I intend to spend
the bulk of this series on Ronald Reagan dealing with a theory I’ve had on him
for the last several years: that Reagan’s path to the Presidency was not
inevitable, that several outside factors intervened and that he could not have
won the White House at any other time then he did.
However, before I
begin this series in earnest, as a student of historian I am intrigued by how
both sides view Reagan. For the record, along with JFK, I believe he is one of
the most overrated Presidents in history. Recent studies have ranked him among
the ten best Presidents of all time: I think that’s too high by far. At best,
he deserves an above average mark and should not be ranked higher that
Cleveland or Eisenhower as some studies have.
But I do believe
that at least one of the reasons that Reagan is lionized by the right does not
hold up to close to historical scrutiny. And I think that Reagan receives far
too much credit for bringing about the end of the Cold War.
Let’s start with
some basic facts that have been proven by this historical record. Yes, the Soviet
Union was a totalitarian regime that was one of the most repressive in history.
Everything we learn about live in the USSR, from the reign of the KGB to the existence
of the gulag system to how they stamped down anything resembling dissidents
bares that out. That they extended to level of dictatorship throughout Eastern Europe
and help seed much of it with equally oppressive and horrific strongmen cannot
be questioned either. There is a certain
truth when Reagan referred to them as the Evil Empire.
However, we have
also learned that while they were a gross violator of human right wherever they
held court, their threat to world peace during the nuclear age was grossly
overrated by their side. Almost from the
beginning of the 1950s until very close to the end, the United States always
had an advantage when it came to nuclear weapons. Furthermore while they worked
hard to stamp out many attempts to overthrow their rule in the post-WWII era,
there was very little expansion of their regime after Mao helped take over
China in 1949. The belief of the ‘domino theory’ – that essentially led to the Vietnam War – was
basically a myth.
There is an
argument that so much of what happened in the Cold War was driven by two
beliefs that American politicians and military never could get around. The
first was Stalin’s betrayal at Yalta, and the fact that after he died, no one
in leadership could ever accept that any Soviet Leader – indeed, any leader who
wore the banner of Communism – was not Stalin. I believe that was the
fundamental driving force of foreign policy from the Truman Doctrine until the
middle of the 1980s. And because of that fundamental belief, it justified by
far some of the worst actions in American history.
I don’t tend to
agree with ‘the People’s History’ in all things but in this case I do have a
certain alignment with them and I also agree that it was a bipartisan affair
from 1948 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. No official running
for elected office in either Congress or President could hope to have a chance
of winning with the accusation of being ‘soft on Communism’. In a sense, that
was very much the reason for so much bipartisan accord in domestic policy as
well as foreign policy in Congress: we didn’t want to look weak to the Commies.
This also essentially led to our government’s agencies – sometimes with the
President’s open approval; sometimes with them looking the other way – overthrowing
democratically elected officials throughout the world who might have been
openly Marxist (such as Salvador Allende in Chile) or could be replaced with
someone we could use as an ally against Communism (the installation of the Shah
of Iran). That this led to us installing more repressive regimes in their place
was considered a consequence that members of both parties were fine with: we
had to defeat the Communist, and any ally we had was one they didn’t. The citizens
of those regimes were more or less collateral damage to either side. Reagan was,
in that sense, the inevitable extension of half a century of those beliefs.
Yet somehow we
have always given too much credit to Reagan for causing the Soviet Union to
help collapse, which makes little sense according to certain parts of the
calendar.
One of the leading
causes in the collapse of the U.S.S.R was the decision of the Soviets to invade
Afghanistan. This happened in the last years of the Carter administration. In his
last state of the Union in 1980, Carter asked Congress to approve a 5 percent increase
in the defense budget. This was a level that the Soviet Union could not match.
He also called on European nations to meet the aggressive Soviet Threat and for
Congress to send military aid to Pakistan. In addition he formally ended the policy
of détente (which I’ll get into detail on later on) Conservatives such as
Robert Gates would later agree that these policies had a significant effect on
the collapse of the Soviet Union. But because their full effect was not felt
until Carter had lost reelection, Reagan would claim credit for them.
Those who try
argue that Reagan’s memorable speech lend to the Berlin Wall coming down ignore
that it did not fall until November of 1989, a year after George H.W. Bush had
been elected President. The collapse of the Soviet Union until Christmas of
1991. It is hard to find a way to argue that Reagan can take credit for that
considering that Bush senior was doing most of the negotiations. The reason
Bush receives less credit than he deserves is mainly because the conservative
moment (and as we shall see, Reagan in particular) loathed him and never truly
considered him one of them.
And of course the
great irony the man responsible for the Soviet Union falling, mainly against
his will, was Mikhail Gorbachev. I have often wondered how Gorbachev must have considered
the rest of his life after resigning in Christmas of 1991. Not merely as to how
his country would, little more than a decade after the Soviet collapse become a
dictatorship led by one of the men who very likely led a coup against him but
of how so many of the conservatives in America chose to view his country’s
collapse.
The narrative for
the past thirty years from the neo-con wing has almost always painted Reagan
(and by British Historians, Margaret Thatcher) as the Cold Warriors who brought
down the Soviet Union. What did they have to lose by negotiating? Gorbachev
knew full well what could happen behind closed doors; he very nearly lost his
life by making his stand in the first place. He was trying to do what he did to
save his country from the evils of his regime, it ended up collapsing and the
Americans who had spent so much time and energy fighting it had no interest in
helping in the aftermath but basically chose to regard it as a lesser focus in
comparison to the Middle East. Reagan and Thatcher spent their last years being
idolized in their home countries by a large portion of their populace and
around the world; Gorbachev more or less died a pariah in his. History is
supposed to be written by the winners and by the standard of American history,
Gorbachev should have been one. Why does our society essentially view him as
little more than a footnote?
While the right
in part lionizes Reagan despite the calendar, the left chooses to excoriate him
because of what they say he was. To do so, they have to also ignore math, which
considering how much they worship statistics is very bizarre. It is also the real
reasons that the left has spent the last forty years loathing him and the
right has spent just as long lionizing him.
Reagan’s electoral
victories are the most impressive for any two term President in American
History. There was actually a Jeopardy clue on it: Reagan outscored his
Democrats opponents by a combined total of 1014 to 63. Reagan is
one of only three Presidents to win an election with more than 500 electoral
votes. The other two were FDR in 1936 and Richard Nixon in 1972. In 1984, Reagan
received more electoral votes than any Presidential candidate in history 525,
which were forty-nine of fifty states. He didn’t do that poorly in 1980 either,
carrying forty five of fifty states. In the 1984 election, for the record, he
came within 3800 votes of carrying Minnesota and received 58.8 percent of the
popular vote, which amounted to more than 54.5 million votes.
The left can spin
this as much as they like; some of it justifiably. They will point out that in
both elections the turnout was historically low and there is truth to that; in
both 1980 and 1984, the total voter turnout was not much more than fifty
percent. They will argue that Carter was historically unpopular at the time of
the 1980 election, which is hard to debate and that Mondale was not a
particularly inspiring candidate. (That undercuts the contributions Walter
Mondale made in his life in politics to be sure, but they’ll make that
argument.) They’ll argue that the post-Vietnam politics had fundamentally
weakened the Democratic party. All true.
None of this can
defeat the underlying factor of Reagan’s massive popular and electoral wins.
Nor does it do much to argue the fact that from the beginning of Reagan’s career,
much of his electoral success was built on appealing to Democrats. (This will
become particularly obvious when we come to his 1976 campaign.) As much as one
wants to argue that Reagan’s popularity was based in the South (and by unspoken
extension, racists) it does not change the fact that Reagan essentially carried
in both elections every other region of the country as well, in forty five of
fifty cases, twice over. Considering that most of those states were blue before
Reagan and after, what does that say about his popularity?
The left, of
course, can’t make a real argument about this. So they will make up straw man
ones. Here are some of the biggest myths:
Reagan never
talked to the press and when he did, he was lying to them. There are so many
ways to ridicule this argument its not even funny, so I’m just going to take
the most pertinent one. Reagan held forty-seven press conferences in eight
years. Jimmy Carter held fifty-nine in four. It’s worth noting the Georgetown
elite never liked him from the start; they could not adjust to the Southerner
in the White House, they fundamentally thought he was too upright for them and
they spent as much time creating false scandals for him rather than pay
attention to his actual policies. The left can argue Reagan ignored the media,
but there is no evidence – certainly in the post-Watergate era – that being a
friend to the media makes you a better President. Indeed, JFK was warm and open
to the media – and spent much of his administration lying to them about every
aspect of his public and personal life.
Reagan spent his
career inventing stories. When Jimmy Carter began his campaign one of the first
lines he said was: “I’ll never tell a lie.” The media immediately reacted with
just as much cynicism as they did Reagan’s false stories, even when they did
correct them. The fact that the press and so much of the public did not believe
in Carter’s fundamental decency any more than Reagan’s fables just goes to
prove that politicians are essentially damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
What the left doesn’t like is that the public liked hearing these stories and
wanted to believe in them just as so many wanted to believe in Carter’s honesty.
Reagan was all
style, using a message of positivity to his voters while actually being as
corrupt as the rest of the right was. Here I will do a case study, and I hope
some of you will see the pattern.
1920: In the aftermath
of World War I, Warren Harding the unknown Senator from Ohio is the Republican
nominee for President. Considering intellectually vacant and corrupt (even
though he was personally honest) his good looks and affability appealed to
many. His campaign was based, in the aftermath of the last decade on one of the
most famous slogans of all time: “A Return to Normalcy”
Harding won with
60% of the popular vote, beating his Democratic rival by a margin of two to
one. He also became the first Republican President to win more than 400
electoral votes.
1928: Herbert Hoover is
the Republican nominee. While an ugly campaign against the Catholic Democrat Al
Smith is waged, the general prosperity of the roaring 1920s is still on Hoover’s
side. His campaign slogan reflects that: “A Chicken in Every Pot and A Car in
Every Garage.”
Hoover wins with more
than 58 percent of the popular vote and with 444 electoral votes, the most any Presidential
candidate has received in history so far.
1932: As the Depression
worsens and Hoover is incapable of effecting change, he runs a dour and doom-trodden campaign,
claiming if FDR is elected, grass will grow on the sidewalks. FDR runs a campaign
filled with light and humor and his campaign anthem is ‘Happy Days are Here
Again’.
FDR wins with 472
electoral votes. His optimistic tone and
humor carry him through three separate electoral landslides, each with at least
432 electoral votes.
1952: After a quagmire in
Korea, Communism affecting American policy at home and abroad, the GOP nominates
Dwight Eisenhower for President. Eisenhower has been the most popular man in
America since the invasion of Normandy and both parties have tried to recruit
him to be their standard bearer. Irving Berlin writes a campaign song reflecting
one of the most famous electoral slogans in history: “I Like Ike.”
Eisenhower wins
in a landslide with more than fifty-five percent of the popular vote and 442 electoral
votes. He is reelected with 57 percent of the popular vote and 457 electoral
votes.
Historians and
the media have wanted the America and the world to believe that driving force for
the electorate are policy issues that affect them and candidates that best reflect
these issues. The cynical part of me has always believes that’s just not true
for most voters.
I truly believe
that most voters choose candidates who they either like in some way or who reflects
a positive attitude. The fact that in the twentieth century the most
significant electoral landslides have been for the candidate who is either more
likable or reflects a positive message bears that out. It would also explain
the LBJ landslide in 1964 and the Nixon was in 1972; Goldwater was considered
frightening and campaigned as a jeremiad; McGovern was considered a radical
even by his own party.
So why wouldn’t
voters want to elect a candidate who was not only immensely affable and likeable
but familiar? Why wouldn’t voters flock to a candidate whose attitude was
positive? In 1984, the theme of Reagan’s campaign was ‘It’s Morning Again in
America’, which told them everything was finally getting better and things
would stay that way. It might not have been true, but based on the numbers, it
was clearly a message that voters responded too.
And why are
progressives so upset about that as an idea? Need I remind them that in 2008
they celebrated a candidate whose message was ‘Yes We Can’ and whose campaign
slogan was simply ‘Hope’. That didn’t have quite the electoral landslide as before
but Barack Obama did manage to get 365 electoral votes. Kind of makes you think
that optimism and endless cheerfulness is a strategy that gets you elected. Why
is that being cheerful and pitching a message of optimism is something that is
only believable when Democrats do it but when a Republican does it, it’s clear
another false flag? Speaking strictly for myself, I’m now at the point in my
life where I’d prefer a campaign where both sides don’t endlessly use variations
of ‘the battle for the soul of the republic’ or “the other side will completely
destroy you.” Reagan’s reelection campaign is arguably the last truly positive
campaign theme in political history and it was clearly the most successful. I
would love to have one candidate on either side run a campaign this way.
But of course optimism
is completely the 20th century. Now the only argument either party has
is some variation of the other side must never come back into power. That’s the
other reason Reagan could never be elected today. I imagine the right would
come up with a variation of “we don’t like these Hollywood types” and “how dare
you reach across the aisle.” The
Democratic party had control of the House throughout Reagan’s Presidency and
the Senate in much of it. These days the left would not have been happy unless
Tip O’Neill (Speaker during the early stages of the Reagan Presidency) or
Robert Byrd (Senate Minority leader after 1981) had not called a press
conference in their first year and said: “Our first legislative goal is to make
Ronald Reagan a one-term President” and spent every day of the legislative
session excoriating the Republicans and everything he stood for on the House
and Senate floor where the newly installed TV cameras were.
One of the jokes so
many Democrats made in the 1980s about Reagan was: “Everyone you know hates
him. Everyone you don’t know loves him.” That’s the thing the left is never
going to accept: that the circle that they traveled in was apparently much
smaller than they would admit.
In my first
official article on the series, I will deal with Reagan’s first attempt at the
Presidency in 1968: how he delayed his possibility of a run until it was too
late, how his fight for the nomination could very well have been won – and how
it is likely if he had gotten the Republican nomination for President in 1968,
his ambitions for national office could have collapsed right then.
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