Reagan set the tone for his presidential
heir By Gary LaMoshi
HONG
KONG - For me, it was mourning in America from the
moment Ronald Reagan got elected. More accurately, it
was mourning in Africa, where, as a US diplomat, I had
the unenviable task of explaining Reaganomics to the
host government. I didn't get it myself.
Watching the news dribble in from the United
States in those pre-CNN, let alone CNN.com, days, from a
distance of several thousand miles, I was astounded at
the wide acceptance of obvious untruths, such as the
Laffer curve claiming lower taxes would produce higher
revenue. Reagan's own vice president George Bush called
the plan "voodoo economics". I kept waiting for
responsible people to say, "That's nonsense," but it
never happened.
Fast-forward a couple of
decades, to the presidency of Ronald W Reagan's
spiritual son George W Bush. Again, from thousands of
miles away, I see more ridiculous proposals offered for
dubious reasons, and, again, no one standing up to say,
"Rubbish."
Reagan's presidency transformed the
debate so profoundly that his ideological heirs can do
far more damage, simply because Reagan moved the US much
closer to the edge. Reagan attacked the unions, clearing
the way for George W Bush to attack workers directly.
Bush's war isn't a paratrooper assault on a Caribbean
airstrip but 130,000 troops occupying a country on the
other side of the world.
Part of the difference
in the Reagan and Bush Jr presidencies is personal.
Reagan came up the hard way - his father was the
alcoholic in the family - and never took himself
completely seriously. In his intellectual sloth and
inconsistency, he could demonize the truly needy with
lies about welfare recipients driving Cadillacs and the
"homeless by choice" then write a personal check to a
charity trying to undo the damage he wrought. Reagan
carried a sense of humor about himself, not a sense of
entitlement. The skills Reagan honed because he couldn't
make a living from his position and influence taught him
to deliver a line and carry it over the hump from
self-righteous to self-evident even when he mangled the
facts.
But the main difference is how far Reagan
moved the political fences and changed the course of the
US mainstream on both policy and presidential matters.
General Electric employed Ronald Reagan in the
1950s and early 1960s in part to speak the company's
piece against government regulation of its business,
such as nuclear plants and manufacturing producing toxic
byproducts. Reagan proved an impressive enough front man
that a cabal of California tycoons hired him to take
over the government instead of just lobbying it. It was
inspired casting.
For all the talk about getting
government off people's backs, Reaganomics and its
successors really shift the government's oversight role
from public-interest regulation to promoting economic
growth. Reagan began the process of converting
government into an agent of business by rigging markets
to maximize profits and limit competition. That means
drilling for oil in wildlife refuges and creating
opportunities for financial manipulation through
deregulation.
It's also about shifting the tax
burden from the richest to the poorest with greater
impunity. In the 1980s, people talked about
"trickle-down effects" and "growing the pie" as reasons
to help the rich get richer. Now it's about "Lucky
Ducky" poor who don't earn enough to pay taxes and
therefore are the real beneficiaries of the system at
the expense of us downtrodden who earn more.
They talk about the Reagan revolution, but in
truth, he instituted lousy economic policies, torpedoed
growth and employment, then deficit-spent the country
out of the recession he created, expanding the
military-industrial complex far beyond Dwight
Eisenhower's imagination. The current Bush
administration has followed the same formula but job
growth has proved trickier to stimulate, perhaps because
of the damage already done.
Reagan's
administration played the "communism" card the way this
Bush team throws around "terrorism". The game has also
become more dangerous as the scope for adventurism has
expanded in tandem with US strategic advantage. The
Reagan obsession produced eloquent speeches and
arms-reduction talks, along with a few limited military
engagements, but that White House didn't send troops to
the hot fronts of those days: Angola, El Salvador and,
of course, Afghanistan.
In Reagan's time, the
intelligence community was off by 100 percent in its
estimates of the Soviet economy, costing billions in
unnecessary defense expenditures. Under Bush, the
Central Intelligence Agency was 100 percent wrong about
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the bills are
still coming in.
Most important, Reagan changed
the tone of the presidency in a more fundamental way.
The presidency became a role, a made-for-TV event. That
evolution had been in process for some time but Reagan
provided the perfect player for the part. The idea of
the bully pulpit wasn't new, but in the aftermath of the
Watergate years, Gerald Ford had been a regular guy who
made his own breakfast and Jimmy Carter promised, "I'll
never lie to you." President Reagan would be a genuine
movie star.
And no movie star always gets his
lines right. Reagan's White House would issue
corrections when he "misspoke". It wasn't far to parsing
the word "is" or to finally admitting there's no
connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11,
2001, attacks but still linking them in every speech you
make. Reagan also moved personal ethical goalposts from
Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech (where he pleaded
guilty to taking a puppy but never an underhanded dime
from supporters) to accepting homes valued in the seven
figures.
Credit Reagan for setting the standard
for dishonesty with this line about trading arms for
hostages in the Iran-contra scandal: "My heart and my
best intentions still tell me that is true, but the
facts and the evidence tell me it is not." Wouldn't you
rather believe the Great Communicator than some stupid
facts and evidence?
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