Right wing revisionists have been tearing away at FDR’s reputation since January in a hilariously misguided attempt to attack Barack Obama’s recovery plans (with their echoes of the Great Depression and the New Deal).
The gist of the conservative spiel has been that FDR didn’t end the Depression with his various social programs 70 years ago, it was World War II that finally bailed out the country.
Perhaps all of this huffing and puffing about Roosevelt is just a way for the right wing pundits to try to keep the rest of us from looking back a mere two decades to ponder the role their hero Ronald Reagan might have played in the mess we are in now.
Reagan has become a secular saint in some quarters — worthy of addition to Mount Rushmore — even though his deregulation mania might have played a major role in the eventual collapse of banking and credit and the financial services industry.
The acolytes also conveniently overlook the Iran-Contra scandal, the savings and loan debacle and such small Reagan embarrassments as his taking part in a Nazi memorial ceremony at the Bitburg cemetery in Germany (above) or having a secret second inauguration ceremony (at midnight) to please his wife’s astrologer.
The bizarre elevation of Reagan to the status of being a “great” president worthy of comparison with Washington and Lincoln is the subject of a long overdue reassessment in Will Bunch’s new book “Tear Down This Myth” (Free Press) which is subtitled “How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.”
Bunch makes a good case that the Reagan years were a Hollywood-style fantasy that the country shared for eight years.
Since then, the myth has been carefully edited for maximum sentiment and nostalgia. Ronnie’s “performance” as president was so good, Bunch asserts, that the fantasy has endured and even grown over the past two decades.
“Like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ the story line has (become) more iconic in the frequent rebroadcasts than when it was actually in theaters. The postpresidency Reagan became not just the most revered figure in modern American history but so much more — a kind of homespun public intellectual…,” the author writes.
Few bother to look back at what Reagan actually said and did as president and, before that, as governor of California.
“Politicians — mostly Republicans but even some Democrats — routinely run for office claiming they will be another Reagan, often by promising things that were the exact opposite of what the 1980s president accomplished, or didn’t,” Bunch notes.
“His promise to shrink government was uttered so often that many acolyties believe it really happened, but in fact Reagan expanded the federal payroll, added a new cabinet post, and created a huge debt that ultimately tripped up his handpicked successor, George W. Bush. What he did shrink was government regulation and oversight, which critics have linked to a series of unfortunate events from the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s to the subprime mortgage crisis of the late 2000s.”
