I have had a lot to say against Reagan nostalgia and the constant invocation of Reagan as a way for modern Republicans to explain away or distract from their errors, failures and bad policies, but what has been striking in recent days is how the McCain campaign and some Palin fans, abandoning the idiocy of the Alaska-is-close-to-Russia gambit, are now desperate to shelve the entire question of foreign policy experience by traducing Reagan’s reputation for understanding of foreign affairs when he was still a governor.  Here is part of Lisa Schiffren’s debate advice to Palin:

I do not have foreign policy experience. As Govs. Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan did, I will learn the names of foreign leaders and the conventions for discussing foreign policy. 

Leave Clinton out of the discussion for the moment (his time overseas was, of course, highlighted during the ’92 campaign, but not in a flattering way).  No one on the right who has ever heard or read Reagan’s convention speech from 1964 could come away with the belief that Reagan did not have very clear and informed views on foreign policy years before his first run for office and decades before his nomination for national office, and Reagan was less formally experienced in government in 1964 than Palin is today.  Reagan didn’t need to learn the names of foreign leaders and conventions for discussing foreign policy when he was nominated to a national ticket, because he had already acquired that knowledge decades earlier.  If there were people who underestimated Reagan during any of his presidential campaigns, and I know there were, they did so out of their ignorance of what Reagan’s familiarity with foreign affairs was.  There’s some pretty poor reasoning going on among Palin’s fans: “Palin is a governor, Reagan was a governor, therefore Palin will be like Reagan.”  What is most remarkable about all of this is that in the desperate effort to make Palin credible even Reagan will be shown disrespect.