To the extent that Ronald Reagan is to be admired, it's as a highly effective snake oil salesman, convincing middle class people that if you shovel enough cash into the pockets of the wealthy, the change that trickles out of their overflowing pockets will enrich the middle class as well. Reagan also fed into the deep-seated emotional need that conservatives have for a father figure, though in those waning days of the Cold War, nutually assured destruction seemed a remote prospect at most. Reagan was the affable daddy, the one who'd keep the bogeyman (welfare queens) away from you but still go out in the backyard and have a catch. In this year's Search for the New Reagan, the Republican candidates are running as the punitive, controlling daddy; as Robert DeNiro in This Boy's Life or Robert Duvall as The Great Santini.
That Charlie Wilson's War turned out to be a dud at the box office is actually a positive sign that people outside those on the hard-core right with their daddy issues are re-evaluating the Reagan era. Whether it's that Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts are past their prime as box office draws, or if it's that people now understand that the events described in that particular story are what led to the creation of al-Qaeda remains to be seen. But it's clear now that the American role in putting the last nail in the Soviet expansionism coffin helped put us in the mess in which we find ourselves now.
It's in the area of economic policy where the current crop of Republicans persist in embracing the Reagan Doctrine, despite the fact that it was a Democratic president that had to clean up the mess that Reagan and Bush left in their "borrow and spend" policies. Today Paul Krugman sets the record straight on the Republicans' Reagan nostalgia in pointing out how there is absolutely no reason for any Democrat to invoke Ronald Reagan as an example for anything:
The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.
When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.
Given that reality, what was Mr. Obama talking about? Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.
For example, I’m not sure what “dynamism” means, but if it means productivity growth, there wasn’t any resurgence in the Reagan years. Eventually productivity did take off — but even the Bush administration’s own Council of Economic Advisers dates the beginning of that takeoff to 1995.
Similarly, if a sense of entrepreneurship means having confidence in the talents of American business leaders, that didn’t happen in the 1980s, when all the business books seemed to have samurai warriors on their covers. Like productivity, American business prestige didn’t stage a comeback until the mid-1990s, when the U.S. began to reassert its technological and economic leadership.
I understand why conservatives want to rewrite history and pretend that these good things happened while a Republican was in office — or claim, implausibly, that the 1981 Reagan tax cut somehow deserves credit for positive economic developments that didn’t happen until 14 or more years had passed. (Does Richard Nixon get credit for “Morning in America”?)
But why would a self-proclaimed progressive say anything that lends credibility to this rewriting of history — particularly right now, when Reaganomics has just failed all over again?
Like Ronald Reagan, President Bush began his term in office with big tax cuts for the rich and promises that the benefits would trickle down to the middle class. Like Reagan, he also began his term with an economic slump, then claimed that the recovery from that slump proved the success of his policies.
And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. The public mood today is as grim as it was in 1992. Wages are lagging behind inflation. Employment growth in the Bush years has been pathetic compared with job creation in the Clinton era. Even if we don’t have a formal recession — and the odds now are that we will — the optimism of the 1990s has evaporated.
This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right’s ideas don’t work, and never have.
It’s not just a matter of what happens in the next election. Mr. Clinton won his elections, but — as Mr. Obama correctly pointed out — he didn’t change America’s trajectory the way Reagan did. Why?
Well, I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.
Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.
I would say that the reason the Clinton Administration didn't change the narrative had nothing to do with policy, and everything to do with the Clintonistas' underestimation of whom they were dealing with on the other side of the aisle, and Bill Clinton's inability to exercise the extra caution in his personal life that was required when the vultures are constantly circling.
Ronald Reagan ought to be the third rail of Democratic politics in that anything that smacks of praise of the Republicans' most cherished icon is to be strictly avoided. I have to wonder how much of Barack Obama's disappointing performance in Nevada was a result of him touching that third rail. It may be that he was trying to win the endorsement of the Reno newspaer that was conducting the interview, but ultimately none of the newspaper endorsements in the world will compensate if you don't get the support from voters who never, ever, want anything that smacks of Ronald Reagan running the country ever again.
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