Kerry Should Claim the Reagan Mantle
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by Larry Beinhart
Published on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 by the Baltimore Sun
SO THE REPUBLICANS - not just the Republicans, most of America - just had this orgy of posthumous Reaganism.
All my knee-jerk liberal friends were appalled. The standard refrain was, "That's not the Reagan I remember." There were various specifics: "He busted unions." "He was against the environment." "He traded arms for hostages." "He couldn't tell the difference between movies and reality." "He supported death squads all over Central America."
But nobody listened to the liberals. As usual.
The media, yea, the whole nation, seemed to speak, once again, with a single voice. It was a voice of adulation and adoration.
Mr. Reagan is to the right and to the center what Franklin Delano Roosevelt was to the left and to the center. That's powerful stuff. Let's stop complaining about it and learn from it. We can learn from it because there was, in fact, a separation between the love of Mr. Reagan and the love of his policies. If you were to make a list, like the one above, and you asked one of those people who traveled 1,000 miles to view the coffin if he loved those policies and those choices, he would say, "Of course not."
We should listen to the people who said they loved Mr. Reagan and listen to why they loved him.
Optimism was big on the list. Praising America (telling us we're great) was big on the list. The warmth, the courtesy, the friendliness, the masculinity and the appeal to family values (though he was our first divorced president, and while he was president, his children appeared to hate him). Almost none of them speak of policy.
Let Democrats do what Mr. Reagan did. Mr. Reagan put on the mantle of Franklin Roosevelt; let our candidate put on the mantle of Ronald Reagan.
Let John Kerry - since he appears to be the man in the saddle - say that he, not President Bush, is the true heir to Ronald Reagan. Let Mr. Kerry say that Mr. Reagan was a populist and flexible and a pragmatist, like real Americans are, and that Mr. Bush is an elitist and an ideologue and a prisoner of bad ideas.
Mr. Reagan came in and tried tax cuts. They worked in some ways, but didn't work in others, so he raised taxes. He went to war in Grenada, where he could get in and get out, but he backed out of Lebanon because he had the sense to know it would be a mess - even though we had been the victims of a terrorist attack there.
Mr. Bush put in his wars and his tax cuts because he is an elitist and just wants to make money for the big money elite even if he has to rob everybody else to do it - not to get America moving again, the way Mr. Reagan did it. Now that the war and the tax policies are creating a mess, Mr. Bush doesn't know how to get out of it because he's no Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Reagan respected other people. Even while he was calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, he was reaching out to Mikhail S. Gorbachev and becoming his friend and he was backing away from confrontation toward reconciliation. Can anyone imagine President Bush doing that? Mr. Bush can't even do it with the French.
It's not about policies. People don't vote for policies. They certainly don't fall in love over policies.
It's about feelings. It's about morning in America. Mr. Bush has taken us off into the darkness, into some strange neo-conservative nightmare, where Americans torture people and take away their rights and the budget is spiraling out of control. Now it's time to wake from this terrible dream and return to who we really are, to return to being the kind of America that Ronald Reagan loved and exemplified.
That's what we have to learn from this love of Mr. Reagan. That's what we should do with it.
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Larry Beinhart is the author of American Hero, on which the movie Wag the Dog was based. He lives in Woodstock, N.Y.
Copyright © 2004, The Baltimore Sun
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