The Reagan 'Myth'

t's slowly dawning on the liberals that it's not going to be enough to ignore Ronald Reagan. Like it or not, they're going to have to take him on, head-first, and try to convince the American people, or at least the historians of his era, that he was a fundamentally bad guy.

I don't envy them the job. Reagan was an immensely popular president. Not long after his retirement I told him, in a private conversation, that I thought his historical popularity would follow the trajectory of most of his predecessors' -- declining somewhat at first, then rising again till he assumed at last his proper place in the presidential pantheon.

I was wrong. Right from the start, after he left the White House, commentators on both the right and the left have recognized him as one of the major presidents of the 20th century, who shaped the country's policies and future in important ways. This is already, clearly, the judgment of history, and there is nothing the liberals can do about it.

They can, however, try to distort his achievements. For a long time they pretty much neglected this, preferring to hope that, if they just ignored him, his memory would gradually fade. But it has failed to do so. On the contrary, he is as alive as ever in the memory of the American people, and is almost (if not quite) universally beloved. It is positively comical to see how all of the Republican presidential wannabes, in election after election, proclaim themselves "Reagan Republicans," and vie for the honor of wearing his mantle. It is almost the exact equivalent of the fetish the Democrats have made of FDR.

As you might expect, some of the current crop of Democratic politicians are not above trying to get a little of the Reagan glory to rub off on them. One of the most recent is Barack Obama, who told a Nevada newspaper that Reagan had offered America a "sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." This is incontestably true, but Obama neglected to couple it with some balancing words of condemnation that certain of his Democratic colleagues apparently felt were necessary.

So Obama has been landed on by the gatekeepers of the Democratic shrine, for whom Ronald Reagan was -- and must always be portrayed as -- irremediably evil. Thus Paul Krugman, who embarrasses even the Op-Ed page of The New York Times with his frantic liberalism, bluntly declared, "the furor over Obama's praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics."

Krugman follows this up with a column's worth of tendentious denunciations of Reagan's policies: "Reaganomics failed. ... The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. ... (T)he inevitable recession arrived (in the Bush years).... There wasn't any resurgence (in productivity)." Etc., etc.

In all of this, of course, Krugman misses the point. Perhaps more accurately, he avoids the point. Arguing over this or that aspect of Reagan's economic record misses the true significance of the man as totally as the Liberty-League nitpickers of the mid-1930s missed the significance of Franklin Roosevelt. It wasn't FDR's grotesque economics, or his disastrous court-packing plan, that made the New Deal memorable and popular. It was the man's panache, and his obvious confidence in the fundamental strength and vitality of American society, that endeared him to the voters.

Similarly, what characterized Ronald Reagan, and made him memorable, was his pride in this country and in its commitment to the principles of freedom, both here and abroad. Americans saw in him a reflection of their own nobility, and responded to it. That is the mark of a true leader, and that is what the Reagan "myth" was really about.

REAGAN , FOR THOSE UNDER 40

This may sound shocking to anyone under 40, but 25 years ago, a lot of serious people were seriously wondering whether America’s best days were already past us.
Time magazine ran a cover story asking “Where have all the Heroes Gone?”
Inflation was 12%, Unemployment over 7% and both were rising simultaneously, giving birth to a new term, “stagflation”. Gasoline was just as expensive as it is today (accounting for inflation), except there wasn’t much to buy and long lines snaked around the block. Articles in respected magazines and newspapers asked whether the American Presidency was “too big a job for just one person”.
American soldiers weren’t the good guys. Just watch any war movie made in the mid-to late 70’s. If our guys weren’t bad, they were distraught, discouraged, crazy or suicidal.
Just 10 short years before becoming the world’s only Superpower, America seemed paralyzed after Vietnam while the Soviet empire expanded throughout the Third World. And it wasn’t just the Communists pushing us around. Millions of Americans watched Islamic militants sack the American embassy in Iran and march 52 blindfolded American hostages in front of television cameras. They wouldn’t release them for over 400 days.
In the Spring of 1979, President Jimmy Carter delivered one of the most unusual presidential speeches ever delivered from the White House. Known today as the “Malaise” speech, its theme was that America was suffering a “crisis of the spirit”. Even Democrats were not impressed. Carter was challenged for renomination by Senator Ted Kennedy. Carter won (or Kennedy lost, more accurately), but his party was divided and his nation was despondent.
Enter Ronald Reagan. Against this somber background, Reagan insisted that America’s brightest days were still in front of us, not behind us. He rejected the Vietnam syndrome, instead declaring that America was not the cause of corruption and evil abroad, but the cure for it, particularly in facing down Soviet communism. As for solving problems at home, we didn’t need the government to do more, we needed it to do less. The size, girth and expense of government was the problem, not the solution. In an era preoccupied with the “complexity” of insoluble problems, Reagan said “There are simple solutions - just not easy ones.”
Sophisticated people found Reagan, well....... unsophisticated. Also naive, not all that bright, and much too hard line.
But Reagan was telling Americans what they wanted to hear and what they wanted to believe about their country. And when they elected him by a 41 State landslide, he went to work doing what he said he would do.
He said his program to cut income taxes, government regulation and domestic government spending would unleash a rising tide of jobs, prosperity and opportunity. It did. He said that deregulating oil prices would lower the price of gasoline and end the “energy crisis”. It did. He said he would fire the air traffic controllers who were illegally striking if they didn’t return to work. He did.
As for dealing with the Soviets, Reagan said that his program of vastly increasing military spending, planting Pershing missiles in NATO countries and aiding anti-Soviet rebels throughout the Third World would one day relegate Marxist Leninism to “the ash heap of history”. This was too much for his critics, made up of a big chunk of Congress, most university professors, and much of the national news media. They regarded Reagan as either dumb, a warmonger or both, and they insisted that his policies would trigger a never-ending arms race and perhaps lead to the unthinkable – a nuclear war.
When Reagan announced his support for a space-based system to defend the country from a nuclear strike, tensions rose even higher. ABC aired a movie, “The Day After”, about America under nuclear attack. The “nuclear freeze” movement in 1984 was every bit as intense and its demonstrations every bit as large as the anti-Iraq-War movement is in 2004. History has yet to render a verdict on Iraq, but we already know who was right about the Soviets. The dumb warmonger won the Cold War without firing a shot. And soldiers were the good guys in the movies again. Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now” gave way to Tom Cruise and Tom Skerrit in “Top Gun”.
But Reagan did more than unlock the American economy and liberate millions of people from Communist captivity. He gave America back its smile. His sense of humor helped, but so did his belief that political differences weren’t personal differences, a sentiment that seems to have gone missing on both sides in recent years.
Where should history rank Reagan? Probably as the greatest President in the last 50 years because, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Reagan defined and ignited an entire political movement. For FDR it was New Deal liberalism. For Reagan, American conservatism.
Before Reagan, conservatism was instinctively reactive and mostly negative: stop spending on this, don’t do that, etc. Reagan made it both positive and pro-active - a movement based on core beliefs and clear ideas. As Ted Kennedy, of all people, put it, Reagan “wrote most of these ideas not only into law, but into the national consciousness.”
Dozens of conservative think tanks and more than 40 state-based policy centers around the country are daily churning out ideas for policymakers based on free markets, limited government and personal responsibility. Reaganism lives on.
Today we take it for granted in America that great days are still in front of us. We take for granted that lower taxes will stimulate growth. We take for granted that the best way to deal with deadly adversaries is to stand up to them, not make excuses for them.
25 short years ago, Americans didn’t take any of those things for granted. That’s what Reagan changed.

Amen...

This is exactly what I told my own sons last night.

I remember clearly, when I was a child, how my grandparents spoke glowingly about FDR. They told me: “He lifted the mood of the entire country, and made us believe again”. FDR came along in a time that was not just economic Depression... it was, collective social depression. In his fireside chats on the radio, his eternal optimism changed the attitude of the entire nation and set them on a path of recovery. At least, the people BELIEVED they were... My grandparents didn’t agree with much of what FDR did, but they loved him anyway.

Ronald Reagan was much the same. After the shame of watergate, we muddled through several years of care-taker Ford. Everyone knew the next election would go to the Democrats.. just as punishment for Nixon’s ‘crimes’. And so, we ended up with Jimmy Carter... even though, I think a majority already knew that Reagan would have been better.

Jimmuh had the mis-fortune of leading during a period of bad economic production, but his policies and inaction made things far worse than they had to be. Everyone saw his cluelessness in how to deal with the problems, and his obvious internal distress. Cue the Iranian Revolution... and, things just got worse. By the time the 1980 election came along, most in this country had given up any hope for the future of America. RR reminded us that, Hey! This is STILL the greatest country around.. and, with leadership backed by the power of the American people, CHANGES for THE GOOD can still happen.

No one.. certainly not me... ever thought Congress would index taxes to inflation to stop the “bracket creep” that relentlessly brought more money into Washington... but, they did! 25 years later, we all STILL get a ‘tax cut’ every year, as the Standard Deduction is adjusted.

No one thought we could get our hostages back from Iran.. we did. NO one thought there was any way to stop “stagflation”.. we did. The cures were painful, to be sure. I was personally unemployed twice during Reagan’s years... I nearly lost my home. But, I survived.. and, even prospered, eventually.

If you ever had ANY doubt that we don’t have a Reagan running this year.... just take a look at the answers to the FIRST question in last night’s debate: “Are we better off than we were 8 years ago”. EVERY CANDIDATE said, “NO”... Mitt, of course, answered obtusely, but... even his response equated to.. No.

ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME??? How hard is it to answer that question, EMPHATICALLY YES!!! Of course, some people may not be... but, as a country? Of course we are.

8 years ago, we were at the end of the dot-com bubble and the markets were about to take HUGE losses. We’ve survived that, taken a wicked terrorist hit, and won two wars since then.. and despite all that, we’ve created MILLIONS of new jobs, increased income, increased personal net worth, seen ALL KINDS of innovative new products, seen the dramatic increases in global trade, advances in health care, etc... I could on for days.

Yet, not one of the Republican candidates could think of anything to say except, “Well.... these are hard times”. BS! I’ve lived in hard times... THIS, AIN’T IT!. What we need, is a leader who will tell this country to stop whining, get to work, and enjoy the fruits of the greatest nation in the history of the world.

Whew.... I was just going to type, “Amen”.... guess, I got carried away.. :-)

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