However, like a lot of my colleagues in the rhetoric/communication field, you are committing an act of "discursive determinism," which comes from a common gut-tendency to think that communication is a lot more important than it really is. There are extra-discursive things that exist in a real world, that tend to trump things like ability to speak as criteria for political success. The Right, and the ruling class, may not have the Left beat in elegance or even simplicity of message, but they do have guns, FBI agents, control of the means of communicative production, and the ability to deploy massive amounts of material resources in the service of their shallow, illogical, and bigoted speech acts.
More than once in the last century, socialist ideas were both more eloquent and more publicly palitable than their rightist counterparts, and whenever the Left has come close to occupying a place at the official political table, all the material, extra-discursive services of the Right have been fully deployed to prevent that from happening. Just as "workers cannot eat symbols"*, the Left cannot "debate" against FBI black bag jobs, assassinations, media blackouts, and jailings.
With all due respect, your statement--that if the Left had a communicator as good as Reagan, they'd be sitting pretty--is actually 180 degrees opposite of what is really true: Reagan could never hope to be as eloquent as Debs, or even as eloquent as JFK. The ability to communicate good, sound ideas, to speak to people's hearts, has never been able to trump extra-discursive police power in America.
Communication is very, very important, but only within a larger context, a political strategy that acknowledges the existence of an objective material world where bosses own the airwaves and, if they can't beat you with their 1000-1 advantage in terms of the means of production, they'll just try to shoot you, imprison you, disappear you, and if that doesn't work, they'll starve their constitents until nobody can afford to listen to you.
A concluding thought: Try and imagine Reagan uttering the rightist equivalent of Debs's criticism of patriotism. They aren't even in the same league:
"These are the gentry who are today wrapped up in the American flag, who shout their claim from the housetops that they are the only patriots, and who have their magnifying glasses in hand, scanning the country for evidence of disloyalty, eager to apply the brand of treason to the men who dare to even whisper their opposition to Junker rule in the United Sates. No wonder Sam Johnson declared that "patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." He must have had this Wall Street gentry in mind, or at least their prototypes, for in every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both, to deceive and overawe the people." [Applause.]
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