<font color=brown> This is the comments re. Reagan from a self professed Democrat.<font color=black>
ted
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What Reagan Changed for Me
By James J. Cramer
RealMoney Columnist
6/7/2004 1:58 PM EDT
We stopped and talked this weekend -- I think my wife, one of the most stoical people on earth, might have been tearing up -- because the Big Man, Ronald Reagan, had passed away, the man we both thought was responsible for so much of our good fortune in life.
For my wife Karen and me, the Reagan era always will be the era when we came to Wall Street and made something of ourselves financially. Both of us were poor, indebted and looking for a way to make a difference. We had come through the 1970s thinking that our country was somehow a loser: loser presidents, loser leaders, second-place to the Russians, certainly an unlikely place to get rich in. We accepted that we would not have even the money that our parents had. Just didn't seem possible with inflation and with the inability of our country to take on the Japanese and the Germans, let alone the Russians. If you made a lot of money anyway, what good did it do? You just paid it to the government in taxes.
Ronald Reagan changed all that. For me, as the son of a Republican and as someone who worked for Democratic candidates in high school and college and then after school, Reagan was different. First, he was the first -- and I can honestly say, the only -- Republican I ever voted for. Second, he was someone so terrific, so compelling, that I found myself talking politics with my dad for the first time ever without fighting.
For those of you who have never been on Wall Street, the period when Reagan was president was like no other. You could sense the optimism; the Street oozed optimism, right where pessimism had run in rivers through the canyons just a few years past. I remember when the market exploded upward in September 1982, when the combination of high rates and a stern monetary policy broke the back of inflation. I remember that Reagan owned that slaying of inflation. He also owned the recovery, and made us all feel as if we could, well, get rich. That's something that none of us had even dreamed of a few years before.
It's funny, President Bush isn't getting much credit at all for the million or so jobs that have been created this year. But you always credited Reagan for anything good back then, because he was funny and compelling and interesting and optimistic. No one thought they'd just gotten lucky; they simply thought that Reagan somehow had made things better, whether through lowered taxes, or his blatantly pro-business, pro-riches view or because he simply wanted you to feel good and was terrific at making it happen.
For me, my time at Goldman Sachs coincided with a rebirth of equities, with Reagan as midwife. There were tons of financings to do, tons of equity deals, and as the country was starved for capital back then, we got more than our fair share of the offerings -- and the sales fees that came with those offerings.
My wife even more than I just loved the guy. She loved putting him on the tube when he was on -- she hasn't listened to a politician since then. When something big happened, she always wanted to know what Reagan would say and how he would say it. I found him spellbinding, myself, and as someone who hated the communists and communism, I felt that once Reagan had won on the economy, somehow he made you feel it was just a matter of time before he defeated the Russkies.
I am surprised at the outpouring for Reagan in the media today, surprised because I can't remember the media ever giving him a break even for a minute. They thought he was dumb; they thought he was simplistic, not simple.
But when you compare him with today's leadership, particularly with the current president who wants so much to be like Reagan and not like his father, you want to scream to President Bush that it wasn't just the cuts in taxes, it was the spirit the man engendered, the positive, nondivisive spirit that made rock-ribbed Democrats like me change my view and vote for the other team.
Goodbye, Mr. Reagan, you most surely will be missed by all, Republicans and Democrats, men and women, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. What a great feeling it was to be an American when Reagan was president. Let's hope the time is not too distant when people feel that way all over the world about us, and most important, that we feel that way again about ourselves. |
