Would Teddy Roosevelt have been a Reagan Republican? I'd like to hear someone ask McCain that. Would he have been a Bush Republican?

Cherrypicking from a man with whom I sometimes don't agree, but in the interest of skepticism toward McCain's self-association, some TR quotes:

"Women should have free access to every field of labor which they care to enter, and when their work is as valuable as that of a man it should be paid as highly."

"If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base, and sordid creature, no matter how successful."

"I have a perfect horror of words that are not backed up by deeds."

"No man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful or unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character."

"This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in."

"The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is duty-bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown."

"A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues."

"Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage."

"If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month."

"When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a 'weasel word' after another there is nothing left of the other."

"The best executive is one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."

"The most important single ingredient in the formula for success is knowing how to get along with people."

"The one thing I want to leave my children is an honorable name."

"The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead."

Thanks for the Teddy Roosevelt quotes taking the measure of McCain, but as I recall TR was more than a little imperialistic and war-loving himself.

Before becoming President he vigorously supported and fought in the Spanish-American War, in which Spain's colonies effectively became ours. As President sent our fleet around the world in a good-will show of force and supported revolution in what was then Colombia to create a pliable Panama that would cooperate in canal-building. A friend of the saber-rattling Kaiser Wilhelm II before WWI, TR excoriated Wilson as a coward for not taking us into war sooner.

Nevertheless, TR represented a combination of virile vigor and gentlemanly integrity that we have missed for a long time and may not see again.