Remembering Saint Reagan some more

Our Great Leader Bush continues to honor the memory of Ronald Reagan at his campaign Website, in a completely nonpartisan spirit, of course, with a prominent quote by Bush and a link to a Bush speech on Reagan added.

Josh Marshall is bemused at the fact that previously, Bush's campaign site opening page had numerous pictures of Kerry, now replaced by Reagan-only images. Marshall comments:

Now, how many days of leaving the site that way will it take before people start to see the obvious: that President Bush's campaign staffers believe that pushing their own guy isn't a particularly good political strategy and that bashing Kerry or grasping on to Reagan nostalgia is far preferable? ...

Yes, it's crass and cynical. But it's also a tad desperate. And that's the more important point, I think. Having watched the Bush White House for some time and seen them try all manner of crude and crass political gambits, very few of them, in my recollection, haven't ended up biting them in the behind.

I suspect this case will be the same.

David Lytel offers What Reagan Taught Bush: The top 10 lessons for counter-revolutionaries American Prospect Online 06/09/04.  I'm giving his Top Ten list here, but he also elaborates on each one:

10. Even if tax cuts build a weaker America they build a stronger Republican party.

9. A President must take full responsibility for everything except mistakes and illegal activities

8. While overt racism is unseemly, a Republican leader should signal to white-power proponents that he agrees with them: 

7. Nations that assist the United States in its foreign policy goals can murder, torture, and imprison anyone necessary to maintain stability:

6. Bust unions whenever you can, because those people are a danger to the continued concentration of wealth and power in the hands of trust-fund Republicans.

5. The most effective way to please corporate contributors is to appoint regulatory chiefs who will undermine their agencies from within:

4. If defense policies serve only to tie corporate interests more closely to the Republican party without making the nation more secure, that’s good enough.

3. No global problem is too big to be ignored.

2. If you are affable, the commercial news media will judge you on your intentions rather than your actual results.

1. Boldly claim credit for major historic events and make it seem that you caused them.

Kos looks at how was The most popular president ever.  And, no, it isn't Ronnie, even though we constantly here that about him in the Republican litany.

Joe Conason thinks Bush should fear Nancy Reagan's ire New York Observer 06/09/04.  He points out that Nancy has become a strong advocate for stem cell research as a result of Reagan's experience with Alzheimer's disease.

Now she's the object of tremendous national sympathy and admiration -- and the spokeswoman for a cause that cuts directly against the President's "faith-based" aversion to scientific progress. She believes that embryonic stem-cell research may someday relieve the Alzheimer's disease that destroyed Reagan's mind, and in that conviction she possesses the kind of credibility that suffering can confer. ...

Her friends predict that in the days to come, she will speak out with increasing frequency and determination on behalf of stem-cell research, which the President has hindered with federal restrictions and constraints on spending. Surely she remembers how he spurned her private pleas three years ago, when he was pondering that decision. She must know that the Bush administration's hostility to science goes well beyond the stem-cell issue, with its big, destructive cutbacks in funding for disease research.

According to press reports, Mrs. Reagan isn't expected to appear at the Republican convention next September (though it isn't clear whether she wasn't invited or declined to participate). No doubt she remains a Republican, at least nominally, and she may eventually deliver a pro forma endorsement of the President, despite her well-known coolness toward the Bush family. Yet she hardly shares the religious-right ideology that motivates this generation of Bush politicians.

In another take on Reagan without sentimentality Salon.com 06/08/04, Conason writes:

The millions of words of hagiographic copy uttered and written this week will make scant mention of the scandal epidemic that marred Reagan's presidency (aside from the Iran-contra affair, which few commentators understand well enough to explain accurately). Disabled by historical amnesia, most Americans won't recall -- or be reminded of -- the scores of administration officials indicted, convicted or expelled on ethics charges between 1981 and 1989.

However historians will assess Reagan's responsibility, the record is what it is. Gathering dust in the news archives are thousands of clippings about the gross influence peddling, bribery, fraud, illegal lobbying and sundry abuses that engulfed the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, to name a few of the most notorious cases.

In his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years," journalist Haynes Johnson came up with an unflattering statistic: "By the end of his term, 138 Reagan administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations."

Heck, those guys were pikers compared to the Bush crew.  Iran-Contra is their template for running foreign policy.  Their pipeline for pumping federal tax dollars to Halliburton and Bechtel puts the piddly corruption of the Reagan days to shame.

In fact, some conservatives are grumping about how Bush doesn't measure up to the Gipper: THE NEXT REAGAN? Many on right doubt that the mantle will fit on Bush San Francisco Chronicle 06/08/04.

Yet many see profound differences between Reagan, who reshaped the Republican Party to his conservative vision, and Bush, who has sought to modify Reagan's conservatism with the word compassionate. In doing so, Bush has presided over an expansion of government that presidential scholars said is sharply at odds with Reagan's small-government philosophy.

"Reagan was a government-is-the-problem kind of guy, and Bush is really much more activist in his use of government," said George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University.

If anything, some contend Bush has changed Reagan's limited-government conservatism into more of an activist neoconservatism that calls for greater intervention at home and abroad, from the invasion of Iraq to the administration's faith-based initiative to lend federal support to religious charities.

Sidney Blumenthal has some thoughts on The u-turn that saved the Gipper Guardian (UK) 06/10/04.

Ronald Reagan's presidency collapsed at the precise moment on November 25 1986 when he appeared without notice in the White House briefing room, introduced his attorney general, Edwin Meese, and instantly departed from the stage. Meese announced that funds raised by members of the national security council and others by selling arms to Iran had been used to aid the Nicaraguan contras. Anti-terrorism laws and congressional resolutions had been wilfully violated. Eventually 11 people were convicted of felonies. In less than a week, Reagan's approval rating plunged from 67% to 46%, the greatest and quickest decline ever for a president.

Blumenthal explains that after the fiasco of Iran-Contra, Reagan proceeded to reach agreements with Gorbachev's Soviet Union on nuclear arms control, rejecting the advice of the Republican hard right.

Reagan's embrace of Gorbachev rescued his own political standing. His rise in popularity to the mid-50s was essential in lifting his vice-president's presidential ambition, for the elder Bush was moon to Reagan's sun. Yet Bush distanced himself, adopting the "realist" view that Reagan suffered from "euphoria" and that nothing fundamental in the world was changing.

Now, George W Bush eulogises Reagan as his example. Bushhas his own doctrine, a Manichean battle with evildoers, and an army of neoconservatives to lend complex rationalisations to his simplifications. Yet Reagan was saved by the wholesale firing of the neoconservatives [after Iran-Contra], the rejection of conservative dogma and a deliberate strategy to transcend his old typecasting. It is why he rose above his ruin, and rides, even in death, into the sunset of a happy Hollywood ending.

But on this idea, Reagan's admirers are way overboard: Republicans want Reagan on greenback
But Andrew Jackson, JFK fans object  San Francisco Chronicle 06/09/04.

You better believe us Andy Jackson fans are going to object!!

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Huntington Beach (Orange County), plans to introduce legislation that would put Reagan on the $20 bill. ...

But the move would be an affront to fans of Jackson, the populist president and general who became a national hero for defeating the British in New Orleans during the War of 1812. Jackson, nicknamed Old Hickory, was a founder of the Democratic Party and was credited with expanding the powers of the presidency.

"It's been over a hundred years since (Jackson) passed away and we've had a chance to evaluate his legacy, and I don't think we've really had a chance to do that with Ronald Reagan," said Robert Remini, a professor emeritus of history and humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading Jackson scholar. "It's rather premature to make these decisions. And I'd hate to see Old Hickory removed from his place."