The Church of Ronald Reagan

Bill Clinton rode the failure of Reaganomics all the way to the White House in 1992 ("It’s the economy, stupid").  In 1991, he said:

“The Reagan-Bush years…have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.

This is true. So I have to admire the ingenuity of Republicans who have managed,  in the words of Paul Krugman, to "change the narrative."  I do not always by any means always agree with Paul Krugman, but in this instance he is dead on. 

Those who didn’t worship the Gipper and his grandfatherly twinkle could see way before his illness was announced that he had problems processing information and recalling his own policy decisions (cf. Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor).  The Iran-Contra scandal (which it later appeared he really didn’t remember), was a grim precursor of the unchecked wielding of executive power characteristic of the current Bush Administration. 

How, then, has Reagan been recast as the ideal Republican, whose giant shoes the current crop would be happy to fill?  The elevation of Ronald Reagan to Republican sacred cow makes it hard to resist the notion that  Republicans really are an especially trusting people.  Do they—like Reagan himself—really not recall? Or were they all too young or too busy disco-dancing?

Bush-2 is what I’d call the logical successor to the policies of the Reagan era, particularly on the economic front.  When he was elected, the fear of all the moderate Democrats I knew was that Bush would turn back the clock to the Reagan era.  And that is exactly what he did. 

If you, like Barack Obama, see the Eighties as a Golden Age of prosperity and "dynamism," economist  Krugman would like to remind you how it really was.

The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before…. (NYT ; emphasis added)

Things did get better, but that wasn’t until Clinton was in the White House. (NYT)

Eventually productivity did take off — but even the Bush administration’s own Council of Economic Advisers dates the beginning of that takeoff to 1995.

Similarly, if a sense of entrepreneurship means having confidence in the talents of American business leaders, that didn’t happen in the 1980s, when all the business books seemed to have samurai warriors on their covers. Like productivity, American business prestige didn’t stage a comeback until the mid-1990s, when the U.S. began to reassert its technological and economic leadership. (NYT)

The usual argument of conservatives that these Clinton-era advancements were due to tax cuts that Ronald Reagan made 14 years before makes as little sense to me as to Paul Krugman.(NYT) And while I don’t think that Bill Clinton was single-handedly responsible for the Clinton-era prosperity, his administration at least created a climate where it could flourish.

Those of  us who were there for the Eighties and paying attention can easily recognize Bush-2’s economics policies as the direct descendants of trickle-down Reaganomics:

Like Ronald Reagan, President Bush began his term in office with big tax cuts for the rich and promises that the benefits would trickle down to the middle class. Like Reagan, he also began his term with an economic slump, then claimed that the recovery from that slump proved the success of his policies.

And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. …Wages are lagging behind inflation. Employment growth in the Bush years has been pathetic compared with job creation in the Clinton era. Even if we don’t have a formal recession — and the odds now are that we will — the optimism of the 1990s has evaporated. (NYT; emphasis added)

Bush-2 has been a disaster for average Republican voters, who—not being idiots or ideologues—can presumably see for themselves that eight years of Bush hasn’t left them better off. 

Republicans who have lost their homes, jobs, health insurance, or pensions—the plight of many in my South Carolina hometown after the local textile mill shipped jobs to the far east and closed down what was formerly the largest cotton mill in the world under one roof—doubtless feel betrayed.  After all, they’re Republicans; they don’t approve of people who are unemployed and accepting government benefits. 

And even when they find alternative employment, it’s often at much lower wages than they were receiving before.  Many are living off credit cards, which is why the 2005 bankruptcy law changes is nice (for the credit card companies).  And though their knees might still jerk reflexively at the call for lower taxes, it might occur to some of them that their taxes are already lower, thanks to their reduced earnings.

I understand the public relations need of Republicans to create an iconic figure to rally round.  But why Ronald Reagan?  Evidently facts are less stubborn than advertised….