Opinion

Going Dutch

One of the first times I began to question the automatic loathing for Ronald Reagan that had been beaten into me during my upbringing (in Massachusetts, the only state that voted for George McGovern) and my education (on a college campus where the CIA inspired more hate than the KGB) was in the winter of 1990.

As the lowest-ranking officer in a small Army unit in Germany, I was assigned to set up a mini-bank every payday where I would cash my enlisted soldiers’ checks in the same building that housed them, saving them a trip to a real bank. A young mother and sergeant saluted, signed over her check and said, “Sure beats welfare.”

In three words, a soldier illustrated what Reagan gave America: renewed self respect, economic advancement and a military force powerful enough to topple the Soviet Union. If Reagan were alive today, on his 100th birthday, he would surely take one glance at the redoubled liberal effort to undermine his legacy and say: There you go again.

Tomorrow night, HBO will present the premiere of a documentary called “Reagan,” by the perpetually outraged leftist filmmaker Eugene Jarecki. Knowing that painting devil’s horns on Reagan won’t work, Jarecki tries to seduce Reagan fans with a relatively friendly opening 45 minutes, making use of fond memories from aides, showing clips of Reagan’s many hilarious quips and backing his election to the presidency with the Talking Heads’ jaunty “Once in a Lifetime” (instead of, say, “The River” or “Fast Car”).

Then “Reagan,” like Carter, falls under the spell of its own malaise. It first harrumphs that Reaganomics only worked for the richest 2% (that the middle and even working classes never believed this continues to wound the pundits’ sense of expertise), then segues to a tired 12-minute rant on the supposed all-consuming importance of the Iran-Contra affair, which never really alarmed Americans.

At the peak of hysteria about the scandal, in the first quarter of 1987, Reagan managed an average Gallup approval of 46%. Americans didn’t like Reagan’s lying, just as they didn’t like it when Barack Obama lied about requiring Americans to buy health insurance, but Reagan did come clean in the end. And everyone but the press had a hard time getting worked up about the underlying crime of dealing arms to Iran in order to both rescue American hostages in Lebanon and shoot a few Marxists in Nicaragua. The US does business with thug regimes all the time. We’ve given $34 billion in military aid to Team Mubarak in Egypt — which didn’t even offer to stomp on any Central American Castros in return.

Iran-Contra hysteria didn’t stop Reagan from leaving the White House with a 63% approval rating in a Gallup poll. Last November, his approval stood at 74% — better than any ex-president of the last 50 years except Kennedy, who is surely an outlier in part due to the uniquely disturbing circumstances of his death. Two years ago, a Gallup poll found that the public rated Reagan the finest ex-president among a group that also included Kennedy, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Washington.

Liberals respect Reagan the way conservatives will never respect another popular ex-president, Bill Clinton. Occasionally liberals try to make the half-hearted case that Reagan was so popular because he was a liberal. Didn’t he raise taxes? (Yes, but only after cutting them; the net effect was a seemingly permanent redefining down of what an acceptable maximum tax burden was.)

President Obama is opposed to nearly everything Reagan stood for, but he is canny enough to recognize that Reagan was a leader with principles — not a mere weathervane like Clinton.

What Obama dearly wants is for people to trust and follow him the way they did Reagan. What he dimly suspects is a truth that becomes more obvious with each passing month — that the voters like him more when he does less.

“There is no denying [Reagan’s] leadership in the world,” Obama wrote in a USA Today op-ed last month, “or his gift for communicating his vision.” Translation: Obama wishes he, too, could bend history to his will and be a great salesman for his policies.

But Reagan didn’t succeed because he fooled people into voting against their interests. He embodied how America sees itself — free, optimistic, fun-loving, far more grateful to its entrepreneurs and troops than to its bureaucrats and regulators.

The HBO documentary keeps feverishly telling us about its self-appointed mission to demolish the Reagan “myth” while peddling its own fictions. Did you know, as one talking head claims, that Reagan told Americans the supply of oil was “infinite”? I don’t remember that either. You thought Reagan won the Cold War? Nah, says the documentary: That was just your imagination. The movie is at its most feeble when it comes to the economy, painting a picture of depressed industry, rampant poverty and deficits caused by tax cuts.

After the end of the recession, Reagan needed to extinguish Carter-era inflation, the economy added 19.9 million jobs from 1983 until the next recession in 1990, growth boomed at an average of 4.1% a year — and federal tax revenues rose 28% in inflation-adjusted dollars despite the decreased tax rates. Deficits arose from Reagan’s inability to tame Congress, which piled on 36% more spending in real terms.

HBO’s movie is painfully short of such statistics, or virtually any statistics, and even hauls in an economist to make the deeply silly case that those upset about the current ($1.5 trillion) deficit should blame Reagan for “legitimizing” much smaller ones. That’s like arguing that if someone gets shot outside a football game, we should blame the athletes for legitimizing violence.

Americans may not know the numbers, but they know Reagan left the country a far stronger place than he found it. No liberal dared ask, in 1984 or 1988, the famous question the Great Communicator posed in 1980 — “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Today no lefty dares ask, “Should a president be like Reagan?”