Distorting Reagan's presidency to bash Bush
Betsy's Page
Fred Barnes has a much-needed column today in the Wall Street Journal about how many Democrats and media types are distorting (isn't that just a polite word for lying?) Reagan's presidency. Then they use the false history as a club to beat Bush over the head with.
First, they pretend that Reagan wasn't a partisan president compared to Bush's better partisan leadership.
<<< Liberals pretend the Reagan years--in contrast to the Bush years--were a golden idyll of collaboration between congressional Democrats and a not-so-conservative president. When Reagan died in 2004, John Kerry recalled having admired his political skills and liked him personally. "I had quite a few meetings with him," Mr. Kerry told reporters. "I met with Reagan a lot more than I've met with this president."
Of course, that wasn't Mr. Kerry's take on Reagan during his presidency: In 1988, he condemned the "moral darkness of the Reagan-Bush administration." A chief complaint of liberals and the media in those days was that Mr. Reagan was a "detached" president, not one easily accessible to Democratic members of Congress or anyone outside his inner circle of aides. But Reagan had to talk to Democrats on occasion since they controlled at least half of Congress. Mr. Bush rarely consults them for the simple reason that Republicans run all of Capitol Hill; so he talks frequently with Republican congressional leaders.
Liberals today talk about Reagan as if the hallmark of his administration was a lack of partisanship--again in contrast with Mr. Bush. Mr. Kerry noted in 2004 that Mr. Reagan "taught us that there is a big difference between strong beliefs and bitter partisanship." Mr. Bush, naturally, is the bitter partisan. Of course that's what liberals then thought of Reagan--and they were partially right: While never bitter, Reagan was in fact a partisan Republican. >>>
And what they're leaving out, of course, is that the Democrats often fiercely opposed Reagan's policies just as they fight Bush's. One difference is that in the 1980s there were still moderate (what we might call Red State) Democrats in the Congress who would form a core of support for Reagan policies on tax cuts and foreign policy. There are few of those Blue Dog Democrats around any more. Most have either been defeated or changed parties or retired.
Next, the Democrats mischaracterize Reagan's foreign policy.
<<< On foreign policy, some liberals peddle the notion that Reagan wasn't the hardliner he might have seemed. Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, has argued that Reagan, having won the Cold War, was ready to rely on international organizations to police the world. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is impugned as the enemy of the U.N. and multilateralism.
Reagan a moderate in foreign affairs? It strains credulity to imagine the president--who supported wars of national liberation in Nicaragua, Angola and Afghanistan, who bombed Libya to punish Gadhafi, who defiantly installed Pershing missiles in Europe, who invaded Grenada--as anything but a hardliner. He was a hawk for whom defeating the Soviet Union was the essential priority.
It's on foreign policy that liberals and conservatives find common cause. Patrick Buchanan, rehearsing the pieties of the political left, argues that Mr. Bush has turned the world against America. The "endless bellicosity" of Mr. Bush and his neoconservative advisers, he recently argued, "has produced nothing but ill will against us. This was surely not the way of the tough but gracious and genial Ronald Reagan."
Of all people, Mr. Buchanan ought to know better, having served as Reagan's communications director from 1984 to 1986. Reagan generated massive antiwar and anti-American demonstrations around the world, far larger and more numerous protests than those Mr. Bush has occasioned. He famously denounced the Soviet "evil empire" headed for "the ash-heap of history." He was treated by the press as a cowboy warmonger, just as Mr. Bush has been. Ill will? Reagan produced plenty--all in a noble cause. >>>
Any one as old as I am with any memory can remember the huge protests when Reagan went to Europe after placing Pershing missiles in Germany. Or the ridicule that he received for his SDI proposal (who's laughing at that now?) Remember the uproar when he joked into an open mike about bombing the Soviet Union in five minutes. Remember the complaints about his simplistic black and white view of the Soviet Union.
Next, both liberals and conservatives act as if Reagan really drew the line on spending in order to criticize Bush and the GOP in Congress for all the spending they're responsible for. While I would like to see the GOP and Bush draw the line on spending, it isn't as if Reagan was any more successful at doing that.
<<< But it's also on the spending issue that the Reagan myth--Reagan as the relentless swashbuckler against spending--is most pronounced. He won an estimated $35 billion in spending cuts in 1981, his first year in office. After that, spending soared, so much so that his budget director David Stockman, who found himself on the losing end of spending arguments, wrote a White House memoir with the subtitle, "Why the Reagan Revolution Failed."
With Reagan in the White House, spending reached 23.5% of GDP in 1984, the peak year of the military buildup. Under Mr. Bush, the top spending year is 2005 at 20.1% of GDP, though it is expected to rise as high as 20.7% this year, driven upward by Iraq and hurricane relief. >>>
All this obfuscation about the past in order to make partisan points today is reminiscent of the points that Noemie Emery made in her excellent article about how Democrats are mischaracterizing Truman's record in order to make Bush look bad.
<<< Despising George Bush, and enraged by the left, which is trying to purge them, the liberal hawks are making their stand with and through Harry, to prove they are manly without being macho, and nuanced and caring without being wimps. Harry, they claim, was strong, but so gentle; a leader, but always deferring to others; moral and mighty yet multilateral, just as they are in their fantasies. Peter Beinart claims in his book The Good Fight that only liberal hawks such as Harry can bring national greatness, a view warmly endorsed by Joe Klein in a New York Times review that flogs it with vigor. With All Our Might (the words fight and might figure large in these titles), a volume edited by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, policy arm of the beleaguered New Democrats, pits the Third Way of Harry against Bush the Cowboy on one side and the far left on the other. Harry, to them, is like Goldilocks's porridge--neither too hard nor too soft; neither too hot nor too cold. The problem is that the Harry they cite is a fantasy, airbrushed and softened beyond recognition, and the narrative that they tell is studded with errors, filled with omissions, and marred by peculiar distortions of facts. >>>
She outlines several myths that they're banking on people not remembering about Truman's presidency in order to forget that he was a very unpopular leader at the time who was willing to stand up to communism and succeeded with support from both parties. But he succeeded in Europe, not in Asia (think China and Korea) and one of the reasons he was able to get support in Europe is because he was handing out huge gifts of cash and support for the devastated European powers. As Emery points out, it was a lot easier to get support when all you're asking is that they accept our aid.
[I]t is easier to win friends when you are offering them
protection and money (as Truman was doing in the late
1940s) than when you ask them for effort and sacrifice
(as Bush did in 2002).
Not to mention when many of our opponents on Iraq like France and Russia were also receiving bribes from Hussein in the oil for food program. She also points out how this present-day Democratic gloss on Truman's presidency glides over the war in Korea.
<<< Above all, do not expect Korea to be brought up at all. Korea, in fact, is Iraq on steroids, a compendium of every complaint that the liberals bring against Bush and his administration: a war of choice that began with an error, that became in effect the mother of quagmires, that cost billions of dollars, killed tens of thousands, and dragged on years longer than anyone looked for, to an inconclusive and troublesome end. It began with a mistake--Acheson's omission of South Korea from a list of countries within the American sphere of protection, which may have led the North to believe it could invade without consequence. It was a war of choice, in that it was an invasion of a country to which the United States was not bound by treaty, but felt obliged to defend as a matter of principle. (The elder George Bush would make a similar decision in 1990, when Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait and its oil fields.)
Complaints began at once that Truman invaded without enough preparation, that he erred when he crossed the border into North Korea without a clue as to what he planned to do when he got there, and that he erred even more in having no inkling that his move would draw in the Chinese, which it did. At once, the war, and the risk, grew exponentially. As Michael Barone would write later, "The United States suddenly found itself at war with an utterly alien foe, led by men of whom it knew nothing, and with whom it was in no communication, and backed by virtually unlimited reserves of manpower. . . . The decision to go north of the 38th parallel, coupled with the decision not to cross the Yalu . . . put the U.S. forces in peril and raised the possibility of broader and even nuclear war." The war that Truman expected to have been clean and quick stretched into a long, hard slog with no exit plan visible. The public turned on the war, and on Truman, whose approval ratings bottomed out at 23 percent near the end of his tenure. His presidency was widely assumed to have been a debacle. In 1952, he was shunned by his chosen successor. His country was eager to show him the door.
What, one wonders, would today's liberal hawks have made of him and Korea, given their penchant for neat, well-planned wars that end quickly, and their standard of zero mistakes? >>>
Read the rest of her article. It is truly well-done (link below).
What is clear is that the Democrats, in propagating these myths about both Reagan and Truman, is that they're depending on people not remembering or knowning enough history to recognize the false comparisons that are being set up. And we know that the media won't correct those myths - even if they actually recognized them for what they were. Once again, we are seeing the importance of knowing history. Those who control our history can control what happens today in politics. And with the sorry state of our education, they may well succeed.
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