Will Bunch - Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy

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Copyright 2009 by Will Bunch

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-9772-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-9772-7

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For my family, especially Julia and Jesse, who never stop me from
thinking about Americas tomorrow.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams, Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials, December 1770

Facts are stupid thingsstubborn things, I should say.

Ronald Reagan, addressing the Republican National Convention in 1988

Who controls the past ran the Party slogan, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell, 1984

T he present was January 30, 2008, when four powerful men walked onto a freshly built debate stage in Simi Valley, California, seeking to control the pastmost ironically, the American past that was at its peak in that very Morning in America year of 1984. They knew that whoever controlled the past on this night would have a real shot at controlling the future of the United States of America.

Lest there be any doubt of that, the large block letters UNITED STATES OF AMERICA hovered for ninety minutes over the heads of these menthe last four Republican candidates for president in 2008who had made the pilgrimage to the cavernous main hall inside Simi Valleys Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. This was the final debate of a primary campaign that had basically started in this very room nine months ago and now was about to essentially end herein what was becoming a kind of National Cathedral to Ronald Reagan, even complete with his burial vault. The block letters were stenciled across the hulking blue and white frame of a modified Boeing 707 jetliner that officially carried the bland bureaucratic title of SAM (Special Air Mission) 27000, but bore the title of Air Force One from 1972 through 1990a remarkable era of highs and lows for the American presidency.

To many baby boomers, this jets place in history was burnished on August 9, 1974, when it carried the disgraced Richard Nixon home to California on his first day as a private citizen. But that was before SAM 27000 was passed down to Ronald Reagan and now to the Ronald Reagan legacy factory, which flew it back here to the Golden State, power-washed it clean, and reassembled it as the visual centerpiece of Reagans presidential library. It was now part American aviation icon and part political reliquary, suspended all deus ex machina from the roof in its new final resting place, with Reagans notepads and even his beloved jelly beans as its holy artifacts.

And for much of this winter night, the men seeking to become GOP nomineeand hopefully win the presidency, as the Republican candidate had done in seven out of the ten previous presidential electionslooked and felt like tiny profiles on a sprawling American tarmac under the shadow of the jetliner, and of Reagan himself. Fittingly, each chose his words carefully, as if he were running not to replace the hugely unpopular George W. Bush in the Oval Officeat an inauguration 356 days hencebut to become the spiritual heir to 1980s icon Reagan himself, as if the winner would be whisked up a boarding staircase and into the cabin of SAM 27000 at the end of the night and be flown from here to a conservative eternity.

As was so often the case, news people were equal co-conspirators with the politicians in creating a political allegory around Reagan. The debate producer was CNNs David Bohrman, whod once staged a TV show atop Mount Everest and now said the Air Force One backdrop was my crazy idea and that he had lobbied officials at the library to make it happen. He told the local Ventura County Star that the candidates were here to get the keys to that plane.

By picking Reagans Air Force One and the artifacts of his life as props for a Republican presidential debate that would be watched by an estimated 4 million Americans, CNN shunned what would have been a more obvious motif: the news of 2008. If you had been watching CNN or MSNBC or Fox or the other ever-throbbing arteries of Americas 24-hour news world, or sat tethered to the ever-bouncing electrons of political cyberspace in the hours leading up to the debate, youd have seen a vivid snapshot of a world superpower seeking a new leader in the throes of overlapping criseseconomic, military, and in overall U.S. confidence.

On this Wednesday in January, the drumbeat of bad news from Americas nearly five-year-old war in Iraqfairly muted for a few weeksresumed loudly as five American towns learned they had lost young men to a roadside bomb during heavy fighting two days earlier. Most citizens were by now so numb to such grim Iraq reports that the casualties barely made the national news. The same was true of a heated exchange at a Senate hearing involving new attorney general Michael Mukasey. He was trying to defend U.S. tactics for interrogation of terrorism suspects, tactics that most of the world had come to regard as tortureseriously harming Americas moral standing in the world. Meanwhile, it was a particularly bad day for the American mortgage industry, which had a major presence in Simi Valley through a large back office for troubled lender Countrywide Financial. That afternoon, the Wall Street rating agency Standard & Poors threatened to downgrade a whopping $500 billion of investments tied to bad home loans, while the largest bank in Europe, UBS AG, posted a quarterly loss of $14 billion because of its exposure to U.S. subprime mortgages. Such loans had fueled an exurban housing bubble in once-desolate places like the brown hillsides on the fringe of Ventura County around Simi Valley, and had been packaged and sold as high-risk securities.

That same day, nearly three thousand miles to the east, Jim Cramerthe popular, wild-eyed TV stock guru, and hardly a flaming liberalwas giving a speech at Bucknell University in which he traced the roots of the current mortgage crisis all the way back to the pro-business policies initiated nearly three decades earlier by Americas still populareven beloved by somefortieth president, the late Ronald Wilson Reagan. Ever since the Reagan era, Cramer told the students, our nation has been regressing and repealing years and years worth of safety net and equal economic justice in the name of discrediting and dismantling the federal governments missions to help solve our nations collective domestic woes.

But there would be no questions about economic justice or the shrinking safety net at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the epicenter of Americas political universe, what with Californias presidential primarythe crown jewel of the delegate bonanza known as Super Tuesdayless than a week away. The GOPs Final Four evoked the parable about the blind man. Each seemed to represent a different appendage of the Republican elephantthe slicked-back businessman-turned-pol Mitt Romney, the good-humored former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee, the fiery fringe libertarian Ron Paul, and Vietnam War hero and POW John McCain, a self-described straight talker on a meandering political odyssey. Despite their unique and compelling stories and their considerable differencesboth in background and in appeal to rival GOP voting blocseach was apparently determined to stake out the same contrived identity. It was like an old black-and-white rerun of To Tell the Truth with four contestants all declaring: My name is Ronald Reagan.