Jitters

The Great National Self-Doubt has set in. It's everywhere:

• People are wondering if Britain will even be able to go on board with us. Tony Blair's in political trouble, as elements of his own party fall back on their pusillanimous roots. Blair will need to be an immensely courageous man to get through this, knowing especially that wartime success treats British Prime Ministers even less kindly than it does presidents; the careers of Winston Churchill and John Major didn't survive their own successful wars.
• The nattering nabobs are clucking about Bush's performance the other night. He was tired; he was listless; his political fortunes seem dire at the moment.
• The economy continues to have trouble, as war jitters weaken the already-doddering markets
• While America doesn't seem particularly ideologically split about the war - most support it - the protest movement is getting bigger, especially if you limit your count to celebrities and people without jobs.

However you read the tea leaves, these are hairy days for the administration.

And yet they have a lot of great role models to choose from in getting their agenda, and the nation they govern, through these times.

Some pundits, like Minnesota's Jeff Fecke, talk about the president's approval rating, not remembering the depths to which Ronald Reagan's approval dipped; in January of 1983, his approval ration was 42%, while his negatives were up around a phenomenal 54%, according to a contemporary ABC/WaPo poll.

His victory in the Cold War was eight years in the future - and by no means assured; most pundits declared the USSR here to stay. The economy was still sweating out the biggest correction since the Depression, punctuated by oil prices that, in 2003 dollars, were around $90 a barrel (again due to Iraq!). The media, in those days when "talk radio" didn't mean "conservative", "Fox News" was a British hunting magazine, and the Internet just connected universities, was stacked against him like Persians against Leonidas. My own liberal beliefs were starting to crumble at the time, but I still feared Reagan - and remember rejoicing at the thought that he was looking like a one-term president at the time. Things looked that dire for Reagan back then.

22 months later, he won the biggest landslide in American history. What happened?

He stayed on message. Free Enterprise works. Tax Cuts will improve the economy. We'll thank ourselves for confronting the USSR later.

Freedom Works.

Two years later still, Reagan faced an equally grave test; at Rejkjavik, he confronted Mikhail Gorbachev; he refused to draw down US battlefield nukes in Europe, waved the Strategic Defense Initiative in the Russians' (and his critics') faces, and stood his ground against the most intense criticism of his career. Some liberals predicted imminent nuclear holocaust.

Four years later, after his successor won in one of the five biggest landslides in American history, the USSR collapsed. Freedom broke out throughout Eastern Europe, and much of the rest of the world as well. Why?

Because Reagan stayed on message. We'll thank ourselves for confronting the USSR, and soon. Screw the pundits, Communism's done for. Rumors of their long-term survival are greatly exaggerated.

Freedom Works.

Bush's challenges are immense. But the same answers still apply. Hold the line on tax cuts. Press the line forward on those who'd kill us. Don't write off a huge chunk of humanity because they're ruled by Islamofascists. Stand up for America.

Freedom works.

Bush isn't Ronald Reagan. It doesn't matter. He doesn't have to be Reagan. He just has to remember the message.

Freedom works.

Ugly Gringoes - Glenn Reynolds has this wonderful quote on the ugly-American blunderrings of...

...the NYTimes and the "internationalist" anti-war movement:

It's interesting to contrast Bush's careful courtesy toward nations who don't deserve it, with the language that the antiwar folks -- who are supposedly the internationalists -- use to describe the rather large coalition that Bush has put together. Remind me again -- who is supposed to be blundering and insensitive here?

Posted by Mitch at March 8, 2003 09:33 AM