Dubya, You're No Gipper
David Kusnet
June 08, 2004
The news of Ronald Reagan's death spurred mourning across the country, along with the inevitable political comparisons of that fallen president to our current leader. But Bush is no Reagan—and the comparisons diminish Reagan's strengths while playing up Bush's most dangerous ideas. Here, former Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet untangles the Reagan myth and the Bush reality.
David Kusnet was chief speechwriter for former President Bill Clinton from 1992 through 1994 and was also a speechwriter for Walter Mondale during his campaign against Ronald Reagan in 1984. He is a visiting fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of Speaking American: How the Democrats Can Win in the Nineties. An earlier version of this article appeared in TomPaine.com in February.
Ronald Reagan is being mourned by Americans across the political spectrum. Whatever we think of his foreign and domestic policies, it’s hard not to respect his rise from poverty to the presidency, his good spirit and straight talk, and his willingness to speak his mind and stand his ground until a majority of voters came around to him.
But if his most fervent supporters have their way, his passing will become a factional celebration, not a national commemoration—the elevation of an ideological icon to a place in the pantheon of American heroes.
Moreover, since George W. Bush—the president who has been hailed as his spiritual son—is running for re-election, partisan Republicans are eulogizing Reagan in ways that implicitly make the case for keeping Dubya. At a time when Bush is trailing John Kerry in many national polls, they’re kicking off the third Reagan-Bush campaign, trying to save the incumbent president by winning one more for the Gipper.
Almost immediately after Reagan left office in 1989—and with increasing urgency since he announced that he had Alzheimer’s 10 years ago—former staffers, conservative commentators, think tank scholars and direct mail entrepreneurs have been conducting a campaign to make sure that Reagan is remembered in exactly the way that they want: as one of the greatest presidents and also as the prophet of hard-core conservatism.
Reagan’s loyalists have the right to try to establish his historic reputation and to make partisan points in the process. But the rest of us have the right to notice that they have been doing something unprecedented. Never before have an ex-president’s partisans worked so hard to carve him a place on Mount Rushmore. From Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, most aging ex-presidents’ friends and former assistants have refrained from jury-tampering with the verdict of history.
But Reagan’s supporters have been sparing neither bricks nor bombast to make him America’s first explicitly ideological national hero. Seemingly unaware of the irony, the anti-tax agitator Grover Norquist has founded the Reagan Legacy Project to build memorials in every county to the president who hated “big government.” Already, Reagan has been honored with the Ronald Reagan office complex in downtown Washington, D.C., the renamed Reagan National Airport in nearby Northern Virginia, a nuclear aircraft carrier and countless local projects. To her credit, Nancy Reagan rejected another proposed memorial: placing Reagan’s portrait on the dime, displacing FDR, his first political hero.
Meanwhile, Reagan’s former staffers and friendly intellectuals have been writing reams of books and articles, including speechwriter Peggy Noonan’s When Character Was King, former domestic policy aide Dinesh D’Souza’s Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader, former White House Counsel Peter Wallison’s Ronald Reagan: The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency, Hoover Institution fellow Peter Schweizer’s Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, and speechwriter Peter Robinson’s memoir He Changed My Life .
For the past two years, the campaign to secure Reagan’s place in history has been less about him than about Bush, whom Noonan has hailed as Reagan’s real heir. Following Reagan’s death, Bush’s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, declared: “In many ways, George W. Bush and the policies that he put forward stand on the shoulders of Ronald Reagan.” Republican National Chairman Ed Gillespie added, “The parallels are there. I don’t know how you miss them.” Meanwhile, on the website of the conservative National Review , defense intellectuals Michael Ledeen and Frank Gaffney, Jr., each contributed columns comparing Reagan’s role in the Cold War with Bush’s stance in Iraq.
Whether they’re making the case for putting Reagan on Mount Rushmore or keeping Bush in the White House, conservatives crib from the same three talking points: Presidents’ characters matter more than their intellects. Tax cuts should be pursued at all costs, including inequality and insolvency. And America can and should act alone in the world.
Now that conservatives are delivering tributes to Reagan that sound just like campaign speeches for Bush, progressives should respond by telling the truth: On each of the points where conservatives glorify the Gipper to defend Dubya, Reagan wasn’t as great as they say, while Bush is much worse than they’ll ever admit. Compared to Reagan, Dubya has limited life experience, an extreme economic agenda and a reckless foreign policy.
The Cult of Character
According to Noonan, D’Souza, and Wallison, presidents needn’t know a lot about public policy. They need only have good character and make the right—or is it right-wing?—decisions on the great issues of their times.
The case for C-student presidents serves Reagan better than Bush. While Reagan may not have known how his own administration worked, he did understand how America works. Growing up poor, he’d been a radio announcer, movie actor, union leader, TV host and corporate spokesman before being elected governor of California.
By the time he became president, Reagan was telling stories about “welfare queens,” although his father had received public aid, and wondering why the media worried about laid off workers in “South Succotash,” although he knew what it was like to get a pink slip at Christmas time. Why did Reagan forget so much of what he’d learned growing up in poverty and coming of age as a labor liberal? Maybe, as Tip O’Neill suspected, he enjoyed the company of the wealthy business people and forgot the people he grew up with.
Still, Reagan remained “a closet tolerant,” in the words of the journalist Rick Hertzberg, a former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter. As governor, he signed a liberal abortion rights law and later opposed a referendum to prevent gays and lesbians from teaching in California’s public schools.
Bush, however, has lived and learned much less. While his admirers present Bush as a man of wisdom and resolve, one wonders where these characteristics came from, since he lacks both learning and life experience. He drifted until the age of 40, then capitalized on his connections to acquire a baseball team, a governorship, the presidency and an air of unearned certitude. He admits that his great obstacle was his own irresponsible behavior as a younger man—hardly the equivalent of Lincoln’s poverty, Roosevelt’s polio or Kennedy’s PT-109.
The Pursuit of Inequality and Insolvency
Bush’s lack of life experience translates into economic policies that are even more regressive than Reagan’s. And Reagan’s policies made the rich richer, working Americans insecure and the government broke.
We were warned. In an interview with The Washington Post’s William Greider early in the administration, Budget Director David Stockman said Reagan’s economic theories were really “a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate.” He explained, “It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle-down,’ so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really trickle-down.”
Around the same time, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned the Reagan policies were a Trojan horse in more ways than one. The secret strategy, Moynihan maintained, was to create a huge federal budget deficit in order to achieve the conservative goal of crippling government’s capacity to regulate corporate America and conduct domestic social programs. In private, Stockman agreed, reportedly using the phrase “starving the beast” to describe the strategy of using deficits to shrink government.
Stockman and Moynihan were right: By 1989, the distribution of wealth and income had become more unequal than at any time since the 1920s. Meanwhile, the federal deficit increased from $73 billion to $155 billion during the Reagan years, and the national debt ballooned from $711 billion to $2 trillion. This ocean of red ink had the desired effect of drowning the prospects for new social spending. In fact, “domestic discretionary spending”—social programs other than entitlements—declined from 4.5 percent of the economy in 1981 to 3.2 percent in 1988.
The Reaganites claim credit for the boom of the late '90s. But Bill Clinton’s successful economic policies reversed Reaganomics by increasing taxes on the wealthy and cutting taxes on the working poor. Contrary to supply-side theory, the result was an even stronger economy than during the late '80s, with the added benefits that the federal budget started showing a surplus and inequality declined.
But the conservative Republicans who returned to power with Bush in 2001 weren’t happy with a booming economy and a balanced budget. In three successive years, Bush pushed through three successive tax cuts totaling $1.9 trillion, with 54 percent of the benefits going to the wealthiest 1 percent of the population.
This time, conservatives openly embraced the “starve the beast strategy.” In an interview with U.S. News and World Report, Norquist explained: “The goal is reducing the size and scope of government by draining its lifeblood.” During an August 2001 press conference, Bush himself declared that the disappearing surplus was “incredibly positive news” because it would put Congress in a “fiscal straitjacket.” By Nov. 5, 2003, with the federal budget showing a deficit of at least $374 billion, Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins was saluting the Republicans as “the party that restrains the growth of government by keeping it on the only fiscal leash that works—a.k.a. the deficit.”
When it came to cutting taxes and running up debts, Reagan was less radical than Bush. Faced with a deepening recession, soaring deficits, and international crises, Reagan reversed himself. After cutting taxes in 1981, he agreed to three successive tax increases over the next three years, including closing tax loopholes for business, in an effort to hold down the deficit. With the bipartisan Tax Reform Act of 1986, Reagan agreed to $420 billion in increased corporate taxes, while reducing individual tax rates.
Reagan was less reckless than Bush because he never completely lost touch with working-class Americans. Writing in his diary, he shrewdly observed: “The press is trying to portray me as trying to undo the New Deal. I’m trying to undo the Great Society.” He understood that Great Society programs targeted towards the poor were unpopular, but New Deal programs benefiting the broad working class continued to enjoy strong support. Unlike Bush, Reagan would never have tried to tamper with working people’s well-being by privatizing Social Security or tampering with time-and-a-half pay for overtime work.
Going It Alone
On foreign policy, too, Bush’s packers present him as Reagan’s heir. But the similarity is more rhetorical than real. Yes, Bush’s rhetoric echoes Reagan’s. Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” so Bush lumps Iraq, Iran and North Korea together as an “axis of evil.” The Reagan Doctrine called for rolling back communism, so the Bush Doctrine announces that the United States can stage pre-emptive attacks upon rogue states.
But while Bush sounds like Reagan, he behaves very differently. Unlike Bush, Reagan was reluctant to commit American troops overseas, except to the small Caribbean country of Grenada. When a bomb blew up the Marine headquarters in Beirut, he withdrew from Lebanon.
While Reagan did confront America’s adversaries, he also reached out to them—something the younger Bush has yet to do. A former labor leader, Reagan knew how to reach out to his adversaries and reach agreements with them. Starting with a personal letter to Leonid Brezhnev and culminating with his personal relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, Reagan also showed a surprising willingness to negotiate an end to the arms race and eventually the Cold War itself.
As Colin Powell, who served as Reagan’s last national security adviser and is now a lonely moderate in the Bush administration, writes in his memoir, My American Journey : “He [Reagan] had the vision and flexibility, lacking in many knee-jerk Cold Warriors, to recognize that Gorbachev was a new man in a new age offering new opportunities for peace.” But, unlike Reagan—and Powell—Bush lacks the life experience to understand that a person or a nation needs more friends and fewer enemies.
Pre-emptive war, total indifference to deficits and assaulting the middle class as well as the poor—these are George W. Bush’s contributions to conservatism, not Ronald Reagan’s legacy. And progressives shouldn’t be ashamed to say so.
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