Reagan: the Huckster President

In the May 12 issue of Newsweek there is an article on President Reagan in which a conversation between liberal Sean Wilentz and conservative George Will was recorded under the title, "The Left Starts to Rethink Reagan."  

We tend to sanitize our presidents, to make some of them larger than life.  An excellent example is Abraham Lincoln;  it has taken us over 140 years to openly discuss his flaws. And none of those flaws diminish him as a great president.

Since the death of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have embarked on a campaign to hold him up to the American people as an icon to be admired and loved.  Time and time again, he is invoked as one of the great presidents of our era.   Indeed, future historians may concur in that observation.  I do not.  But please withhold your spitballs until the end of this piece.

That Reagan was a transformational president I do not deny.  He set out to overturn the accomplishments of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's  "New Deal."  While at the same time he told the American people that "government is the problem, not the solution," he used government as his tool to dismantle the New Deal.  Behind his smile and his cheerful mien, I regard him as the great American salesman that he was.  After all, he got his training selling General Electric products on television.       

He started his presidency off as a buster of unions (recall the Air controller's strike); he reduced and inhibited social legislation by attacking welfare and the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (and to be fair, Democrats fell in line).  His foreign policy involved secretly supporting contras in Nicaragua and Honduras, about which he lied; it was during his administration that the wealthy benefited and greed was acceptable.

Reagan was not an evil man.  He was good, cheerful and optimistic.  He huffed and puffed at the Soviet Union, and its house fell down.  However, to believe he alone brought the Soviet's house of cards down is to believe in the tooth fairy.  Nonetheless, he was indeed a super salesman who helped to bring down the New Deal with a "smile and a shoeshine."   So be it.