Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) talked to Right Wing News about voting for Ronald Reagan:

“I remember, I was a teenager, had just become a teenager and voted for Ronald Reagan — limited government, you know, smaller government, lower taxes, strong national defense. You knew what you were getting. You knew how a Reagan administration, a Reagan presidency was going to be better for you.”

One problem: Blogging Blue notes Walker wasn’t old enough to vote in either 1980 or 1984 when Reagan ran for president.

Update: Right Wing News posts the audio of the interview and apologizes for misquoting Walker.

The Washington Free Beacon uncovers a 1992 memo written by pollsters Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake which concludes: “What voters find slick in Bill Clinton, they find ruthless in Hillary.”

“The full memo is one of many previously unpublished documents contained in the archive of one of Hillary Clinton’s best friends and advisers, documents that portray the former first lady, secretary of State, and potential 2016 presidential candidate as a strong, ambitious, and ruthless Democratic operative.”

The Washington Examiner looks at other interesting tidbits from the files.

“In Chris Christie’s first successful campaign for public office, he sat down next to his wife and baby, looked into a camera and told voters something that wasn’t true,” the Washington Post reports.

“That 1994 race was New Jersey’s introduction to the brash and confident Christie, whose hardball tactics have repeatedly surprised people — even in a state that thinks it invented hardball. But in Morris County back then, people thought Christie had learned the downside of playing so rough: That ad helped get him into his first elected office but then helped get him out of it. He was sued for defamation, required to apologize and then defeated at the polls after just one term.”

Karen Tumulty: “The ambitious ‘Great Society’ agenda begun half a century ago continues to touch nearly every aspect of American life. But the deep philosophical divide it created has come to define the nation’s harsh politics, especially in the Obama era.”

“On the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty, Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a battle over whether its 40 government programs have succeeded in lifting people from privation or worsened the situation by trapping the poor in dependency.”

FBI files show that between 1947 and 1956, the movie It’s a Wonderful Life was listed as “under the suspicion of being a
vehicle of Communist propaganda.”

“There’s no telling what might happen now that Barack Obama and George W. Bush find themselves taking a long Air Force One flight from Washington to Johannesburg to attend the funeral of Nelson Mandela. But history suggests something will,” Time reports.

“When Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower shared a limo back from Arlington cemetery in November 1963, following the burial of John F. Kennedy, the two men, bitter enemies for more than a decade, finally found a way to set their animosity aside… The two men got to talking and all the years of difficulty and pain melted away as the hours ticked by and the cocktails were refilled.”

“Defenses came crashing down again in 1981, when Ronald Reagan sent Richard Nixon, Jerry Ford and Jimmy Carter to Cairo to attend the funeral of Anwar Sadat…The ride over on the old Boeing 707 was long, crowded and awkward. But on the way home, Nixon peeled away on a different trip and Carter and Ford dropped a half decade of resentment and realized they had more in common than either imagined. They both hated raising money, they both dreaded 25 years of unexpected retirement; they both disliked Reagan. It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship: over the next 25 years, Ford and Carter joined forces on two dozen projects.”

First Read: “But as universally praised and beloved as Mandela is now, anyone who was politically aware in the 1980s or 1990s knows that always wasn’t the case. After all, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan vetoed legislation — which Congress overrode — punishing South Africa for its racial apartheid. A lot of it had to do with Cold War mentality at the time; some viewed Mandela as on the wrong side of that fight. But it’s all a reminder how the passage of time and history can transform a one-time controversial figure into a political saint, and vice-versa. But it’s also a lesson that sometimes a policy of the moment will end up being embarrassing; politicians today ought to think about what a policy decision in the moment will look like a generation later.”

Steve Kornacki has a fascinating look back at the 1992 Democratic presidential primary in New York, which was a dramatic and chaotic do-or-die test for Bill Clinton after he lost the Connecticut primary unexpectedly to Jerry Brown.

“When the Connecticut result came in, the basic nature of the Democratic
race changed on the spot, transforming the next major contest on the
calendar into a make-or-break test for Bill Clinton. If he could win it,
his inevitability would be restored. But lose again, to Jerry Brown,
and all hell would break loose.”

“And here was the worst part for Clinton. Of all the venues for that that next major test, that do-or-die battle, it would be playing out in a state where they practiced a notoriously cutthroat brand of politics; a state where his southern accent marked him as a suspicious outsider, a used car salesman; where the media delighted in chewing up supposed front-runners; where an unusually powerful tabloid press would giddily plaster his personal baggage on its covers; where one major liberal columnist was already calling him “Slick Willie” while another simply branded him “a fraud”; where one of the biggest-name Democratic politicians was openly arguing that his “character problems” made him “unacceptable to the vast majority of Democrats”; a state whose Democratic governor had nearly launched a presidential campaign of his own, and who was now being touted as the white knight who could rescue the party if Clinton stumbled just once more – a governor, by the way, whom Clinton had personally insulted in secretly recorded conversations that had come to light months earlier.”

Jonathan Chait: “This last weekend, I finally saw 12 Years a Slave. It was the most powerful movie I’ve ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later — it was a morning matinee — I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era.”

Just released for the iPhone: The Day That Launched The Kennedy Half Century.

It’s a companion app for Larry Sabato’s The Kennedy Half Century.

As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination approaches, a new Gallup poll finds that 61% of Americans still believe others besides Lee Harvey Oswald were involved.

The Monkey Cage: “Why are Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories so popular? The distinguishing feature of a successful conspiracy theory is power, and the Kennedy assassination has that in spades. The victim was an American president and the potential villains include actors of immense reach and influence.”

Out next week: A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination by Philip Shenon.

Former Speaker Thomas Foley (D-WA), who spent
30 years in Congress as a kingpin on agriculture, ultimately leading the
chamber as the ‘Speaker from Spokane,’ has died, Roll Call reports.

He was 84.

This is kind of amazing: JFK 50 Year Commemorative Collection.

The most important moments of Kennedy’s 1,000 days as president as compiled by the National Archives.

The Week warns: “Not every political party lasts forever.”

Associated Press: “Once, the young nation had a dramatic excuse: The Treasury was empty, the White House and Capitol were charred ruins, even the troops fighting the War of 1812 weren’t getting paid.”

“A second time, in 1979, was a back-office glitch that ended up costing taxpayers billions of dollars. The Treasury Department blamed it on a crush of paperwork partly caused by lawmakers who — this will sound familiar — bickered too long before raising the nation’s debt limit.”

“These lapses, little noted outside financial circles in their day, are nearly forgotten now.”

The Nation has dug up the 1981 audio of the late Lee Atwater explaining how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves.

Said Atwater: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites… ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.'”

Former Chicago Bears coach Mike Ditka told the Dickinson Press that he regrets not running against Barack Obama to represent Illinois in the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Said Ditka: “Biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Not that I would have won, but I probably would have and he wouldn’t be in the White House.”