Ronald Reagan, the anti-Reaganite

[alp227]

by Jacob Heilbrunn

A Ronald Reagan boomlet is sweeping the nation, thanks in no small part to an army of conservative admirers who have never missed a chance to buff his image — and then use it for their own ends. Nothing looms larger for Reagan worshippers than the centennial of his birthday on Feb. 6.

Fittingly, Californians were first off the mark to celebrate their local hero: On Jan. 1, the Reagan Presidential Foundation and Jelly Belly, the jelly bean company that filled candy dishes at the Reagan White House, sponsored the first-ever Rose Parade float memorializing a president. It was 26 feet high and 55 feet long and featured 11 poppy-seed pictures highlighting the Great Communicator's life, not to mention 65,000 red roses.

A week later, the National Archives unveiled a yearlong Reagan exhibit, including a bronze replica of the Kremlin given to him by Mikhail Gorbachev. Indiana is sponsoring an essay contest for schoolchildren on Reagan's most important contribution to American history. His admirers in Nevada are trying to name a state peak Mt. Reagan this year, adding to the long list of naming opportunities pursued by the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which was established in 1997, seven years before his death.

Full article: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-heilbrunn-reagan-20110123,0,204786.story

Found this via Drudge Retort. Heilbrunn is a senior editor of conservative magazine The National Interest, has contributed to Commentary and The Washington Monthly among other publications, and is the author of the book They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. Reagan's liberal son Ron Reagan recently released a biography of the former president, My Father at 100.

[pinto]

1. It's an interesting Op-Ed and makes some good points - One, the RW wouldn't accept Reagan today,

despite the ongoing brouhaha in their veneration of the myth. ~ pinto

100 years after his birth, Republicans clearly still venerate his memory, but they have moved so far to the right that his actual record wouldn't live up to their ideals.

<snip>

But in assessing any president, it's more illuminating to focus on what he did rather than the bombast delivered to the rubber-chicken-and-mashed-potato circuit. Early in his political career, as governor of California, Reagan displayed his pragmatic side, signing an abortion bill and agreeing to a $1-billion state tax hike. Similarly, as president, he paid lip service to ending abortion but never did anything about it, and he worked with congressional Democrats on a massive tax hike in 1982, thereby averting the worst effects of the supply-side deficit spending he had endorsed when he entered office the year before.

Moreover, Reagan, the putative foe of big government, accumulated hundreds of billions in debt by the end of his second term. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who cleaned up the mess, leaving a budget surplus behind in 2000.

[madrchsod]

2. to reagan`s credit he personally signed....

the orders to give the Afghans stinger missiles that sealed the russians fate.

reagan was no longer in charge of much of anything by the start of the second term.

[struggle4progress]

3. Reagan's game as President was smooth, avuncular front-man: his job was to spout happy shit

to distract from issues

Example. Reagan on apartheid South Africa, August 1985: "They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country, the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated - that has all been eliminated." Infuriating nonsense