Posted by
Always To The Right on Monday, July 17, 2006 1:49:04 PM
REVISIONIST POLITICS
The Reagan Myth
The Gipper's record is being distorted to make President Bush look bad.
BY FRED BARNES
Monday, July 17, 2006 12:01 a.m.
I
was recently asked about President Bush's chances of a political
resurgence. Might Mr. Bush be able to recover as strongly as President
Reagan did from a slump in his second term in the 1980s? My response
was, Reagan recovery? What Reagan recovery?
Though
he continued his ultimately successful fight to win the Cold War,
Reagan achieved nothing new--practically nothing--after the Iran-contra
scandal broke in 1986. His presidency was crippled. The Republicans had
lost the Senate. His nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in
1987 was defeated, partly because of feeble White House support. His
veto of a transportation bill was overridden.
The
question was innocent enough, but it reflected a broader pattern of
misrepresentation of Ronald Reagan's record in the White House that has
become not only widespread but widely accepted. Reagan was, I believe,
one of the greatest presidents of the 20th century, but many of the
things that both liberals and conservatives now credit to his
presidency simply never were. And there's a political purpose behind
this Reagan revisionism. He is cited mostly to criticize Mr. Bush and
congressional Republicans for falling short of some mythical Reagan
standard.
Liberals
pretend the Reagan years--in contrast to the Bush years--were a golden
idyll of collaboration between congressional Democrats and a
not-so-conservative president. When Reagan died in 2004, John Kerry
recalled having admired his political skills and liked him personally.
"I had quite a few meetings with him," Mr. Kerry told reporters. "I met
with Reagan a lot more than I've met with this president."
Of
course, that wasn't Mr. Kerry's take on Reagan during his presidency:
In 1988, he condemned the "moral darkness of the Reagan-Bush
administration." A chief complaint of liberals and the media in those
days was that Mr. Reagan was a "detached" president, not one easily
accessible to Democratic members of Congress or anyone outside his
inner circle of aides. But Reagan had to talk to Democrats on occasion
since they controlled at least half of Congress. Mr. Bush rarely
consults them for the simple reason that Republicans run all of Capitol
Hill; so he talks frequently with Republican congressional leaders.
Liberals
today talk about Reagan as if the hallmark of his administration was a
lack of partisanship--again in contrast with Mr. Bush. Mr. Kerry noted
in 2004 that Mr. Reagan "taught us that there is a big difference
between strong beliefs and bitter partisanship." Mr. Bush, naturally,
is the bitter partisan. Of course that's what liberals then thought of
Reagan--and they were partially right: While never bitter, Reagan was
in fact a partisan Republican.
On
foreign policy, some liberals peddle the notion that Reagan wasn't the
hardliner he might have seemed. Bill Keller, the executive editor of
the New York Times, has argued that Reagan, having won the Cold War,
was ready to rely on international organizations to police the world.
Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is impugned as the enemy of the U.N. and
multilateralism.
Reagan
a moderate in foreign affairs? It strains credulity to imagine the
president--who supported wars of national liberation in Nicaragua,
Angola and Afghanistan, who bombed Libya to punish Gadhafi, who
defiantly installed Pershing missiles in Europe, who invaded
Grenada--as anything but a hardliner. He was a hawk for whom defeating
the Soviet Union was the essential priority.
It's
on foreign policy that liberals and conservatives find common cause.
Patrick Buchanan, rehearsing the pieties of the political left, argues
that Mr. Bush has turned the world against America. The "endless
bellicosity" of Mr. Bush and his neoconservative advisers, he recently
argued, "has produced nothing but ill will against us. This was surely
not the way of the tough but gracious and genial Ronald Reagan."
Of
all people, Mr. Buchanan ought to know better, having served as
Reagan's communications director from 1984 to 1986. Reagan generated
massive antiwar and anti-American demonstrations around the world, far
larger and more numerous protests than those Mr. Bush has occasioned.
He famously denounced the Soviet "evil empire" headed for "the ash-heap
of history." He was treated by the press as a cowboy warmonger, just as
Mr. Bush has been. Ill will? Reagan produced plenty--all in a noble
cause.
Conservatives
attack Mr. Bush most vehemently on excessive government spending, and
there they have a point. He could have been more frugal, despite the
exigent circumstances, especially in his first term. But it's also on
the spending issue that the Reagan myth--Reagan as the relentless
swashbuckler against spending--is most pronounced. He won an estimated
$35 billion in spending cuts in 1981, his first year in office. After
that, spending soared, so much so that his budget director David
Stockman, who found himself on the losing end of spending arguments,
wrote a White House memoir with the subtitle, "Why the Reagan
Revolution Failed."
With
Reagan in the White House, spending reached 23.5% of GDP in 1984, the
peak year of the military buildup. Under Mr. Bush, the top spending
year is 2005 at 20.1% of GDP, though it is expected to rise as high as
20.7% this year, driven upward by Iraq and hurricane relief.
Mr.
Reagan was a small government conservative, but he found it impossible
to govern that way. He made tradeoffs. He gave up the fight to curb
domestic spending in exchange for congressional approval of increased
defense spending. He cut taxes deeply but signed three smaller tax
hikes. Rather than try to reform Social Security, he agreed to increase
payroll taxes.
The
myth would have it that Reagan was tireless in shrinking the size of
government, a weak partisan always ready to deal with Democrats, and
not the hardliner we thought he was. The opposite is true. Reagan
compromised, as even the most conservative politicians often do, to
save his political strength for what mattered most--defeating the
Soviet empire and keeping taxes low. Today, the latter still remains
imperative, and the former has been superseded by a faceless death
cult. We can't understand George Bush if we distort the real Ronald
Reagan.
Mr. Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard and author of "Rebel in Chief" (Crown Forum, 2006).