"makes George Bush look like George McGovern"

From Ruth Marcus, Washington Post column, "Rick Perry by the book" Aug. 30:

Perry’s 2010 Tea Party-steeped manifesto, “Fed Up!,” makes George Bush look like George McGovern. Perry has said he wasn’t planning to run for president when he wrote the book, and it shows:

?The Texas governor floats the notion of repealing the 16th Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax. Perry describes the amendment as “the great milestone on the road to serfdom” because it “was the birth of wealth redistribution in the United States.”

? Perry laments the New Deal as “the second big step” — the 16th and 17th amendments being the first — “in the march of socialism and .?.?. the key to releasing the remaining constraints on the national government’s power to do whatever it wishes.”

?He specifically targets Social Security for “violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles of federalism and limited government,” and asserts that “by any measure, Social Security is a failure

Whoa! These are not mainstream Republican views — at least, not any Republican mainstream post-Goldwater and pre-Tea Party. Even Ronald Reagan, who had once criticized Social Security and Medicare, was backing away from those positions by the 1980 presidential campaign.