Reagan's Legacy - How will he be remembered?

[Drake Tungsten]

As for completely altering the political landscape..HOW?

Are you being serious?

[JohnT]

Amazingly, he is. Apparently Goldwater getting his ass kicked is one revolution, Gingrich taking over Congress another, but the start of 20+ years of conservative (or right-leaning) Presidents after ~40 years of left-leaning Presidents does not a revolution make.

[Arrian]

Flinx, if you're going to hurl insults at the man, at least spell his name properly.

-Arrian

[Drake Tungsten]

Amazingly, he is.

I can't believe that. It would destroy what vestiges of faith I have left in the intelligence of my fellow man...

[JohnT]

The "Reagan Democrats" disappeared in the 90's.

For two reasons:

1. Because some became Republicans. Don't you remember the Dem pols shifting parties right after the 1994 elections... Richard Shelby, Ben "Nighthorse" Campbell, etc.

2. Clinton co-opted much of the Rights agenda after the '94 election, making it more palatable for the remaining conservative Dems to stay in the party.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Reagan completely altered the political landscape of the most powerful country on Earth. Even if you continue to deny his influential role in ending the Cold War, the previous point alone is enough to count as a significant impact on the real world...

And this is the precise reason why I hate him. He didn't only alter the political landscape in the US, but with his groupie Thatcher, and his overlord Friedman, they begun the rampage known as the conservative counter revolution. Something that is still wrecking havoc today.

[Drake Tungsten]

He didn't only alter the political landscape in the US, but with his groupie Thatcher, and his overlord Friedman, they begun the rampage known as the conservative counter revolution.

I personally like the economic growth we've experienced since Reagan and Friedman changed things.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Amazingly, he is. Apparently Goldwater getting his ass kicked is one revolution, Gingrich taking over Congress another, but the start of 20+ years of conservative (or right-leaning) Presidents after ~40 years of left-leaning Presidents does not a revolution make.

It is the hight of fallacy to say the Reagan Revolution had little impact because Goldwater and Gingrich were the ones who pushed the whole thing! Goldwater was whipped and after him the Presidential nominees were Nixon and Ford, who were centrist Republicans who were not opposed to New Deal policies. It was Reagan who came in and swept the thing aside. And who do you think influenced Gingrich? It is obvious that his political hero was Reagan.

As for "Reagan Democrats", you don't think Zell Miller, John Breaux, etc, would have been for Reagan? You are kidding yourself.

[GePap]

Originally posted by JohnT
Amazingly, he is. Apparently Goldwater getting his ass kicked is one revolution, Gingrich taking over Congress another, but the start of 20+ years of conservative (or right-leaning) Presidents after ~40 years of left-leaning Presidents does not a revolution make.

Oh yes, Clinton was right leaning

Lets see, 8 years of Reagan, to the right, followed by 12 years of Bush and Clinton, both moderates, and that a conservative revolution make?

[GePap]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui


It is the hight of fallacy to say the Reagan Revolution had little impact because Goldwater and Gingrich were the ones who pushed the whole thing! Goldwater was whipped and after him the Presidential nominees were Nixon and Ford, who were centrist Republicans who were not opposed to New Deal policies. It was Reagan who came in and swept the thing aside. And who do you think influenced Gingrich? It is obvious that his political hero was Reagan.

Maybe the language is to difficult for you all, but lets try it: Being lionized by someone does not meanthey did what you think they did. You say Reagan came and "swept things aside"-I can think of only a few programs he "swept aside" , mainly ending help for low income housing. Non-military discretionary spending grew under him, and he made no moves to end any of the largest programs. All the reforms were pushed by 8 years asfter he left power, logn after his mind began to leave him. If the revolution was a car, Reagan was not the driver but a prominent bumpber sticker.

As for "Reagan Democrats", you don't think Zell Miller, John Breaux, etc, would have been for Reagan? You are kidding yourself. [/QUOTE]

Wow, you just named 2 voters... Reagan democrats as a voting block, not conservative democrats, which is what you mentioned.

[Adam Smith]

Originally posted by Spiffor

And this is the precise reason why I hate him. He didn't only alter the political landscape in the US, but with his groupie Thatcher, and his overlord Friedman, they begun the rampage known as the conservative counter revolution. Something that is still wrecking havoc today.

How exactly does Friedman or the University of Chicago fit into this? And what part of what they recommended is still wreaking havoc today?

[Drake Tungsten]

How His Legacy Lives on
If Reagan never balanced the budget, he changed the conversation about government

Ronald Reagan utterly remade the American political landscape. Even Bill Clinton, as adroit a politician as America has known, had to conduct his entire presidency in the confined political space in which Reagan placed him. It was because of Reagan that Clinton had to promise to end welfare as we know it. It was because of Reagan that he spoke the fateful line, "The era of Big Government is over."

As it happens, it wasn't over—more on that later—but make no mistake, what Reagan brought forth was a revolution all the same. Like the Civil War and the New Deal, the Reagan years were another of those hinges upon which history sometimes turns. On one side, a wounded but still vigorous liberalism with its faith in government as the answer to almost every question. On the other, a free market so triumphant—even after the tech bubble burst—that we look first to "growth," not government, to solve most problems. On one side, a U.S. still licking its wounds from Vietnam, reluctant to exercise its power. On the other, U.S. forces in Bosnia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. On one side, Russians invading Kabul. On the other, McDonald's invading Moscow.

Reagan was without a doubt the greatest communicator among postwar Presidents. Even J.F.K., with his faintly patrician manner, could not play the effortless everyman as Reagan did. Every politician with national ambitions today tries to capture his easy way and Teflon character. All Republican candidates are conditioned now to always ask themselves, What would Reagan do?

He not only knew how to talk. He also knew how to use the power of his persuasion. "Reagan fundamentally changed the way President and Congress relate," says Al From, former head of the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed the Democratic Party toward the center—inspired partly by Reagan's success in pushing the G.O.P. to the right. "Before Reagan, if you wanted to get a big idea through Congress, you worked through the leadership. Reagan couldn't do that. The most important leader in Congress, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, was his enemy. So he figured out he had to go to the people. To get a big idea through Congress now, you go outside. Reagan understood that."

Ever since Reagan's departure from the political stage, G.O.P. candidates have been trying to summon his image and perform the magic of uniting their party's disparate factions, from libertarians to religious conservatives to Big Business, under one tent. Don't forget that Reagan also left that imprint on another charismatic actor who now sits in the Governor's chair in California. As he tries to find his way out of a nasty fiscal crisis, Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking lessons from the Reagan playbook all the time. "They both have extraordinary personal charm," observes Ken Khachigian, Reagan's former chief speechwriter. "That goes a great way in taking the sting out of things when you're doing something negative."

Remarkably, Reagan accomplished that while being the most conservative President his party had ever moved into the White House. Make no mistake. By Republican standards, Richard Nixon was middle-of-the-road. He believed his job was not to dismantle the New Deal but to manage it more effectively than the Democrats did. And by those lights, Gerald Ford was no better, naming the ur-moderate Nelson Rockefeller, the bogeyman of the Republican right, his Vice President.

"Reagan took a more moderate Republican Party and made it very conservative," says Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. "Goldwater tried and failed to do that. Reagan succeeded." More than that, Reagan took who was next in line of Republican centrism, George H.W. Bush, vanquished him in the 1980 primaries and then cordially digested him into his own Administration. It was a lesson George the Younger never forgot.

So great was Reagan's victory in making his preoccupations into enduring themes of the national conversation that it may not matter that his record didn't always match his rhetoric. He insisted, for instance, that a balanced budget was one of his priorities. But by the time Reagan left office, a combination of lower tax revenues and sharply higher spending for defense had sent the deficit through the roof. But as Dick Cheney is reported to have said, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." In his recent memoir, former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill quotes the Vice President using those words to shut down an internal White House debate over the budgetary impact of Bush's tax cuts. And at least with respect to the political costs, he was right. Reagan demonstrated that among voters, the easily understood appeal of tax cuts neutralized the abstract peril of big deficits. It's a trick that the current Administration is hoping can still be managed.

Yet if Reagan never balanced the budget, he changed the conversation about government. He made nonmilitary federal spending seem like an indulgence. Because of his two electoral landslides, a badly humbled Democratic Party had to think, really think, about reinventing government, trying free-market approaches to problems like public housing and health care that they once saw chiefly as targets for tax dollars. Four years after Reagan left office, the enduring popularity of his ideas obliged Clinton to back away from his 1993 stimulus spending package in favor of a budget more agreeable to the bond markets. When Clinton's proposed health plan started looking like a return to Big Government, voters rose up to produce the '94 Republican sweep of Congress. By May of that year, only 2% of Americans were telling pollsters they had "a lot" of confidence that the Federal Government could tackle a problem and solve it. Two percent.

That '94 sweep was itself a delayed tremor of the Reagan upheaval. Newt Gingrich's Contract with America drew heavily from Reagan's legacy. But there was another lesson of Reaganism that Gingrich and the Republican class of '94 grasped too late: keep smiling. Even when his views were most intransigent—when he wondered out loud whether Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist or failed for nearly all of his presidency to speak the word aids even once—Reagan gave Reaganism a human face. "He made us sunny optimists," says Bush political adviser Karl Rove. "His was a conservatism of laughter and openness and community."

By the '90s most presidential campaigners had learned to follow that model, and the ones who hadn't, like Pat Buchanan, crashed and burned in their own rhetorical fires. Bob Dole used to proclaim himself "the most optimistic man in America." And Clinton was the Reagan of the liberals, always full of bright-faced hope for a new tomorrow. By comparison, Gingrich and his followers made conservatism look snide and angry and strenuous. They learned the phrases but never the genial delivery of the man who carried 49 states in 1984 without breaking a sweat.

That's a mistake George W. Bush has been careful not to repeat. Though he ran in 2000 on a platform as hard edged as any President's since, well, Reagan's, he was careful to style himself that year as a "compassionate conservative." One of Bush's recent campaign commercials—a girl watches her father raising an American flag as a narrator assures us that "America is turning the corner"—could be an outtake from Reagan's famous 1984 "Morning in America" campaign.

The Bush White House has absorbed the lessons of Reagan-era foreign policy too. From the first, Reagan moved aggressively to undo the "Vietnam syndrome," the postwar hesitation to project American power by force and to act unilaterally in places like Libya and Grenada. These days, when we do that in Iraq, we call it the Bush doctrine. But Reagan also presided over a moment of weakness that led America's enemies in the Middle East to believe that terrorism could work. On Oct. 23, 1983, Hizballah terrorists blew up Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241. A few months later, Reagan withdrew the remaining U.S. forces. Two decades after that, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice put it this way: "Prior to Sept. 11, our policies as a nation, going really all the way back to the bombing of the Lebanon barracks, were not in a mode of the kind of war that we were fighting." Translation: We cut and ran. Terrorists drew their own conclusions.

the white house may return to the democrats some day. even Congress may go back their way. But the federal courts will be Reagan's for years to come. He named 83 appeals-court judges and 292 district-court judges, slightly more than half the federal judiciary. That's more federal judges named than by any other President in history.

Reagan's impact on the judiciary has been profound. Federal courts today are far more willing to question racial and ethnic preferences. Mandatory busing for school desegregation is now a museum piece. Court rulings in criminal cases are far more likely to favor law enforcement. Laws once prohibited even moments of silence in classrooms and remedial education for the underprivileged in sectarian schools. Now school vouchers for use in private schools, both secular and sectarian, hold up in courts.

The real Reagan years, the years of red suspenders and corporate takeovers, of Bonfire of the Vanities and big hair, were shorter than they seem in memory. They began around the middle of his first term, after the 1981 recession gave way to the boom years, and ended midway through his second, when Iran-contra broke and so in some ways did Reagan's spell. But however briefly they lasted, those years habituated us to a giddy, swaggering, saw-toothed capitalism that seemed a bit appalling then. It feels much more familiar now. Because the country had lived through the '80s, through all those poison pills and hostile takeovers and Donald Trump, the unapologetic materialism of the '90s—the stock options and ipos, the $21 soup courses and 22-year-old millionaires (and Donald Trump!)—seemed more like business as usual in the most literal sense of the words.

But it won't do to end by emphasizing a Reagan legacy of unintended consequences. The consequences he wanted—an America that is stronger militarily, more dedicated to free enterprise, more mindful of the virtues of self-reliance and more confident in its own powers—were the ones he got as well, and the ones he passed on firmly to America. Ronald Reagan may be gone, but will it ever be accurate to call this nation "post-Reagan"?

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040614/rlegacy.html?cnn=yes

[GePap]

Oh yes Drake, the opinion of Time Magazine makes it true........

This is how your decline into absurd lies ussually begins, correct?

[Drake Tungsten]

I'll trust the opinion of Time Magazine (and the numerous other people and organizations who have said the same things about Reagan's legacy) over you any day of the week...

[GePap]

Wel, why not do some Draking (to post opinions and hold them as proof of anything) of my own. For Sava:

The Great Taxer
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 8, 2004

Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher rating during his last two years in office.

We're also sure to hear that Mr. Reagan presided over an unmatched economic boom. Again, not true: the economy grew slightly faster under President Clinton, and, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the after-tax income of a typical family, adjusted for inflation, rose more than twice as much from 1992 to 2000 as it did from 1980 to 1988.

But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.

The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.

The contrast with President Bush is obvious. President Reagan, confronted with evidence that his tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, changed course. President Bush, confronted with similar evidence, has pushed for even more tax cuts.

Mr. Reagan's second tax increase was also motivated by a sense of responsibility — or at least that's the way it seemed at the time. I'm referring to the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, which followed the recommendations of a commission led by Alan Greenspan. Its key provision was an increase in the payroll tax that pays for Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance.

For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's income tax cuts. In 1980, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, middle-income families with children paid 8.2 percent of their income in income taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. By 1988 the income tax share was down to 6.6 percent — but the payroll tax share was up to 11.8 percent, and the combined burden was up, not down.

Nonetheless, there was broad bipartisan support for the payroll tax increase because it was part of a deal. The public was told that the extra revenue would be used to build up a trust fund dedicated to the preservation of Social Security benefits, securing the system's future. Thanks to the 1983 act, current projections show that under current rules, Social Security is good for at least 38 more years.

But George W. Bush has made it clear that he intends to renege on the deal. His officials insist that the trust fund is meaningless — which means that they don't feel bound to honor the implied contract that dedicated the revenue generated by President Reagan's payroll tax increase to paying for future Social Security benefits. Indeed, it's clear from the arithmetic that the only way to sustain President Bush's tax cuts in the long run will be with sharp cuts in both Social Security and Medicare benefits.

I did not and do not approve of President Reagan's economic policies, which saddled the nation with trillions of dollars in debt. And as others will surely point out, some of the foreign policy shenanigans that took place on his watch, notably the Iran-contra scandal, foreshadowed the current debacle in Iraq (which, not coincidentally, involves some of the same actors).

Still, on both foreign and domestic policy Mr. Reagan showed both some pragmatism and some sense of responsibility. These are attributes sorely lacking in the man who claims to be his political successor.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/08KRUG.html