Is There a ‘Ronald Reagan Day’ in Our Future? God help Us!

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH

February 6, 2011 is the 100^th anniversary of the birth Ronald Reagan. While the official Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission is planning its festivities, conservatives will try to turn it into a full-year of celebrating, honoring and capitalizing politically on the legacy of a decidedly mediocre president.     

 Earlier this year, the brothers Reagan (Michael, the older one, a conservative radio talk show host, Ron, the younger, a progressive radio talk show host), had a spirited, civil, and public disagreement. They weren’t facing off at a University of Oxford Debate nor did they spend some time with Oprah; in fact, it wasn’t even face-to-face (although a holiday dinner might be quite an event). Rather, through the magic of an assortment of media platforms, the two brothers discussed how their father, Ronald Reagan, might have responded to the Tea Party Movement. 

Michael insisted that his dad “would say ‘hear, hear’ to those people who in fact [are] out there rattling their sabers if you will to wake up Washington, D.C.,” he said in an early-February interview with the Business & Media Institute.  In another venue, Michael said he believed that his father “would embrace the tea party movement if he were alive today.”  

During an appearance on the Joy Behar television talk show, Ron said his father “would be un-amused by the tea partiers, with their Hitler signs and all the rest of it.  No, I don't think he'd be cottoning to that much at all."

Arguments about what Ronald Reagan might have thought about tea partiers and other contemporary issues, and over what he thought and did during his 8-year tenure as president will come into bold relief next year when the country celebrates the 100^th anniversary of the birth of America’s 40^th president.   

On June 5, 2004, after suffering for quite some time from Alzheimer’s disease, Ronald Reagan died. Many in the nation mourned. Many did not. Now, with the 100^th anniversary of his birth around the calendar’s corner, it is likely that a fairly large chunk of the public will once again display what writer Gore Vidal has characterized as a unique American type of collective amnesia. Meanwhile, the Ronald Reagan legacy folks – a band made up mostly of of determined conservatives -- will be trying to take full advantage of that condition.

President Barack Obama – with Nancy Reagan at his side – on June 2, 2009, signed into law the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act, which established an 11-member commission to plan activities that will be taking place throughout the year in honor of the 100^th anniversary of the birth of President Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project

Founded more than a decade ago, the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project (RRLP) was originally dedicated to a political deification of Reagan. The organization’s stated "mission” was “to honor and memorialize the historic achievements of … Reagan…. by naming at least one notable public landmark in each state after the 40th president."

The main motivator of the RRLP is longtime conservative activist Grover Norquist, who in 1986 founded an organization called Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a conservative national taxpayer advocacy organization. (Norquist may be best known for his statement: “Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”) The RRLP had ambitious goals which included the naming of at least one notable public landmark in each state, and all of America’s counties, after Reagan, It also hoped that a monument to Reagan be erected on the National Mall. There were other goals as well, including replacing Alexander Hamilton’s face with Reagan’s on the $10 bill, and having half the dimes -- currently with FDR’s likeness -- stamped with Reagan’s visage. Thus far neither of these exalted goals has been achieved.   

The Legacy Project was successful in getting the capital's National Airport renamed to honor Reagan. And, across the nation there are a number of roads, drives, turnpikes, parkways and freeways, elementary schools and high schools, community centers, and state office buildings bearing his name. Outside the U.S. there’s the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on the Marshall Islands, a number of projects in Poland including Ronald Reagan Square (formerly Central Square), in Krakow, Ronald Reagan Park, in Gda?sk, and the Ronald Reagan Monument, in Wroc?aw. There is also the Ronald Reagan Scholarship Fund in the small country of Grenada.

Perhaps the tastiest tribute was the six-foot portrait of Reagan made from 14,000 jelly beans, called “Reagan’s Sweet Legacy.”    

The Legacy Project’s ultimate goal, however, has been more than merely a renaming effort. It is an attempt to rewrite history and have the American people believe that a decidedly mediocre president deserves to be in the company of such presidents as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

‘Tear Down This Myth’

In his 2009 book Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future (Free Press, February 2009), Will Bunch provided insight into how Norquist and allies proposed “an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan's legacy across America”:  “The … contours of the Reagan myth were neatly laid out in a series of short essays from the leaders of the conservative movement: that the Gipper deserved all or at least most of the credit for winning the Cold War, that the economic boom that Americans were enjoying in 1997 was the result of the Reagan tax cut (and not the march toward balanced budgets, lower interest rates and targeted investment), and that the biggest problem with the GOP was, as the title suggested, not Reagan’s legacy but a new generation of weak-kneed leaders who were getting it all wrong.”

Theses days, The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is still in business, according to Adam Radman, the Programs and Communications Manager for Americans for Tax Reform (ATR). Although for a time the organization appeared to have morphed into a blog called “Reagan’s Legacy,” and there were no posts on the blog since February 6, 2008, when 30 Governors responded to the project’s request to “enact proclamations declaring February 6th ‘Reagan Day’ in their respective states.”

The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is “in the process of putting together a section on ATR’s website for the project,” Radman said in an email. 

Radman pointed out that ATR “will be asking all Governors to make proclamations declaring February 6^th as “Ronald Reagan Day,” an annual “effort of the project that will be more focused this year.”

The image of a ‘Teflon President’ survives

In his 2001 Z magazine review of the book Reagan In His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan that Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (Free Press, February 2001). Richard Alan Leach noted that the book, containing a number of Reagan’s 400-word radio essays delivered between 1976 and 1979, was aimed at convincing the public that “that Reagan was a Deep Thinker, rather than 'vacant between the ears,' as his ideological soul mate Maggie Thatcher once remarked." 

Leach noted that for many Reagan was the “Teflon President” -- nothing bad managed to stick to him as he became the darling of the mainstream media – or the “Great Communicator” -- using his Hollywood-sharpened acting skills to tell carefully calibrated stories and anecdotes.

In reality, Reagan’s legacy consists of the Iran-Contra arms for hostages/drug running scandal; the prosecution of low intensity warfare in Central America, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands; a lack of interest in supporting sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid regime; the extraordinarily high number of convictions or indictments of his administration’s associates; fanning the flames of racial discord; and silence while the AIDS epidemic began to take root.

In 2009 William Kleinknecht, a veteran reporter and crime correspondent for the Newark Star-Ledger, wrote The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America (Nation Books, February 2009). In promoting the book, The Nation magazine pointed out that “The myth of Ronald Reagan's greatness has reached epic proportions. The public rates him as one of the most popular presidents, and Republicans everywhere seek to cast themselves in his image."

Nevertheless, “So much that has gone wrong in America—including the subprime mortgage crisis and the meltdown of the financial sector—can be traced directly to Reagan's policies. The financial deregulation launched in the 1980s freed banks and securities firms to squander hundreds of billions of dollars and make a shambles of the economy. Boom-and-bust cycles, obscene CEO salaries, blackouts, drug-company scandals, collapsing bridges, plummeting wages for working people, the flight of U.S. manufacturing abroad—these are all products of Reagan's free-market zealotry and his gutting of the public sector.”

In early April, the California legislature moved closer to establishing an annual Ronald Reagan Day when the state Senate unanimously passed a bill designating Feb. 6 as Ronald Reagan Day. While it will not be an official holiday – government offices will not be closed and workers will not be given the day off -- it would be the third special day of recognition in California dedicated to an individual (the first honors conservationist John Muir, and the second honored Harvey Milk, a gay activist and former San Francisco supervisor who was murdered in 1978), teachers in the state’s public schools will be encouraged to talk about Reagan’s accomplishments.

Reagan’s centennial comes at an interesting time in America’s political history. Over the past two decades, and moreover since his death, Republican political candidates have trumpeted his legacy, and used his image and words to brandish their own reputations and bolster their credibility with the Party’s base and to enhance their own political campaigns.

In these tumultuous Tea Party times, however, Reagan himself might not measure up to the standards – albeit as amorphous as they are – set by Tea Party activists. Some in the movement might not view at least a portion of the Reagan record – particularly his signing of an abortion bill and his raising of taxes as Governor of California – too favorably. Libertarians in the movement might see Reagan’s Iran/Contra involvement and his series of so-called low intensity conflicts as examples of unwarranted interventionism.    

Ironically, it is entirely possible that Reagan might never have made it out of the California primaries, let alone all the way to the White House. Instead, his career path might have led to his having moved on from playing Gipp the footballer, to playing the great coach himself, Knute Rocke.

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