Candidates will talk about the Reagan who cut government regulation, but not the one who increased the size of the federal government and the national debt. We hear about the Reagan who demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall" and called Soviet Russia an "evil empire," but not the Reagan who later met diplomatically with Soviet leaders to form the foundation of nuclear disarmament. Perhaps the main reason that Reagan is mentioned so frequently may simply be because, as Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institution wrote before September's debate, while Democrats had Clinton and Barack Obama to fill the void after Kennedy, Republicans have had no recent candidates who can match Reagan's charm.
But pretending to be an imaginary version of Reagan does the candidates no services — no one really believes that Romney or Donald Trump are Reagan reincarnated, and many voters are too young to be nostalgic about Reagan anyway. According to data shared with CNBC by consumer data company Resonate , 7 percent of people who said that they vote Republican weren't even alive when Reagan left office, and more than a third of Republican voters weren't of voting age.
Whalen's advice to the debating candidates: "Like Reagan and his political journey from Trumanite to Thatcherite, dare to show evolved thought. Be bold enough to take the GOP in directions beyond its present conservative straightjacket.
When did Republicans become obsessed with Reagan? Mark Fahey marktfahey. Getty Images. Republicans want you to know that they adore Ronald Reagan. Vote Vote to see results. Not a Scientific Survey. The new Reagans Reagan's disappearance from public life nearly six years after he left office also made it easy for conservatives of all stripes to claim his mantle. Reagan followed a similar script in his presidential campaigns.
He championed populist cultural issues opposition to forced busing, gun control and the Equal Rights Amendment and struck to an anti-establishment tone. Trump is also arguably closer to Reagan on hot-button issues like entitlements, immigration and trade than the common wisdom recalls. Reagan generally exempted programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid from budget cutting — even as the deficit exploded. Reagan was an adamant free trader, but he never hesitated to impose sanctions on foreign companies if they engaged in unfair practices.
His tariffs on Asian motorcycle companies, for example, helped save the American icon Harley-Davidson from bankruptcy. Reagan also supported amnesty for illegal immigrants — though only as a condition for employer sanctions and other restrictions he believed would stem the flow of what he called economic migration. He believed even America was not so rich that it could take in every person who wanted to sup at its table.
We can see the Trump-Reagan symmetry in the degree to which each attracted support from blue-collar non-Republicans. Both men received high support from these voters for their times — bringing longtime Democratic voters into the Republican camp. They both carried the blue-collar-dominated Midwestern states of Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the only Republicans to do so in the past 40 years.
Indeed, these states are so important that no candidate who has carried all six has ever lost the presidency. The leadership has been AWOL on the populist issues of our day, allowing illegal immigration to continue and permitting foreign competition to hollow out communities without resistance. We know that a watershed is coming when that language starts to change. We are now hearing a new idiom in the speech of public figures, one in sharp contrast to the language that originally defined the Reagan Revolution.
That speech was a universe of discourse, a network of rhetorical questions, assumptions, normative terms, and modifiers that has given the last 10 years an identifiable momentum.
Even though the sitting vice president was chosen to be president in November, this now-familiar political idiom will not long survive the changing of the guard. About the promise of individual liberty and responsibility, we will hear less and less; about the benevolence of government, more.
The thought of such subtraction makes us self-conscious about what we will lose. Thus, these remarks are openly valedictory of the rhetoric of the Reagan presidency, the eloquence by which we were so securely environed.
And very soon this will be the attitude of most conservatives, however frequently we have lost patience with President Reagan while he has been in office. For all things change when the expectations generated by political discourse shift. In recent months, conservatives have argued that tax reform and tax cuts have made it difficult for politicians coming after Reagan to Postulate the necessity for creative spending; to insist that government, if properly concerned for the unfortunate, should throw money at social problems.
For a time I shared that opinion. Now I doubt its validity. Leftism is a virus in the bloodstream of our body politic, present in authoritative appeals to tolerance and peace, fairness, charity, and a natural right to the property of others.
It will not go away. It has a ground in envy and resentment, which are the fashionable modern responses to eminence and distinction of every kind. Yet the political success of Ronald Reagan has forced the contemporary Left to disguise the intransigent emotional core of its world view behind talk of heart-rending circumstances and imminent disasters, which by reason of their severity cancel every consideration of means or ends.
Assuredly, the task that President Reagan set for himself has not been completed. The practical consequences of his triumphs have been adumbrated by continuing Democratic power on Capitol Hill, by a press overwhelmingly on the left, and by the timidity of too many of his servants. We must remember that he was allowed to govern for only one term. The rest has been a holding action, undercut by concern for respectability and by a preoccupation with the 'Judgment of history.
Reagan reaffirmed with eloquence the continuing validity and vitality of the American Dream. In this more than in any policies or decisions lie his legacy and enduring claim to greatness. This president has taught those who share his politics how to conduct a national campaign-how to give limited government, strong national defense, and a check on inflation mass appeal.
He has shown us how to do this with a high heart and good humor, making conservatism an optimistic creed. Moreover, he has put to rest forever the old axiom that no candidate for the presidency can run as a conservative and be elected. Finally, with the counsel of Attorney General Edwin Meese, he has compounded these achievements by choosing judges who will defend the Constitution as it has not been defended in over 50 years. These appointments are this president's greatest accomplishment.
I leave aside the effort of the Reagan administration in Central America, its role in Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. They involve business that is far from complete. Along with much of the Reagan agenda, their disposition must wait upon his legitimate successors: those who will go forward with implacable determination regardless of the enmity that confronts them.
Ronald Reagan will be remembered for the initiatives he set in motion with his anti-statist rhetoric, and for changing through such language the current of our politics almost as dramatically as that current was changed in The most popular of our modern presidents, he has in his virtues and personal style symbolized our national character, not necessarily as it is, but as we wish it to be.
After Ronald Reagan has endured the usual biographical cycle of bunk, debunk, and rebunk he likely will be remembered as an outstanding national cheerleader.
If such an assertion sounds disparaging, it should not. In the Media Age, rhetorical leadership has become one of the presidency's most important functions. In part through hard policies but even more through his skills as a communicator, Reagan has successfully lifted the morale of a nation that in was wallowing in pessimism and uncertainty.
Long accustomed to the spotlight and the microphone and understanding the way in which the media magnifies one's personality, Reagan has turned what was a liability for most of his predecessors into an asset of major proportions. It seems doubtful, however, that they will consider him the outstanding political leader and conceptualizer of the return to free market capitalism. That honor will be reserved for Margaret Thatcher, a political captain of notably greater will and tenacity.
It is in the realm of the substantive rather than the symbolic that future generations will raise the greater number of questions about Reagan. Their ultimate judgment probably will be that like most American presidents he wore his ideology lightly and was more notable for his flexibility than for his dogmatism.
Was he conservative? Sure, but not a "hard" conservative. Reagan has largely had his way on economics but with policies that do not fit well into traditional definitions of economic conservatism.
Many observers, not all of them liberal, argue that in the long run we will pay for a prosperity set in motion by massive budget and international trade deficits. Reagan's defenders may confound or simply infuriate them by invoking Lord Keynes' dictum that in the long run we are all dead. It remains to be seen whether the American economy is capable of generating the output to cover our internal and international debts with little or no pain. It is notable, moreover, that even in the realm of economics Reagan has taken the easy path rather than the hard one.
For all his rhetoric in favor of a balanced budget, he has consistently refused to fight for one. Instead, he has rather easily acquiesced in one of the worst tendencies of democracy, its cupidity.
Despite the incessant rhetorical handwringing about the plight of the poor, the vast bulk of federal "social programs" involve some sort of subsidy to the middling groups in American society. It is, no doubt, a realization of this situation and along with it a basic political survival instinct that has caused the administration to back away from programmatic hit lists. Reagan ran up against a popular appetite for federal benefits without parallel in our history.
He and the people around him were able to deal with it only by pandering to it. The Ronald Reagan who announced that the elderly will receive an increase in Social Security benefits whether or not inflation runs high enough to trigger it is hardly the leader of a counterrevolution. One wonders what historians will make of all the talk of a conservative era in a decade when federal social spending actually increased. Reagan has left the nation stronger, more prosperous, and more confident than he found it.
Yet it will be difficult to argue that he has achieved greatness. It is even harder to determine how they may classify a man whose foreign policy has meandered all over the ideological spectrum and has run in qualitative terms from the steadfast defense of the American nuclear presence in Europe and the liberation of Grenada to the muddled Reykjavik summit and the shabby arms-for-hostages dealings in Iran.
That said, it is a pretty sure thing that most historians will approve of the recent moves toward detente with the Soviet Union, in part because most historians are liberal but also because if present indicators hold up, Reagan will have done the right thing.
One wishes, however, that he could have found a better way to go about it than tinkering with the nuclear balance. Has he been a great president? Let us begin with the acknowledgment that at the very least in the short run, Reagan has left the nation stronger, more prosperous, and more confident than he found it. Unless sometime in the next several years we fall victim to a catastrophe that can be convincingly traced to his policies, it will be hard to rate him a subpar chief executive.
Yet it will be difficult even for those in sympathy with him to argue that he has achieved greatness. It is clear now that his administrative style has been not simply "detached" but virtually disconnected. It is well for presidents to avoid obsession with detail and to keep their eyes on the larger goals, but Reagan exemplified the opposite extreme to a fault.
He too often appeared indifferent not simply to detail but to the personnel who managed his presidency, not just ill informed but positively removed from the world of policy execution. He does not seem to have made much change in the large patterns of American politics.
If he has temporarily changed the momentum of American foreign and domestic policy, he has not posed a frontal challenge to the assumptions of the Great Society, nor has he established a new majority. Public opinion surveys that record a widespread pessimism about the future may show that even his achievement as a morale booster has been superficial.
He has sustained himself politically by taking the easy way out on the tough issues. Ideologues may call this cowardice; political professionals will characterize it as prudence. In either case, it may have been the price of self-preservation in assuming the leadership of a people who want to avoid difficult choices.
What it is not is an indicator of greatness. Reagan will be remembered as the president who reversed the decades-old flow of power to Washington. As for comparisons: Reagan has been an uplifter and rhetorician comparable to the two Roosevelts and Wilson; a conservative exponent of capitalism in the tradition of Coolidge and Eisenhower; a cold warrior and advocate of U. These analogies demonstrate the skill and strength of a political leader able to draw on diverse themes and weave them together into a formidable personal coalition.
Whether he has left something more durable remains for all of us, especially George Bush, to see. He is now at work on a biography of Harry S. Forecasting history's judgment of a presidency is a tricky business. In addition to lacking the perspective that time alone can provide, we are impaired by two features that inhere in the office. The first of these is that the presidency is dual in character: the president is head of government, which is an administrative and managerial function, and he is also head of state, which is a ceremonial, ritualistic, and symbolic function.
Our tendency is to judge the president, while he is in office, largely in terms of the latter, and therefore personality weighs heavily. Scarcely a generation need pass, however, before personality is forgotten and other criteria come to bear. Accordingly, such presidents as Lincoln, Wilson, and Truman, whose personalities were far from charismatic and who were regarded as failures by most of their contemporaries, can come to be regarded as great; and the likes of William McKinley and John F.
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