissed as a tantrum, but when The Washington Post called California's 1978 antitax Proposition 13 "a...(Read Full Post)