Reagan: The good and the bad (make that ugly)

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Reagan: The good and the bad (make that ugly)

Postby lukpac » Mon Jun 07, 2004 9:18 am

Editorial: What Reagan taught us

An editorial
June 7, 2004

In the hours after former President Ronald Reagan's passing, at age 93, it was amusing to witness the rewriting of history.

Suddenly, the man who redirected billions of dollars away from domestic needs to build the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, ran up record deficits, saw members of his administration investigated and indicted at a staggering rate and came close to being impeached himself for allowing aides to create a shadow government that peddled weapons to sworn enemies of the United States and used the profits to fund illegal wars in Central America was remade as a statesman who restored dignity and direction to his country.

While no one should begrudge Reagan's admirers this opportunity to replay those "morning in America" commercials that were deployed with such success during the last of their man's fourth run for the presidency, it is a bit embarrassing to hear people who know better embracing the spin.

The problem with all this hero worship is that the spin underestimates and demeans Reagan. It reduces a complex and controversial man to a blurry icon with few of the rough edges that made him one of the most remarkable political figures of his time.

This newspaper disagreed with most of what Reagan did during two terms as governor of California and two terms as president. And nothing that has happened since he left office in 1989 has altered our view.

Yet, we have always maintained a grudging respect for the man. And we continue to recognize that there is much that liberals can - and should - learn from him.

Ronald Reagan was a master politician who understood how to package rightwing ideas in appealing enough forms to get himself elected and, sometimes, to implement his programs. He did so by maintaining an optimism about his ideology and its potential that most conservatives before him lacked. That optimism transformed the conservative movement from a petty circle of grumbling cynics who believed that every glass was half empty - and probably poisoned - into energetic and, dare we say it, happy warriors on behalf of tax cuts, weapons systems, corporate welfare, deregulation and the blurring of lines between church and state.

In the years after Barry Goldwater's landslide loss of the 1964 presidential election, many conservatives had doubts about whether they would ever be able to peddle their programs successfully. But Reagan did not doubt. He believed. And his faith was infectious. It helped him beat a liberal Democratic governor of California in 1966 and a moderate Democratic president in 1980. And it permitted a new generation of conservatives to feel they were part of a movement with not just principles but with a future.

As that movement grasped its future, during Reagan's presidency and in its aftermath, liberals became the doubters. Many Democrats gave up on the progressive values that had carried that party to its greatest successes, and began to move to the right. It was a tragic error, for which the Democratic party continues to pay, as does the country.

The lesson to be learned from Reagan is not an ideological one. His ideology was wrong for America and wrong for the world - something even Reagan sometimes recognized, as when he backed off the most extreme elements of the conservative agenda to, for instance, defend Social Security.

Rather, the lesson to be learned from Reagan is a stylistic one. He loved preaching his conservative doctrines. And he loved battling with liberals at the ballot box, at the debate podium and in the Capitol. He showed no respect for party decorum, challenging a sitting Republican president - Gerald Ford - who he felt was too moderate. And he was willing to lose on principle, even in fights over nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This willingness to fight for his faith is what made Reagan remarkable. It is what inspired conservatives. And it is what liberals would be wise to learn from Ronald Reagan.

Published: 6:37 AM 6/07/04
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Postby lukpac » Mon Jun 07, 2004 9:59 am

Reaganomics still reverberates
Themes of tax cuts, less government and regulation echo
By GLENN KESSLER
The Washington Post
Posted: June 6, 2004

Through the prism of the right, Ronald Reagan's economic policies in the 1980s were a rainbow, a vision that was largely responsible for the nation's remarkable economy in the 1990s. Through the prism of the left, Reaganomics was a storm that devastated the poor and left huge budget deficits in its wake.


That debate may be settled only by historians not yet born, but this much is clear: Economic policy-making today must still contend with the rhetorical markers laid down by Reagan when he took office more than two decades ago.

Smaller government. Lower taxes. Less regulation. Low inflation.

Reagan failed to achieve many of these goals - his spending cuts barely nicked the fastest-growing parts of government, his tax cuts so devastated revenue that later in his tenure taxes had to be raised repeatedly, his regulatory approach was so haphazard it led to the savings and loan crisis, and his budgets were so unbalanced that the federal debt nearly tripled in eight years. Many economists give most of the credit for whipping inflation to former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker.

In assessing Reagan's economic legacy, "you have to distinguish between being a master at creating a mood and what he actually did in changing the structure or content of government programs," said Charles Schultze of the Brookings Institution, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Carter administration.

But Reagan's "mood" changed the terms of the debate, shifting the nation on a rightward economic course. He fired the air traffic controllers when they went on strike, forever altering union-management relations. He tolerated the high unemployment brought about in part by Volcker's tight money policies. And he championed the free market and railed against government programs, making it harder for his successors to create new ones except in the guise of a tax credit.

"He changed the conversation," said Isabell Sawhill, a Clinton budget official and Brookings scholar. "When people talk about the fact that the country moved rightward, it has. He was a skilled communicator, and he employed talented people to get that message across."

Tax-cut cry still reverberates
Reagan's predecessor, Jimmy Carter, may have ushered in deregulation or set in motion a big defense buildup. But it was Reagan who took those policies to heart. Former President Bill Clinton may have declared "the era of big government is over" or finally balanced the budget. But it was Reagan who set those goals and inspired the Republican Congress that worked with Clinton.

Reagan also placed tax cuts firmly at the center of the Republican agenda. Before Reagan, Republicans disliked government and abhorred deficits. After Reagan, tax cuts became an all-consuming crusade that one day would - maybe, possibly - lead toward smaller government and the end of deficits. Reagan preached that lower taxes would lead to greater economic growth, a theme that still echoes in the House and the Senate and whenever President Bush steps up to give an economic speech.

While Reagan only slowed the growth of non-defense spending, his deficits piled up and sent government interest costs soaring, making it difficult for future Congresses and presidents to increase spending without making even bigger holes in the budget. "The deficits were successful in putting pressure on government to reduce some types of spending," Schultze said.

From 1980 to 1986, spending on annually funded domestic programs (besides defense), as a share of the overall economy, fell 29%, but in the same period defense spending rose 27%. Tax revenue plunged 17%, while the interest on the national debt soared 61%. The net result: The budget deficit rose to 5% of the overall economy, an 86% increase.

Judging any president's impact on economic and business conditions is tricky and subjective. A president's term in many ways is an arbitrary dividing point. His economic legacy is determined in part by circumstances beyond his control, such as the business cycle or overseas events.

When Reagan took office in 1981 after the inflation-ravaged years of Carter, his advisers warned of a looming "economic Dunkirk." When he left the presidency eight years later, inflation and unemployment had fallen sharply and the country was in the midst of what was then the longest economic expansion in history.

That looks like success. But undergirding that expansion were stresses and fractures that quickly exposed themselves in the recession that doomed the George H.W. Bush presidency. The boom was powered by the debt-financed defense spending, while savings and investment were poor, living standards had stagnated, and the divide between rich and poor had widened.

Banks had lent money with abandon to finance real estate deals inspired by quirks in the tax code - and soon found themselves in a financial crisis. The budget deficits, by eating away at overall national savings, helped keep interest rates from falling as much as expected, making it more expensive for businesses to borrow money to make long-term investments.

There were other consequences. The value of the U.S. dollar soared as overseas investors attracted by high interest rates and cuts in business taxes rushed to buy dollars to invest in the United States. Many American farmers and manufacturers couldn't compete against foreign producers because the powerful dollar made U.S. goods too expensive and foreign goods inexpensive.

Yet, with the passage of time, some of the worst excesses of the Reagan years may be seen in a more charitable light. Some argue that the huge defense buildup helped bankrupt the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. If so, perhaps Reagan should receive credit for the fact that in the Clinton years the United States could dramatically reduce defense spending and balance the budget.

"That defense buildup (and the Fed's tight money policies) were primarily responsible for the deficit," said William Niskanen, president of the libertarian Cato Institute and a member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. "The Cold War is over. Tight money has brought inflation down. Both of these policies looked risky at the time but look good in retrospect."

Were voters better off?
Reagan owed his election to the economy. He won the presidency by asking a voters a simple but devastating question: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

In the waning days of the Carter administration, when high inflation and interest rates tormented Americans, the answer appeared to be no. And Reagan appeared to have a plan: He would unleash the forces of the free market by reducing the size of government and cutting taxes. Reagan also demanded larger defense spending.

These goals appeared contradictory or, in the memorable phrase of 1980 presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, "voodoo economics." But Reagan insisted that reducing taxes would generate enough corporate activity to make up the difference in lost revenue. This was a theory espoused by "supply-side" economists, who focused on the impact of taxes on the total supply of output, in contrast to those who concentrated on how to stimulate demand.

The problem was how to cut taxes, increase defense spending and balance the budget in the midst of an increasingly grim economic situation. It was an impossible task, made possible only by effectively cooking the books.

As recounted in the memoirs of budget director David Stockman and other former Reagan aides, the Reagan team was able to get its budget passed because of accounting gimmicks that came to be known by such terms as the "rosy scenario" and the "magic asterisk."

The rosy scenario predicted the economy would do much better than expected, providing revenue that would never materialize. The magic asterisk was made of spending cuts that would be identified later - but never were.

Congress did its part in the charade. The tax cut plan, which slashed taxes 25% over three years, was relatively easy to pass. So were defense spending increases, which were the equivalent of a new public works project in nearly every congressional district.

But the same conservatives who eagerly denounced deficits fought hard against cuts in agriculture programs, energy projects, highway funds or anything else with a vocal constituency. "Those were the mother's milk on which Republican politicians - self-professed conservatives as well as moderates - lived no less profitably than their Democratic colleagues," Stockman wrote in his book, "Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed."

A growing mountain of debt
Reagan, who delegated most details on key decisions to aides, also shied away from hard choices. A bipartisan group of senators came up with a plan that would have wrung real savings out of Social Security - and Reagan blanched. The looming crisis in Social Security was ultimately tossed to a commission for recommendations (which resulted in payroll tax hikes that helped wipe out much of the effect of his tax cuts). Reagan also never targeted the other big old-age program, Medicare.

So defense spending increased from 5.1% of the overall economy in 1981 to a high of 6.2% in 1996, a boost of nearly $120 billion. Payments for individuals, such as Social Security and Medicare, stayed around 10% of gross domestic product (GDP) - and in dollar terms increased as much as defense spending.

But interest costs on the growing mountain of debt soared from 1.9% of GDP in 1981 to 3.1% when Reagan's successor took office. Those interest payments consumed about $69 billion in 1981 - and $169 billion by 1989, a percentage increase almost as large as the boost in defense spending. While Reagan managed to kill few programs outright, those interest costs helped squeeze out money for domestic programs, many of which barely kept pace with inflation or shrank.

"In economic terms, one of his biggest legacies was these very large deficits," said Brookings scholar Sawhill. She noted that during the Reagan era, the United States went from being the largest net creditor to the largest net debtor nation.

As the economy deteriorated early in Reagan's presidency, just months after the "rosy scenario" had predicted a balanced budget by 1984, the scope of the deficit problem quickly became clear. Within a year, lawmakers had convinced Reagan that he needed to raise taxes to help close the gap, though the president convinced himself he was only closing loopholes.

In 1986, Reagan made one more attack on the tax system, signing into law a significant overhaul of the tax code that simplified the rate structure and shut down many tax shelters. But the law was not designed to affect revenue, and since then its reforms have been chiseled away by his successors.

Getting inflation under control
As the deficits mounted and some social programs were cut back, Fed Chairman Volcker kept a tight grip on the money supply to cure the inflation problem. The result was the most severe recession in modern times.

Volcker was a Carter appointee, and Carter had induced the Fed to undertake a disastrous experiment with credit controls late in his administration. But Reagan gave Volcker a relatively free hand to bring inflation down by tightening interest rates, even at the height of the 1981-'82 recession. Double-digit inflation fell to the single digits, where it has remained ever since.

Sawhill said one of the most positive aspects of Reagan's economic legacy was getting inflation under control. "He was willing to tolerate a deep recession to accomplish that," she said. "It is quite possible we wouldn't have (tolerated that) under a Democratic president."

Still, Sawhill said, it could be argued that a better mix of policies - a smaller tax cut, lower deficits, less stringent monetary policy - would have been a wiser economic course. The Fed, she said, wouldn't have had to step so hard on the economic brakes if the administration, with its massive tax cuts and defense buildup, weren't at the same time stepping on the accelerator.

John M. Berry of the Washington Post contributed to this report.

From the June 7, 2004, editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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Postby Rspaight » Mon Jun 07, 2004 12:27 pm

Here's an interesting article from last year:

Reagan's Liberal Legacy
What the new literature on the Gipper won't tell you.

By Joshua Green

Over the past several months, Nancy Reagan has quietly been alerting friends and family that the health of her husband Ronald Reagan, the nation's 40th president, is failing rapidly due to Alzheimer's. Reagan will turn 92 on Feb. 6, and the signs seem to suggest that he won't be with us for very much longer.

It is not uncommon, when such circumstances involve a national figure, for the media to prepare tributes and obituaries in anticipation of the event. But in the case of Ronald Reagan, the magnitude of this ritual seems certain to eclipse anything that has preceded it. As long as five years ago, the three main newsweeklies had locked up eminent presidential historians to write his valedictories. The conservative Heritage Foundation has underwritten a multimedia Reagan legacy project, cued up and awaiting word of his death. The major networks and the History Channel have prepared exhaustive documentaries (the latter didn't even wait for Reagan's departure, airing "Ronald Reagan: A Legacy Remembered" over Thanksgiving). And media jockeying to pay tribute has already begun: This month's Esquire dubs Reagan the "greatest living American."

But the clearest indicator can be found at the bookstore. The last few months have brought an avalanche of Reagan biographies, from John Harmer's Reagan: Man of Principle to Peter Schweizer's Reagan's War to Peter Wallison's Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency. They join such recent fare as William F. Buckley Jr.'s Ronald Reagan: An American Hero, Peggy Noonan's When Character Was King, and Dinesh D'Souza's Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, themselves just a fraction of the 427 listings on Amazon.com, many of them gauzy tributes, each striving to bestow an encomium more noble and gallant than the last. Indeed, what is so striking about these books--besides their sheer number--is their collective determination to exalt Reagan as the heroic embodiment of American conservatism.

This is no accident. In fact, there is an active campaign to nail into place a canonical version of Reagan's life and career. Energetic conservatives have organized a drive to glorify the former president by trying to do everything from affixing his name to public buildings in each of the nation's 3,066 counties to substituting his face for Alexander Hamilton's on the $10 bill. A similar dynamic applies here. Many of these hagiographies are written by noted conservative authors (Buckley, Noonan, D'Souza) or former Reagan staffers (Wallison, Martin Anderson, Michael Deaver), under the auspices of conservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (Wallison), the Hoover Institution (Anderson and Schweizer), and the Heritage Foundation (Stephen F. Hayward's The Age of Reagan, the first of two volumes).

One would have to go back to FDR to find a comparable example of a president portrayed in such consistently glowing terms--and the swashbuckling triumphs depicted in these books mythologize Reagan to a degree which exceeds even that. As one might expect, most gloss over or completely avoid mentioning the many embarrassing and outright alarming aspects of his presidency: from consulting astrologers to his fixation with biblical doom to the tortured rationalizations that enabled him to believe that he never traded arms for hostages. But they also do something else. Most of his conservative biographers espouse a Manichaean worldview in which Reagan's constancy in the face of liberal evils is the key to his greatness. But to sustain such an argument requires more than simply touting (and often exaggerating) his achievements, considerable though some of them were. The effort to gild Reagan's legacy also seems to demand that any accomplishment that didn't explicitly advance conservative goals be ex-punged from his record. And so they have been.

Reagan is, to be sure, one of the most conservative presidents in U.S. history and will certainly be remembered as such. His record on the environment, defense, and economic policy is very much in line with its portrayal. But he entered office as an ideologue who promised a conservative revolution, vowing to slash the size of government, radically scale back entitlements, and deploy the powers of the presidency in pursuit of socially and culturally conservative goals. That he essentially failed in this mission hasn't stopped partisan biographers from pretending otherwise. (Noonan writes of his 1980 campaign pledges: "Done, done, done, done, done, done, and done. Every bit of it.")

A sober review of Reagan's presidency doesn't yield the seamlessly conservative record being peddled today. Federal government expanded on his watch. The conservative desire to outlaw abortion was never seriously pursued. Reagan broke with the hardliners in his administration and compromised with the Soviets on arms control. His assault on entitlements never materialized; instead he saved Social Security in 1983. And he repeatedly ignored the fundamental conservative dogma that taxes should never be raised.

All of this has been airbrushed from the new literature of Reagan. But as any balanced account must make clear, Reagan acceded to political compromises as all presidents do once in office--and on many occasions did so willingly. In fact, however often unintentionally, many of his actions as president wound up facilitating liberal objectives. What this clamor of adulation is seeking to deny is that beyond his conservative legacy, Ronald Reagan has bequeathed a liberal one.

Roosevelt Republican

Reagan arrived in Washington with a full head of steam, vowing, as he put it in the major economic speech of his 1980 campaign, "to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending." To conservatives, and many others, he seemed destined to fulfill campaign pledges to abolish entire government agencies, rein in the excesses of the welfare state, and end Americans' overreliance on government. Sensing the historical moment, Reagan echoed John F. Kennedy in famously declaring, "If not us, who? If not now, when?"

At the outset of his first term, Reagan's revolution appeared to have unstoppable momentum. His administration passed an historic tax cut based on dramatic cuts in marginal tax rates and began a massive defense buildup. To help compensate for the tax cut, his first budget called for slashing $41.4 billion from 83 federal programs, only the first round in a planned series of cuts. And Reagan himself made known his desire to eliminate the departments of Energy and Education, and to scale back what his first budget director David Stockman called the "closet socialism" of Social Security and Medicaid.

But after his initial victories on tax cuts and defense, the revolution effectively stalled. Deficits started to balloon, the recession soon deepened, his party lost ground in the 1982 midterms, and thereafter Reagan never seriously tried to enact the radical domestic agenda he'd campaigned on. Rather than abolish the departments of Energy and Education, as he had promised to do if elected president, Reagan added a new cabinet-level department--one of the largest federal agencies--the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Though his budgets requested some cuts in some areas of discretionary spending, Reagan rapidly retreated and never seriously pushed them. As Lou Cannon, the Washington Post reporter who covered Reagan's political career for 25 years, put it in his masterful biography, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, "For all the fervor they created, the first-term Reagan budgets were mild manifestos devoid of revolutionary purpose. They did not seek to 'rebuild the foundation of our society' (the task Reagan set for himself and Congress in a nationally televised speech of February 5, 1981) or even to accomplish the 'sharp reduction in the spending growth trend' called for in [his] Economic Recovery Plan." By Reagan's second term, the idea of seriously diminishing the budget was, to quote Stockman, "an institutionalized fantasy." Though in speeches Reagan continued to repeat his bold pledge to "get government out of the way of the people," government stayed pretty much where it was.

This hasn't stopped recent contemporary conservative biographers from claiming otherwise. "He said he would cut the budget, and he did," declares Peggy Noonan in When Character Was King. In fact, the budget grew significantly under Reagan. All he managed to do was moderately slow its rate of growth. What's more, the number of workers on the federal payroll rose by 61,000 under Reagan. (By comparison, under Clinton, the number fell by 373,000.)

Reagan also vastly expanded one of the largest federal domestic programs, Social Security. Before becoming president, he had often openly mused, much to the alarm of his politically sensitive staff, about restructuring Social Security to allow individuals to opt out of the system--an antecedent of today's privatization plans. At the start of his administration, with Social Security teetering on the brink of insolvency, Reagan attempted to push through immediate draconian cuts to the program. But the Senate unanimously rebuked his plan, and the GOP lost 26 House seats in the 1982 midterm elections, largely as a result of this overreach.

The following year, Reagan made one of the greatest ideological about-faces in the history of the presidency, agreeing to a $165 billion bailout of Social Security. In almost every way, the bailout flew in the face of conservative ideology. It dramatically increased payroll taxes on employees and employers, brought a whole new class of recipients--new federal workers--into the system, and, for the first time, taxed Social Security benefits, and did so in the most liberal way: only those of upper-income recipients. (As an added affront to conservatives, the tax wasn't indexed to inflation, meaning that more and more people have gradually had to pay it over time.)

By expanding rather than scaling back entitlements, Reagan--and Newt Gingrich after him--demonstrated that conservatives could not and would not launch a frontal assault on Social Security, effectively conceding that these cherished New Deal programs were central features of the American polity.

"Mondale Would Have Been Proud"

It's conservative lore that Reagan the icon cut taxes, while George H.W. Bush the renegade raised them. As Stockman recalls, "No one was authorized to talk about tax increases on Ronald Reagan's watch, no matter what kind of tax, no matter how justified it was." Yet raising taxes is exactly what Reagan did. He did not always instigate those hikes or agree to them willingly--but he signed off on them. One year after his massive tax cut, Reagan agreed to a tax increase to reduce the deficit that restored fully one-third of the previous year's reduction. (In a bizarre bit of self-deception, Reagan, who never came to terms with this episode of ideological apostasy, persuaded himself that the three-year, $100 billion tax hike--the largest since World War II--was actually "tax reform" that closed loopholes in his earlier cut and therefore didn't count as raising taxes.)

Faced with looming deficits, Reagan raised taxes again in 1983 with a gasoline tax and once more in 1984, this time by $50 billion over three years, mainly through closing tax loopholes for business. Despite the fact that such increases were anathema to conservatives--and probably cost Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, reelection--Reagan raised taxes a grand total of four times just between 1982-84.

This record flummoxes the best efforts of today's Reagan hagiographers to explain away. Peter Wallison, for instance, after proclaiming that Reagan "stayed the course against changes in his economic plan," later dismisses the president's tax increases as "a modest rollback" that "seems to have been the result" of his accepting a Democratic promise to cut spending by twice that amount. (Whatever happened to "Trust, but verify"?)

Reagan continued these "modest rollbacks" in his second term. The historic Tax Reform Act of 1986, though it achieved the supply side goal of lowering individual income tax rates, was a startlingly progressive reform. The plan imposed the largest corporate tax increase in history--an act utterly unimaginable for any conservative to support today. Just two years after declaring, "there is no justification" for taxing corporate income, Reagan raised corporate taxes by $120 billion over five years and closed corporate tax loopholes worth about $300 billion over that same period. In addition to broadening the tax base, the plan increased standard deductions and personal exemptions to the point that no family with an income below the poverty line would have to pay federal income tax. Even at the time, conservatives within Reagan's administration were aghast. According to Wall Street Journal reporters Jeffrey Birnbaum and Alan Murray, whose book Showdown at Gucci Gulch chronicles the 1986 measure, "the conservative president's support for an effort once considered the bastion of liberals carried tremendous symbolic significance." When Reagan's conservative acting chief economic adviser, William Niskanen, was apprised of the plan he replied, "Walter Mondale would have been proud."

So would Russell Long. In 1975, the Democratic senator from Louisiana had passed into law the earned income tax credit (EITC), essentially a wage subsidy for the working poor. Long's measure was tiny to begin with and had dwindled to insignificance by the time Reagan agreed to expand it in 1986 as part of the tax reform act. Despite years of opposing social insurance programs, Reagan's support of the EITC gave rise to what has become one of the most effective antipoverty measures the federal government has ever devised--by the late 1990s, the EITC was lifting 4.3 million people out of poverty every year. Reagan's decision to expand it was "the most important anti-poverty measure enacted over the past decade," wrote The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt. The exemption of millions of low-wage earners from income taxes through the EITC and other reforms in 1986 added a significant measure of progressivity to the tax code. As evidence of its popularity with liberals, Clinton dramatically expanded the EITC in 1993.

At the time, many Republicans touted Reagan's support as proof that he wasn't the coldhearted tyrant liberals made him out to be. Other conservatives, like Niskanen, however, saw it as troubling evidence of their leader's weakness. Today, there is a growing movement within the Bush administration to roll back these changes by making the working poor pay their "fair share" of taxes.

These evident lapses in conservative ideology are a fact that some liberals have a much less difficult time coming to terms with than conservatives. "There were two Reagans," says Robert J. McIntyre, director of the left-leaning Citizens for Tax Justice, who was instrumental in the 1986 act, "the good one and the bad one. Liberals and conservatives wouldn't agree on which is which, but they would have to agree that Reagan completely flipped after 1981. If you like one, you can't like the other."

Bellicose Peacenik

Reagan has a good claim to the credit he receives for a foreign policy of confronting and challenging the Soviet Union that helped bring on its collapse--a central theme of any account of his life. But the vexing problem for conservatives, then and now, was that Reagan's bellicosity, which they liked, obscured an equally strong belief that nuclear weapons could and should be abolished, a conviction found mainly on the liberal left. Long before he became president, Reagan had argued for a massive military buildup not just to confront the Soviets, which hardliners approved, but also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control--a goal to which conservative pragmatists subscribed. But no one shared, or even understood until late in the game, Reagan's desire for total disarmament. "My dream," he later wrote in his memoirs, "became a world free of nuclear weapons." This vision stemmed from the president's belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war--and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons.

Driven by this dream, Reagan embraced Mikhail Gorbachev and initiated a series of negotiations that ultimately alarmed everyone in his administration. Hardliners like Patrick Buchanan, Richard Perle, and Caspar Weinberger reacted in horror to the very idea of engaging the Soviets in such talks, warning against the "grand illusion" of peace. "Reagan is a weakened president, weakened in spirit as well as clout," echoed New Right leader Paul Weyrich in The Washington Post. Administration pragmatists like George Shultz and Robert McFarlane, who supported negotiations but believed in deterrence, were shocked by how far Reagan took them. At the Reykjavik summit, he and Gorbachev almost agreed to the "zero option" to eliminate both sides' thermonuclear arms. Reagan's unwillingness to give up his cherished missile-defense program doomed the agreement, though the talks did yield the signature arms-reduction pact of his presidency, the 1987 INF treaty.

Conservative biographers like Peter Schweizer seem determined not to acknowledge Reagan's timely softening toward the Soviets: Reagan "would not change course, even in pursuit of personal political glory." But, thankfully, Reagan did change course. After a defense buildup that pushed the Soviets to the verge of economic collapse, this shift, augmented by a reduction in U.S. military spending in the latter years of his presidency, strengthened Gorbachev's ability to proceed with reform in the Soviet Union, and set the stage for George H.W. Bush to oversee a peaceful end to the Cold War.

Reagan was similarly helpful in advancing another great liberal cause, one in which his overall record is deeply tarnished: human rights. The idea of pressuring despotic governments to better treat their citizens had long appealed to the left and rankled the right. Like other conservatives, Reagan criticized the Helsinki Accords when Gerald Ford signed them in 1976, and disparaged Jimmy Carter during his 1980 campaign for what he considered a soft refusal to engage with the bitter realities of communism. Reagan's indifference to human rights abuses committed by the United States' erstwhile allies in Central America is an especially ugly stain on his presidency. Yet, as time progressed, there was one place where he did apply the logic of bringing human rights into public policy: the Soviet Union. Through the latter part of his presidency, Reagan spoke forcefully and openly about human rights in speeches and in meetings with Gorbachev, presenting lists of thousands of persecuted Soviet Jews and dissidents, many of whom were ultimately allowed to emigrate. "Human rights became for Reagan the final shame that he could bring to bear on that aspect of the Communist empire," says Sean Wilentz, director of the American Studies program at Princeton University.

Reagan's human rights policy may have been inconsistent and hypocritical. But the very fact that he had one transformed the politics of human rights. With dissidents from Andrei Sakarov to Vaclav Havel testifying to the power of his words in sustaining their movements, it became impossible for conservatives to deny the usefulness of such commitments as a component of American foreign policy. Today, there are almost as many human rights proponents on the right side of the aisle in Congress as on the left.

Mourning in America

Many of Reagan's actions that wound up furthering liberal ends were to some extent the result of the normal compromises of political office. The fact that his conservative biographers don't see fit to acknowledge these deviations is a clue that their aim is something besides an accurate depiction of the life and achievements of the 40th president. When conservatives mythologize the Reagan presidency as the golden era of conservatism, it's not Reagan that they're mythologizing, but conservatism.

The great success of Reagan's 1980 campaign was that it united the disparate strands of the conservative movement: supply-siders, libertarians, religious conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and big business. The fact that Reagan's presidency didn't accomplish anything approaching its seismic promise--the size of government grew, abortion remained legal, and entitlements still abounded--is one that his partisan biographers elide by focusing on what Reagan believed and said rather than on what he actually did. The imaginary Reagan who inhabits these books embodies the ideas on which all these groups can agree. His shining example helps maintain the coalition while putting pressure on current GOP politicians to hew to the hard-right ideal.

The real Reagan, on the other hand, would bring discord to the current conservative agenda. If you believe, as conservatives now do, that raising taxes is always wrong, then it's hard to admit that Reagan himself did so repeatedly. If you argue that the relative tax burden on low-income workers is too light, as the Bush administration does, then it does not pay to dwell on the fact that Reagan himself helped lighten that burden. If you insist, as many hardliners now do, that America is dangerously soft on communist China, then it is best to ignore Reagan's own softening toward the Soviet Union. As with other conservative media efforts--Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, The Washington Times--the purpose of the Reagan legacy project is not to deliver accuracy, but enhance political leverage.

But, as Reagan himself liked to cite from John Adams, facts are stubborn things. And the fact is that Reagan, whether out of wisdom or because he was forced, made significant compromises with the left. Had he not saved Social Security, relented on his tax cut, and negotiated with the Soviets, he'd have been a less popular, and lesser, president. An honest portrait of Reagan's presidency would not diminish his memory, but enlarge it.

Joshua Green is an editor of The Washington Monthly.
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Postby lukpac » Tue Jun 08, 2004 8:33 am

Hesselberg: Reagan's lies will live on, too
11:47 PM 6/07/04
George Hesselberg Wisconsin State Journal

Ronald Reagan, with his twinkling eyes and rouged cheeks, had a way of making people feel good, though there were often some hidden costs involved. <

The exaggerations continue, even after his death. <

A cheerful sort, Reagan single-handedly won the Cold War, jack-hammered the Berlin Wall, fed millions of starving businessmen, saved movies from infiltration by the Evil Empire, and arranged the financing of strong community organizing efforts in El Salvador and Nicaragua while encouraging the bartering system in Iran, among other important accomplishments. <

Besides spawning a couple of generations of right-wingers whose idea of public service was to find a way to cut benefits to poor people, Reagan gave astrologers some short-term credibility and was the best speech-giver the White House has ever seen. <

(And while he was a hero to some of the elderly, he also, in 1983, signed into law a bill taxing Social Security benefits and increasing the retirement age.) <

He was known for his whoppers, but one in particular has lived on, and on. <

It was included in the September 2003 Washington Monthly, which printed a few of Reagan's doozies: His 1980 statement that "trees cause more pollution than automobiles do," his claim that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps (he never left Hollywood), and his claim in 1986 that "we did not, repeat, did not, trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we." <

But the whopper that became legend, and was used to usher in welfare policy changes, is the story of the "welfare queen" living a life of lavish leisure while collecting welfare. <

Reagan frequently told a version of the story in speeches, beginning in 1976, of the "Chicago welfare queen" who had 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and collected benefits for "four nonexisting husbands," bilking the government out of "over $150,000." <

Suddenly, the enduring image of a person on welfare became a black woman in a mink coat driving a Cadillac to pick up her welfare checks. <

The real "Chicago welfare queen" used two aliases to collect $8,000 and didn't get away with it. <

No matter it was false, the story had a purpose, according to professor Franklin D. Gilliam of UCLA. <

The story was the topic of a media study by Gilliam in 1999. Gilliam, a political scientist who taught at UW-Madison from 1983-86, examined the impact of media portrayals of the "welfare queen," which he described as "Reagan's iconic representation of the African-American welfare experience," on white people's attitudes about welfare policy, race and gender. <

"It does appear fair to conclude that the welfare queen narrative script has succeeded in imprinting stereotypic racial and gender images in the minds of many Americans," he wrote. That imprint brought support for welfare changes. <

Gilliam, who is also the director of UCLA's Center for Communications and Community, said Monday the welfare-queen myth has outlived Reagan. <

"It's still there. It's probably even been extended a little bit to include some immigrants. Think of (the welfare queen story) as a narrative to explain poverty, designed to structure particular kinds of policies, in this case the welfare reform policies and attempts to limit welfare benefits. That's the end-game, and the narrative gets attached to it. <

"The conservative communications machine understood that for them to pursue the policies they wanted, they had to construct a narrative to explain to people why they should do what they wanted to do, which was reduce expenditures to the welfare state. It required some sort of explanation, and this was it," he said. <

The media tried to debunk it, but it had mutated into common knowledge by the time a newspaper reporter, David Zucchino, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, spent a year with two welfare mothers in that city. The result in 1996 was a highly praised book, "The Myth of the Welfare Queen." <

More than Reagan is to blame for the myth. <

"The general public is sometimes not too swift, and the media help it." <

Sometimes a fairy tale is simply a fairy tale, no matter how many stars your policy advisers wish upon. <

Reach George Hesselberg at ghesselberg@madison.com, 252-6140 or at the Wisconsin State Journal, P.O. Box 8058, Madison, WI 53708.
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Postby Rspaight » Thu Jun 10, 2004 8:26 am

As long as I'm being a bad center-leftie and not supplicating at the feet of St. Ronnie (see "AIDS was a big joke"), I'd like to point out that the oft-repeated assertion that Reagan "left office as the most popular president in modern history" is a big fat LIE. (Hint: It was Clinton.)

http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files ... age001.gif

I don't mind all the media coverage -- Reagan's death is an important event. What I mind is the lying from the so-called liberal media.

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Postby lukpac » Thu Jun 10, 2004 8:43 am

"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD

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Postby lukpac » Wed Jun 16, 2004 8:57 am

Damn liberal sour grapes...:

Left and Right Clash Over Reagan Media Coverage
By Robert B. Bluey
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
June 15, 2004

(CNSNews.com) - Little more than a week after Ronald Reagan's death, a liberal Washington think tank released a five-point attack on the former president, declaring that Reagan's legacy was "rife with controversy" on issues from AIDS to race to the economy.

In its daily "Progress Report" e-mail, the Center for American Progress - headed by former Clinton administration aide John Podesta and funded in part by billionaire George Soros - chided conservatives for trying to rewrite history. Just a week ago, the think tank offered some praise for Reagan.

"With the solemn farewell to Ronald Reagan now complete, the right-wing spin machine has ramped up efforts to whitewash the Reagan record," according to Monday's Progress Report. "Despite glowing media coverage last week of the Reagan presidency which downplayed contentious issues, radio host Rush Limbaugh continues to browbeat the media for its supposedly negative coverage of the Reagan record."

But few journalists offered praise for any of Reagan's policies in the last week, according to the conservative Media Research Center, which tracks media bias. For instance, most accolades from journalists noted Reagan's optimism and patriotism, not his policies, the MRC noted.

In fact, a new 18-page report released Monday by the MRC, the parent of CNSNews.com, highlights years of hostility that Reagan endured from journalists.

"The national media's often gracious coverage in the days after Reagan's death obscured the unfortunate historical record of media coverage: a chronicle often filled with not just disagreement, but with disgust, hatred, ridicule and insults," according to the MRC's report.

Prior to Reagan's death, issues like AIDS, race and the economy were grounds for journalists to frequently criticize the former president. And even now, after 10 days of mourning, they represented Reagan's biggest flaws, according to Monday's Progress Report.

The Progress Report points to a Philadelphia Daily News column by Debbie Woodell that criticizes Reagan for not doing enough about AIDS. A Baltimore Sun article by Kelly Brewington is cited because it criticizes Reagan's civil rights policies.

"Most Americans liked Ronald Reagan for the big things he did - beating the Soviet Union in the Cold War, freeing millions from communism, reinvigorating the economy," said Rich Noyes, the MRC's research director. "Liberals like to attack him on a range of smaller issues, like AIDS and homelessness and so-called budget cuts."

Noyes, one of the authors of the MRC's report, said it appeared as though liberals had given Reagan and his family a one-week grace period from criticism, but he said Americans should be prepared for an onslaught of negativity.

"You can tell where reporters were coming from when they wanted to resurrect all these issues in their reminiscence of Ronald Reagan," Noyes said. "They wanted people to remember him with a bad feeling about the Reagan years, rather than a feeling of victory and accomplishment."

The MRC report noted a number of occasions - nearly 90 in all - where journalists had editorialized negatively about Reagan. Many of the references come after the MRC's founding in 1987 at the end of Reagan's second term.

The three network anchors - NBC's Tom Brokaw, ABC's Peter Jennings and CBS's Dan Rather - are all represented.

Some of the highlights include Brokaw's views on Reagan's values in an April 1983 interview with Mother Jones: "Pretty simplistic. Pretty old-fashioned. And I don't think they have much application to what's currently wrong or troubling a lot of people. ... Nor do I think he really understands the enormous difficulty a lot of people have in just getting through life, because he's lived in this fantasy land for so long."

Rather said on the CBS Evening News on March 5, 1992: "In America in the 1980s, what former President Reagan and those who support him call the Reagan revolution put more money in the pockets of the rich. We already knew that. But a new study indicates that those who did best of all by far were the very richest of the rich."

The most frequently cited journalist is Bryant Gumbel, former anchor on NBC's Today and CBS's Early Show. Gumbel declined to respond to CNSNews.com's written questions Monday.

On Today, Gumbel declared on July 17, 1989, "Largely as a result of the policies and priorities of the Reagan Administration, more people are becoming poor and staying poor in this country than at any time since World War II."

Gumbel also said on Today on April 20, 1990, "The missteps, poor efforts and setbacks brought on by the Reagan years have made this a more sober Earth Day. The task seems larger now."

The MRC's director of media analysis, Tim Graham, who also authored the report, said journalists' negative views of Reagan were largely based on ideological differences. Journalists disagreed with Reagan's military spending because they saw it as a slap at the poor.

"What's wrong with these quotes is that they're all editorials," Graham said, "but also they're factually wrong in a lot of cases."
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD

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Postby Xenu » Wed Jun 16, 2004 2:06 pm

BEATING...SOVIET...UNION...ARGH....

AIDS: it's a small issue. Glad to know that.
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Postby Rspaight » Mon Jun 21, 2004 1:41 pm

The political cartoonist at the Lexington newspaper, Joel Pett, is pretty lefty for this area, so it's something of a local sport for the conservatives to complain about him in the letters to the editor. After Reagan died, he ran with this:

Image

Well, today's paper has a flurry of people rending their garments in outrage that Pett would dare to criticize the Gipper so soon after his death. (Side note: one letter writer claimed that Reagan left office as the most popular president in the 20th century, thus avoiding Clinton's higher numbers when he left office in 2001. Sneaky. But not sneaky enough, since FDR was higher, too. Oh, well.) "Where's the respect?" they howl. "Where's the respect?"

The very next page has a huge, tacky full-page ad for commemorative Reagan coins for only $30 for one, $100 for three or $160 for five. (No, those numbers don't make sense. Just like Reagan's budgets.) I wonder how many of those writing to complain about Pett would have a problem with that...

Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney