Reagan was, it must be said (though few will in the hagiographic orgy that will swamp us in upcoming days), an ignorant boob and a serial exaggerator, if not outright liar. Three examples: "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do"; "we did not--repeat, did not--trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we"; and Reagan's infamous, racially coded story about the "Chicago welfare queen" who used 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and four fake husbands to cheat the government out of "over $150,000," which Reagan brazenly continued to tell even after the press debunked it (the woman had two aliases and collected $8,000).
Still, he suffered little for such ridiculous falsehoods because people liked him personally, and in politics popularity is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. The press dubbed him the Teflon president out of frustration. The key to his success? He made people feel good about themselves, even when they had good reason to feel bad. Years ago Rosalynn Carter said that the American people liked Reagan because "he makes us feel comfortable with our prejudices." It wasn't a compliment.
Reagan didn't just legitimize what had until then been paranoid, fringe-right assertions about the evils of government and painfully naive, nativist beliefs in the intrinsic, unalloyed superiority of the American character, he ensconced them near the center of elite American political discourse. Then, interestingly, he regularly sold out those ideals in the pursuit of political expediency. In sharp contradistinction to his avowed philosophy, he repeatedly raised taxes (while denying doing so), bailed out Social Security, allowed government to expand, avoided a frontal assault on abortion, and successfully negotiated arms control with the Soviet "Evil Empire."
Even when he often failed to live up to his own rhetoric, though, Reagan remained the consummate salesman of his bad ideas, hiding their harsh implications behind the twinkle in his eye or dismissing their sheer nastiness with a hokey joke, often delivered at his own expense. Here was a guy who intuitively seemed to know how to talk the talk (and act the act) in a way that obfuscated the walk. Those ideas (including the political usefulness of Orwellian misdirection and the power of image to obscure substance) endured to be grafted into the very DNA of the modern Republican Party. It's quite a legacy.
We need look no farther than George W. Bush to see Reagan's reach. In a psychologically fascinating repudiation of his own father's one term in office, Bush 43 has modeled his presidency--and to a large extent his persona--on that of Reagan and his administration. It's not just the policy similarities, which are obvious. Reagan endlessly repeated banal, feel-good platitudes about American virtue; so does Bush. Reagan was a Manichean, eschewing subtlety in favor of a cartoonish worldview, a B-movie morality play in which good always vanquishes evil; this tendency is even more pronounced in Bush.
Reagan cultivated an all-American cowboy image, clearing brush at his California ranch; Bush does the same in Texas. Reagan employed a hands-off management style, articulating a few broadly simplistic principles while leaving the nitty-gritty of translating those ideas into policy to underlings. Taking his cues from the easy luxury of the corporate boardroom, he kept bankers' hours and vacationed frequently. Bush, as we know, doesn't sweat the details either.
But Reagan succeeded--he really was a uniter, not a divider--and Bush has not. Reagan was likable, Bush is polarizing. Reagan deployed a grandfatherly smile that charmed the gullible, Bush smirks a frat boy smirk that screams out his selfish joy in his own unearned privilege. Reagan was a silver-tongued communicator, Bush is a tongue-tied mangler of language. Most importantly, Reagan ran as an ideologue, but governed in large part as a pragmatist. Bush ran as a pragmatist, but governs as an ideologue. Reagan was canny, a political idiot savant; Bush has turned out to be no savant.
