"GOP debate is a tug-of-war for the Reagan mantle"

Always such fun to speak with Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle (soon to be moving to Politico).

Jessica Levinson, who teaches political ethics at Loyola Law School of Los Angeles, says winning the rights to the Reagan legacy isn’t even much of a contest.

“Who is the the next Ronald Reagan?’’ she asks. “None of them. It’s like, ‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up,?’” evoking a famed question from rapper Eminem’s landmark work.

‘Movie star quality’

That’s because the vaunted Reagan shadow looms large over the culture, and the country — both among Republicans who hold him in awe, or Democrats who often hold him in contempt, she said.

“There was a movie star quality about him that appealed to the nation then,” in a way that will likely never be replicated in the age of social media, she said.

To his party, Reagan is still revered for his “ability to inspire, to make us feel better about the country we live in,” Levinson said. “And whether you think he was a positive or a negative, he did represent a sea change in terms of our expectations of what government should do for us — a paradigm shift.”