Ronald Reagan: A real leader with a real legacy

Last week former President Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor Congress can bestow. I believe that, if history is fair, Ronald Reagan will be remembered for his extraordinary accomplishments.

That part about history being fair is pretty dicey. For the people who fashion history, the deep thinkers, the intelligentsia, the media, tend to be Leftist. And that perspective colors their opinion of the man and his administration. To many of those people, Ronald Reagan was a mean-spirited simpleton who somehow managed to bungle his way into becoming the most powerful person on earth.

A decade ago, the very popular Bartlett’s Quotations included only three quotes from the Great Communicator, but 28 from John Kennedy and almost three dozen from Franklin Roosevelt. Even Castro confidante Jimmy Carter qualified to have six of his pearls of wisdom listed. When asked why Mr. Reagan’s words were used so sparingly, Bartlett’s editor had a ready explanation: "I’m not going to disguise the fact that I despise Ronald Reagan."

One of the former President’s most appealing traits was his capacity to shrug off such detractors. He had a sense of what he wanted to accomplish and did his best to get there. He didn’t need the approbation of the establishment press or to look at focus group findings for guidance. His vision, which critics often charged didn’t permit gradations of gray, but was always white or black, right or wrong, was unwavering.

Mr. Reagan set the stage for what he wanted to achieve at his first Cabinet meeting. He told his appointees, "Gentlemen, I hate inflation, I hate taxes and I hate the Soviets. Do something about it." Then he left the room.

So how did Ronald Reagan do on these matters? When he was elected in 1980, inflation was a major concern. Jimmy Carter had beaten Gerald Ford like a rented mule over the issue while narrowly defeating Ford four years earlier. Yet under Carter, the inflation rate shot up to 12 percent. Ronald Reagan’s administration sliced that by more than half.

On taxes, President Reagan pushed through Congress the largest cut in history, 25 percent over a three-year period. The marginal tax rate was 70 percent when he was elected; that was reduced to 28 percent, courtesy of the Gipper. The resulting boom reduced unemployment and lowered interest rates while inflation diminished.

On Communism, shortly after moving into the Whit House, Mr. Reagan asserted at Notre Dame University that, "The West won't contain Communism. It will transcend Communism. We will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written." Only four years earlier, speaking at the same school, then President Carter had talked glowingly of how Americans were finally free of our "inordinate fear of Communism." Carter had bought into the notion that, like rock and roll, Communism was here to stay and we needed to accommodate the murderous thugs who made Hitler look like a slouch when it came to genocide.

He was far from alone in that view. Many foreign policy "experts" shared that opinion. Some even saw a rough moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan knew an evil empire when he saw one and didn’t mind calling it exactly that. He announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, known to its opponents as "Star Wars." Whatever it was called, it played a major role in the collapse of the Soviet Union, at least according to observers as disparate as England’s former prime minister and the Soviet Union’s former foreign minister.

President Reagan was a clear, consistent voice for freedom. He personalized the struggle between light and darkness at the Berlin wall – an edifice erected when John Kennedy was president - in 1987: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

And the wall was torn down and millions of slaves freed from the subhuman misery of Communism. Ronald Reagan was a president of character and conviction, an individual with an infectious optimism, a leader with an unambiguous vision of the future. He restored to America a sense of patriotism, of hope, of renewed purpose.

The magnitude of what REagan accomplished is amazing given what he had to work with. He never had sixty Republican votes in the Senate and he never had a majority in the house.

Yet he got his tax cuts and defense spending approved.

Do you know how he did it? Reagan made no attempt to convince Tip O'Neil and the democrats that his plan would work. He only convinced him it had public support. The Democrats were convinced that doing what Reagan wanted would be popular at first. But when it failed to work, Reagan would get all the blame and Democrats would win big time. O'Neil reasoned that if he fought Reagan on the issues, the public would blame the Democrats for the international and economic failure were were sure to be under for years. O'Neil was certain the supply side would make it worse and a military build up would make the cold war colder not wamrmer.

From O'Neils perspective it was a choice of who gets the blame... Reagan or the Democrats. He chose Reagon for the blame and gave Reagan the rope to hang himself.

The democrats and the media were totally blind sided when Reaganomics worked. Someone once asked Reagan when he was sure Reaganomics was working. He said, "When the media stopped calling it Reaganomics." They were even more blind sided when his anti soviet policies worked.

The memory of what happened when they Reagan gave Reagan enough rope to hang him self has not paled with time. The Democrats have not forgotten what happened. They did not expect Reagan to use the rope to hang them. But that is what he did. They are not about to give Bush any rope.

That explains in great measure Daschles strong efforts to oppose bush on every front. Daschle will not make the same mistake. He will not give Dubya enough rope to hang them.

They don't understand as Tip did, that by fighting Dubya they will only be hanging themselves.

From 1980 until 1988 Democrats spent a lot of time trashing Reagan. Even as a huge success on all front, he only won in 1984 by something like 56 to 44. Reagans approval ratings rarely exceeded the mid 50's. Reagan was below 50 at this point in his term in office.

The Democrats and the Media kept clinton in the mid 50's by educating the public that crtisizing the President is tantamount to treason, and mean spirited , as well as anit American.

So the new presidential rules the Democrats and media adopted for judging presidents kept Clinton in the 50's and changed how the public judges presidents. The media and Democrats failed to tell the public that those new rules only applied to democrats.

Today the new Clinton rules for presidential support apply to Dubya. And Dubya is solidly in the mid 70's.

It took from 1992 until 1995 to make the new rules work for Clinton. It will take until the end of 2003 to take back the new rules from Dubya.

Democrats can't understand why attacking president Bush is seen by the public as political, unpatriotic and mean spirited.... Do you think we should give them a clue?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.