Reagan’s Birthday
By Mitch Berg
It is, of course, Reagan’s Birthday today.
Were he alive, the greatest president of my lifetime, and by far the best of the last half of the Twentieth Century, would be 98 years old today.
I’ve been writing about Reagan – who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today – as long as this blog has been in existence. His eight years were not perfect, and I’ll resist the urge to beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for twenty years (to say nothing of in their first month of service). His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.
Still and all, he was the greatest president of the second half of the 20th Century. And it’s gotten to the point where his former opponents know it, because they’re paying him the ultimate compliment; they’re trying to co-opt his legacy. Obama the communicator is compared, favorably (and wishfully) to…Reagan. And even Hollywood is in on the act, having tried to filch Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, carefully trim context to fit their narrative, and hand it to a Democrat.
Fortunately, the people freed by the end of the Cold War know better. Hollywood makes movies; the Poles and Georgians and Czechs make statues.
But in these difficult times, when a President is promoting fear and malaise in the guise of “change” and “doing something”, it’s worth remembering Reagan’s example; when times seemed at their most dire (and 1980 was a lot worse than 2008), Reagan walked onto the scene with a smile and a vision, and a backbone of steel, and cleaned up the mess lefty by his failed slapnut predecessor – something our next president will need in 2012 or 2016.
And the most important part? He did it by unleashing something that many, then as now, thought was dead – the inner, optimistic, take-charge greatness of the American spirit.
Reagan’s gone. But that spirit, the one he understood, almost alone among American politicans of his era, lives on in the American people. Most of it, anyway.
NOTE: While this blog encourages a bumptious, raucous debate, this post is a pro-Reagan zone. All comments deemed critical of Reagan will be expunged without ceremony. You’ve been warned.
You have the whole rest of the media to play about in; this post is gonna be gloriously monochrome.
February 6th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Sorry, Mitch. Even Peev thinks Angryclown stepped over the line. How come no censorship?
February 6th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
‘Cause you is bumptious, Clownie. Therapy could help with dat.
February 6th, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Yes! I, too, demand more censorship! And I will make this demand known across the land, nay, even across the seas so justly and securely ruled by our admiralty!
My demand for more censorship will be even be whispered of in the perfumed seraglios of the Turk, and parleyed round the smoky campfires of our Western savages. You, Mitch Berg, will hear it in the riverbank’s lapping waves and in the breeze that combs the wheat fields of the prairie.
I will not be silenced.
February 6th, 2009 at 11:29 pm
Was that over the top? I can never tell.
February 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Mr. D, I see a different picture in you statistics – and I hope that disagreeing which era was worse doesn’t cross any restrictions on the topic of Reagan.
D., respectfully – Simply looking at the unemployment rates is not adequate for any kind of comparison. Apart from not taking into account the number of people who have stopped looking for work, or are underemployed but still technically employed, there is the issue of what kind of jobs are being performed. We do not as a country manufacture anything like the items we have produced in the past. Many of the jobs being performed to day pay significantly less and/or provide fewer benefits (like health care) than were provided in the past. Even service jobs, which tended to replace production jobs, have taken a significant hit in being exported over seas. Looking at the current employment stats in the context of the shifting of wealth away from the middle classes and working poor into the hands of a tiny minority of wealthy individuals has adversely affected what is essentially a consumer driven economy. Don’t even get me started on the imbalance of trade figures now versus 1980.
As for the inflation rate, lower is not always better. We do seem to be heading for stagflation / deflation. One could as easily point to the current difference in interest rates as a cause for claiming 2008 better – except that the current low interest rate, looked at in the context of other economic factors, is clearly an indicator of an economy in distress, not robust good health. I would use the analogy that a very ill human can as easily have a too low body temperature as a fever spiking above 98.6 as an indicator of a viral infection.
I will have to look up the DJIA for 1980 to compare to 2008, but as someone who has seen bear markets before, I can say with some certainty that solid growth in the market over the intervening years has effectively been wiped out; this is far from the normal downturn patterns. Indeed, I don’t recall ever seeing such an unstable, volatile market, never mind the real estate market, and other similar indicators. Last of all, I am very concerned with the amount of foreign investment in the interim since 1980; it wont be all that longer before foreign interest pretty effectively own our rear end, financially speaking. If you look at the overall picture, not isolated stats – this is worse.
Which does not diminish the Reagan legacy of addressing the problems he encountered. It’s just NOT comparing apples and oranges.
February 7th, 2009 at 7:01 pm
Peev,
Different times. I agree. Different challenges, too. I agree with that. All I’m saying is this — the late 1970s and early 80s were a terrible time economically. I was finishing high school at the time and remember it well. The economy is more volatile now, no doubt about it. It was stagnant in the late 1970s and the feeling you got was that of a gradual, inevitable decline.
The reason that interest rates matter is that it does mean that there will be avenues available for people to invest, explor and innovate, so long as the government doesn’t crowd everyone else out of the credit markets. Borrowing a trillion dollars will certainly cause problems that way.
There’s reason to believe things will get better, but it would be in spite of the stimulus package. What troubles me about the path that the Obama administration is taking is that they are choosing to spend money that won’t actually provide any stimulus, but instead is part of normal baseline budgeting, except on steroids. It won’t end well. And I don’t see a Reagan on the horizon who will have the talent or the will to address the problems that I (and a lot of other people) see coming. What made Reagan great was that he managed the things he could control, i.e., foreign policy, in a masterful way. Presidents can’t control the economy, although they can hurt it. Reagan understood that. It’s clear that Obama doesn’t, at least yet. He is capable of learning, if he chooses to.
And yes, the Republican Congresses of this decade were derelict in holding the line on spending, too. You won’t get much argument from anyone around here on that point.
We’ll see what happens.