Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann continues to cite Reagan and his "economic miracle" as something to be emulated. But I believe that she, Sarah Palin, and other Tea Party members of the Government-Hating Ronald Reagan Fan Club must be talking about a different Ronald Reagan.
The Reagan I remember once said, "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes... it is his right to do so" and launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi - where 3 civil rights workers had been brutally murdered - with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink speech about state's rights, code word for the right to own slaves, later morphed into the right to segregation. He's also the guy who coined the phrase "welfare queen" and popularized the notion - which would be witty if true - that government is not part of the problem, it is the problem, an interesting stand for someone who spent most of his life as a government employee in one form or another. He even voted for FDR every time he could. In fact, before he was against Democrats, he was a Democrat. Not only was he for unions before he started to bust them, he actually was president of a large and powerful union, the Screen Actors Guild.
Bachmann perhaps didn't get the memo, but Reagan is not all that popular. Reagan's popularity averages 52.8% (behind JFK, Clinton, Ike, LBJ, and even Bush I). A third of Americans wanted him to resign after Iran-Contra. Reagan said he hated taxes but raised them every year except for his first and last, and although he lowered the top marginal tax rate, it was still a "socialist" 50% by the time he left office (now Bachmann believes that raising it from 35 to 40% would be the mother of all tax hikes, unaware perhaps that Obama has the lowest income tax rates of any president going back to the 1930s, and the only real area where Reagan unquestionably was superior was in his propensity to tax. If nudging tax rates up to Clinton levels is socialism, then Reagan must be an outright communist. In fact, Reagan's 1982 Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act was the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.
Even the nonsense that Reagan won the Cold War is revisionist history at its worst. 4 days after the Berlin Wall fell, a USA Today poll found far more people credited Gorbachev (43%) than Reagan (14%). The Cold War did not end with the nuclear sword, but with the negotiating pen. START would have been mocked as "appeasement" by the Tea Party today, but it worked.
Reagan had some oddly progressive views on terrorism, calling the death of civilians in anti-terrorism operations "terrorism itself." He was foolish enough to put American Marines in harm's way in Beirut, but wise enough to withdraw them (cut and run) shortly after our country's first introduction to suicide bombing. Had Bachmann been president, perhaps we would still be fighting and dying there.
Reagan's adviser, Paul Bremer, took the decidedly un-Republican position that terrorist suspects should be tried in civilian courts to "delegitimize them."
And let's not forget Reagan's strong stance against torture. In 1988, he signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which stated that torture could be used under "no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever." A Treaty signed and ratified becomes US law, so isn't it ironic that Reagan's action criminalized the behavior of Bush and Cheney decades later?
Oh, and that whole "smaller government" thing was as much a myth under Reagan as under Bush II. Federal spending grew by 2.5% after inflation under Reagan. Since he did not think it necessary to pay for his expansion of the size and scope of federal government, national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion, a far greater proportional increase than even under Bush and certainly than under President Obama For someone who hated federal employees, he sure created a lot of them, increasing their ranks by 200,000, from 2.8 million to 3 million; government-loving Clinton, in contrast, trimmed that number back to 2.7 million.
Reagan violated a campaign pledge to get rid of two Cabinet agencies as promised - Energy and Education - and even managed to add a new one (Veterans).
Oh, and let's not forget that the "pro Life" (meaning abortion prohibitionist) Reagan legalized abortion in California as governor in the late 1960s (we all owe him a debt of gratitude for that), never sought a constitutional ban on abortion, and appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court.
In short, Reagan (President Reagan, not the B Movie Actor Bachmann is obviously confusing him with) did some good things, but they are generally things the Tea Party hates, and the reasons they say they love him fit their faux populist pseudo-libertarianism far more than Reagan's actual record as president.
As you run through his accomplishments, many of which should please Americans who are not on the far right, we might even like him if it weren't for his lying to Congress, selling weapons illegally to Iran (while openly supporting our Man in Baghdad Saddam Hussein (remember him?) in a bloody, US-supported war against the Great Satan du jour) then using the profits to illegally support terrorist groups in Central America, like the Contras in Nicaragua or those CIA-supported operatives in the Honduras who had a penchant for throwing nuns out of helicopters far out at sea. If he didn't misrepresent his own actions and philosophy, demonizing the federal government while expanding it greatly, then he would not have legitimized a generation of overt "starve the beast" gubment-haters. If he had stopped blathering about the importance of empowering this "problem" government to force a woman to carry an unintended pregnancy to term, instead pointing out to the religious right that he had neither the intent nor the ability to overturn Roe v. Wade, we would have all moved on to other topics (or they would have abandoned Reagan for someone even more right wing who would not have been electable).
I think Reagan should have stuck to his first impulse, remaining a loyal Democrat while dabbling in B Westerns. He could have had a happy life with his second wife and none of us would be bothered if an occasional Republican would get confused as to whether he really was the Gipper or simply played one on the silver screen.
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