When the Republicans need to dip back into their presidential past for heroes they don’t have much that they can call upon that fits the desperate, mean-spirited, irrelevant political party that they have become. Not much of their history fits very well. Consider this.
Lincoln: nominally a Republican, but he did something that no conservative would have done—freed the slaves. Today’s staunchest Republicans are in the Southern states that, well . . .
Teddy Roosevelt: a progressive. Teabaggers would lynch him today.
Hoover: a flop, father of the Great Depression. He doesn’t get a mention
Eisenhower: No way. He supported the progressive income tax (91% in the top bracket), and unions, and warned of the military-industrial complex that is the contemporary Republican credo.
Nixon: ended up surrendering on Vietnam, cozied up to the Red Chinese and then got caught lying about Watergate.
The Bushes: Republicans hardly mention either of them; 41 didn’t go all the way to Baghdad and raised taxes; 43 did go there and caused what might be the next Great Depression.
So who did we leave out? You guessed it. I have a friend who calls him “Dutch” (with the same reverence he refers to John Wayne as “Duke”). Of course Dutch is also called the “Gipper” and “The Great Communicator.” I guess it takes a lot of sobriquets for a guy who played so many different roles during his actor-huckster-politician life. Reagan is now regularly exhumed by his worshippers, as he has been of late in a television documentary and glossy magazine I saw at the supermarket stand, to have his administration tuned into something between the walking on water and the sermon on the mount. The cover in the mag had Ronnie in a cowboy hat; he was never a cowboy, nor was he in the military in WWII, but you can find photos of Ronnie uniform (from some movie he made). Ronnie, it seemed, was always reading from some script, and he taught Republicans how to blur the line between fact and fiction.
Republicans have raised Ronnie Reagan to Conservative sainthood by means of a mythology they maintain like a drumbeat. Never mind that he began his presidency by stabbing Jimmy Carter in the back through a relationship with enemy Iran that would result in the unconstitutional and illegal Iran-Contra deal, worse than the Watergate break in ever could be. Ronnie just couldn’t “remember” he had anything to do with that, until he “remembered” later, when the dust had settled (his was a “selective” Alzheimer’s). Other people involved took the hit for the Gipper, who was in fact impeachable for his constitutional breach.
But Ronnie didn’t forget his rich friends. If you want an apt starting point for the economic policies that led to our current Great Recession, start with Ronnie. Reagan, sucked in by the bogus Laffer Curve and “supply side” economics (what G.H.W. Bush later called “voodoo economics and was also denigrated by Fed Reserve Chairman Paul Volker) started shifting American wealth upward. Although trhe Great Shifter presented himself as a guy who was from the working class and related to the workingman wages for people in the middle and working classes stayed rather flat during his reign. And he had a rather hard-assed attitude when it came to people having a hard time. Perhaps they weren’t doing enough with the “trickle down” his economic policies were supposed to engender. Even his son Ron has pointed out that his father was capable of referring to “The homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
If Ronnie was an adept blame shifter he was also a masterful tax shifter. As California Governor he like shifting the state’s share of the fiscal burden for elementary and secondary education and junior colleges to the local level (the regressive property tax). Suddenly there were new bond issues on local ballots to make up the difference, but Ronnie looked like the tax cutter he claimed he was. He rode the reputation and his shifty methodology to the White House. But even shifting burden to the states he still found he had to raise taxes to finance the other part of his reputation (more on that in a moment) of being the guy who would out defense spend those pesky Rooskies and get Mr. Gorbichev to “tear down that wall.” He showed them what a great war resident he was with his daring victory in Grenada. In any case, the great tax-shifter ended up running up the biggest deficit in history up to that time.
But you won’t hear any of that documentable reality from the worshippers of the Great Shifter. They prefer the myth. They also prefer the myth of how Reagan brought down the U.S.S.R. In fact the Soviet Union was already in dire economic trouble before Reagan and they already knew it. Reagan didn’t push Gorby into perestroika and glasnost; credit should really go to the decade long war they waged against the Afghan muhujadeen. It takes more than a flashing smile and a pomaded pompadour to bring down a superpower. Nevertheless Ronnie hagiographers persistently push the myth that this phony cowboy and second-rate actor saved the world from communism.
Ronnie was good a taking down unions and “tearing down” the regulatory walls that that kept greedy bankers and Wall Streeters and energy companies somewhat in check. He was unsuccessful in eliminating the departments of Energy and Education however. Although he liked to drone on about how “government isn’t the solution to the problem but is the problem” which conservatives love to repeat the government grew by over a quarter million workers during his administration.
So now we are back to the conservatives using the Great Shifter to rally to their flag. One can only wonder what Ronnie would think of the great rightward shift of the country, of the Teabaggers and the likes of Palin, Beck, Rand Paul and McConnell and Boehner, and his name and fictionalized legacy being evoked in their cause. Remember, before he became the great wealth shifter he was the great ideology shifter. But even if you are Republican “saint,” unlike your reputation, you only get to go around once.
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©2011, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 2.19.2011)