By David J. Sanders

If Republicans ever hope to reemerge and become politically relevant, they should ignore Jeb Bush’s ill-conceived advice and embrace Bill Clinton’s clear example.

The former Florida governor, who is the son of the 41st U.S.  president and younger brother to the 43rd president,  suggested the other day that in order to “get past Reagan,” Republicans ought to set aside their conservative “nostalgia” for the former Republican president. Such advice from Bush the younger is not only incredibly misguided, but it ignores the incontrovertible political fact that nearly every major politician — Democrat and Republican — since 1988 has tried to build on Reagan’s political legacy.

It was something Bill Clinton understood.

Writing in 2000, journalist Carl Cannon asserted that Clinton owed Reagan a great deal. Beyond borrowing the Gipper’s phraseology, backdrops, mannerisms, theatrical devices and electoral map strategies, Cannon pointed out that Clinton and his aides “diligently studied” the former Republican president’s magic “until they divined its most essential property: unbridled optimism.”

Reagan’s “Hope, Growth and Opportunity” became Clinton’s place to believe in: His hometown of Hope, Ark. But, Clinton’s Reagan imitation wasn’t only based on style. He embraced Reagan on substance – the Republican’s fingerprints were all over Clinton’s policies.

In 1992, he eschewed the Democratic Party of old by embracing the political arc that Reagan reshaped. Clinton ran on a middle-class tax cut as a way to get a faltering economy moving again. Contrast that with Walter Mondale, who pledged to raise taxes if voters elected him instead of Reagan in 1984.

To combat increasing crime, Clinton promised 100,000 more police on the streets. Four years earlier, Michael Dukakis claimed he’d oppose the death penalty, even if his wife was brutally murdered. And, like Reagan, the Arkansas governor pledged that if elected he’d work to “end welfare as we know it” even as his party sought to defend LBJ’s “Great Society.”

Clinton, unlike some would-be Republican leaders today, understood that Reagan’s presidency made history in terms of presidential politics. Reagan was the only U.S. president in the 20th Century who was elected to two consecutive terms, then followed by an elected president of his party.

In 1988, Vice President George H. W. Bush ran on his boss’ successes, which led many observers to label his first term Reagan’s third. But after his election, Bush abandoned the Reagan playbook, preferring a “kinder, gentler” and more moderate approach. This included Bush breaking trust with the American people by breaking his campaign pledge not to raise taxes, which opened the door for Reagan’s fourth term, vis-à-vis Clinton.

But after Clinton wavered in 1993 and 1994, abandoning much of what he’d promised in 1992, congressional Republicans picked up the Reagan mantle and won. This caused Clinton to readjust and move back to the right to win re-election in 1996.

Others have successfully embraced Reagan.

When he ran for the presidency in 2000, then-Gov. George W. Bush, with his Western optimism, adherence to supply-side economics, and pledge for an era of responsibility, was often accused of being more like the Gipper than his father.

And then, after a troubling era of Republican wavering on spending and irresponsible governance, both perceived and real, at home and abroad, a one-term senator emerged victorious in his quest for the White House by asking the country if it was better off than it was four years earlier (something Reagan routinely did in 1980), pledging to cut the middle class’ taxes, and promising to restore “hope,” just like Reagan 28 years earlier and Clinton 16 years before.

Republicans should disregard those who ignore history and instead embrace Reagan’s playbook, which has proven time and again to produce winning results for those who read from it.

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David J. Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and is the host of Arkansas Education Television Network’s “Unconventional Wisdom.” His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com.