Will Bunch gets some precious space in the Washington Post to debunk five myths about Ronald Reagan, on the occasion of his 100th birthday. For example, Reagan didn’t shrink the size of government.
Reagan famously declared at his 1981 inauguration that “in the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” This rhetorical flourish didn’t stop the 40th president from increasing the federal government’s size by every possible measure during his eight years in office.
Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion. Many experts believe that Reagan’s massive deficits not only worsened the recession of the early 1990s but doomed his successor, George H.W. Bush, to a one-term presidency by forcing him to abandon his “no new taxes” pledge.
The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon. (It took the Democratic administration of President Bill Clinton to trim the employee rolls back to 2.7 million.) Reagan also abandoned a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies – Energy and Education – and added a new one, Veterans Affairs.
I swear, when I read Bunch writing about Reagan, I can start thinking that he wasn’t that bad. He despised nuclear weapons, torture, killing innocents in anti-terror operations, and he raised taxes when reasonable people told him it was necessary. In other words, he would have no place in today’s GOP.
Correct, or at least I agree, that Saint Ronnie would not have a place in the Republican party and probably would not fit anywhere in the current political spectrum
But, I do not think Reagan was very bright. W may have been brighter. Dunno. Both were rather dim, Ronnie just had more charisma.
Maybe not so dim, on either count; just exceptionally willing to play President for their own twisted personal reasons.
I could write for hours why he sucked, the biggest being the promulgation of the myth of trickle down, which has bankrupted this country. But I still need coffee.
Reagan the man may have held humanitarian beliefs, but his administration caused immense damage & suffering both domestically & abroad. On which basis would you judge his presidency? Was he a leader or not? Either way, he looks none too good.
Where he’d fit in today’s GOP is irrelevant to our judgement of his presidency, in his own time, also.
Personally I will not & cannot forgive his administration’s willful inaction regarding AIDS. That’s enough for me to consider his presidency a criminal tragedy.
The most criminal aspect? The fake, saccharine Hollywood Grandpa routine that gave the electorate back their childhood.
When he was shot my friends & I partied & hoped he would suffer. I’d do the same today.
Don’t forget … Ray-gun stumped for Truman .. but of course later sold his soul to GE … and of course .. there was Springsteen … who the night or two after Ray-gun was elected .. warned Phoenix(that’s where his show was that night) and the rest of the country what was to come .. in eerily prescient fashion .. because as any Bruce fans here know .. his parents moved out to CA in the late 60’s .. so his parents .. and by extension Bruce .. found out what Ray-gun was about the hard way .. when Ray-gun was Governor of CA
Did you read or hear Mike Stark’s chat with Rush Limbaugh about Reagan? Pretty interesting: http://bit.ly/eO3Tk8
On the size of budgets and deficits, the Republican excuse is that “Democrats, who controlled Congress, made him do it.”
On defense budgets, David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics documents how an arithmetic error got propagated into the largest defense budget increase of the Reagan administration. (The error was not undone, it was supplemented.)
It is easy to forget that Reagan was an FDR supporter until the Red Scare hit the movie industry when he the president of the Screen Actors Guild. And after his acting career went down the tubes, he found employment by pushing anti-communist propaganda for General Electric on the General Electric Theater. It was that gig plus the request of some Goldwater operatives that gave him the keynote speech at the GOP convention in 1964.
He was from the generation that understood what nuclear weapons could do because of the US attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And he knew what an economic depression felt like. And a war that surprised a nation. Those experiences don’t go away easily. No matter what silly philosophical principles you claim to believe later.
I dunno about the effect our two bombs dropped on Japan had on his thinking. He was, after all, a public backer of Truman in 1948.
I suspect the landmark widely-watched movie-for-tv in 1983, The Day After, which Reagan screened in the WH, had far more of an effect on his thinking about nuclear weapons and the Cold War than anything else. His 1990 “autobiography” seems to suggest this anyway. It might also have served as a sobering reminder of how Cold War politics and rhetoric — which until then the Reagan admin had been hard-charging and rather reckless about — can get out of hand, leading to unfortunate but predictable actions.
Reagan was always, anyway, far more influenced by things he saw and heard on the screen than what was actually happening in the real world.
I think you’ve got something there. Too bad Spike Lee wasn’t making movies then about America’s inner cities, because under Reagan and Bush and their ignorant policies and corruption, America almost lost its cities.
The reality about the consequences of nuclear weapons did not really seep in until the Soviet Union appeared (thanks CIA) to have parity with the US in nuclear weapons. It was then that folks who witnessed the history through the news of the end World War II then began to imagine being on the receiving end of a nuclear attack. That shift came in the 1960s, most likely at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The debate then became between the “peace through strength” bunch and the “disarmament agreement” bunch. At Reykjavik, my reading of Reagan’s actions was that of claiming the victory of the “peace through strength” approach. He wanted very much to be the President who put an end to nuclear weapons, and this scared his staff.
Reagan’s personal humanitarian principles, in light of his administration & its aftermath, recall the Zen koan about the tree falling in the forest.
Another huge contribution Reagan made was to make it OK (in a political sense) to be racist again in America. He was an awful man.