Remembering St. Reagan realistically

St. Ronald Reagan with Dixiecrat Republican (and Trent Lott hero) Strom Thurmond

Obama has understandably drawn criticism from both Clintons and from John Edwards for his praise of Reagan and his bizarre statement that the Republicans have been the idea party for the last 15 years or so. Paul Krugman, who has been a sharp critic of Obama's daydreams of bipartisan harmony, writes on St. Reagan and his historical legacy in Debunking the Reagan Myth New York Times 01/21/08:

... [T]he furor over Barack 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.

Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”

Contrast that with Mr. Obama’s recent statement, in an interview with a Nevada newspaper, that Reagan offered a “sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”

Krugman asks the perfectly legitimate question, "why would a self-proclaimed progressive say anything that lends credibility to this [conservative, pro-Reagan] rewriting of history — particularly right now, when Reaganomics has just failed all over again?"

Obama or some of his staff might also want to consult this essay by Nicholas Lemann, "The Best Years of Their Lives" New York Review of Books 06/30/1988. Lemann writes:

It is going way too far to call Reagan a pure conservative. Even so, there is no question what his overall impact on the country has been. He staked out a basic position that was outside the consensus of the national leadership on practically every issue from relations with the Soviets to affirmative action to environmentalism. By proving that his position would not seem eccentric - that in fact it would win elections - he caused the consensus to move in his direction. By the mid-Eighties ideas were being discussed in respectable Washington that would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the decade. Groups of intellectuals and interest groups who had been on the fringe in the Seventies were now "part of the process," as Larry Speakes would say—it seemed actually to matter, for the first time ever in government, what the editor of Human Events, or rogue businessmen like Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife, thought. The constant pressure from the Republican right, combined with the disappearance of the Republican left, had the effect of making even the much despised Republican pragmatists more conservative than they used to be. The panoply of conservative interest groups became bolder, spent more money, and in several cases underwent internal revolutions in which the right-wingers unseated the moderates. For a while there seemed to be a direct line from the hothouse conservative policy world to the White House, although this feeling has disappeared in the final, peacemaking phase of Reagan's presidency.

American politics is usually described by experts as essentially centrist, but Reagan moved the location of the center. This is a far more important achievement than staying awake in meetings or remembering the names of Cabinet members. In the play of interests and ideas, the Reagan years were not one long snooze, and the insider books that portray them as such are very soon going to seem dated. (my emphasis)

This is an aspect of the Reagan administration that is far more important than vague observations of how he reflected public opinion. He took his Party the next step toward being the Party of neoconservatives, shameless plutocrats and Christianist theocrats that it is today.

Reagan didn't come in on a wave of public support for his "supply side" tax cut theories, although the property-tax "revolt" of that day undoubtedly contributed to his appeal. He didn't catch up to Carter in the opinion polls until the last weeks of the 1980 campaign. And without the Iranian hostage crisis, it's certainly an open question whether he ever would have. And, yes, I think the circumstantial evidence accumulated by Gary Sick and Robert Perry is persuasive that the Reagan campaign had an "October suprise" arrangement to delay the release of the hostages until after the election. But you don't have to accept that notion to recognize that the perceived national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis was a decisive factor.

There's also this timely note on Reagan and his "era", On Martin Luther King Jr. Day: 26 pages in the history of the holiday by Robert Smith San Francisco Chronicle 01/21/08:

Twenty four years ago, when President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, he praised the civil rights leader for "awakening something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be color-blind." In a 1986 message to the Congress of Racial Equality marking the observance of the holiday, Reagan was even more effusive in his praise, describing King as a "truly prophetic voice that reached out over the chasms of hostility, prejudice, ignorance and fear to touch the conscience of America."

Yet, throughout congressional consideration of the legislation, President Reagan opposed the idea of a national holiday for King. Indeed, Reagan associated himself with the views of North Carolina's Sen. Jesse Helms, the legislation's most obdurate congressional opponent. During the Senate debate, Helms called for the opening of the FBI files on King, which he claimed would show that King was a communist or at least a communist sympathizer. When asked in an October 1983 news conference about Helms' allegations, Reagan responded, "We will know in about 35 years, won't we?" (referring to the time for the opening of the FBI files).

Reagan went on to say, "I don't fault Sen. Helms' sincerity with regard to wanting the records opened up. I think that he is motivated by a feeling that if we are going to have a national holiday named for any American, when it's only been named for one American in all our history up until this time, that he feels we should know everything there is to know about an individual." (my emphasis)

Tags: nicholas lemann, paul krugman, ronald reagan