Today’s political Quote of the Day is actually more like a MUST READ of the day — policy analyst David Adesnik’s column “Reagan As Statesman: Learning From An Icon’s Mistakes” on Doublethink Online:
Ronald Reagan embodies the ideal to which conservatives aspire. Yet Reagan has transcended his status as simply a conservative giant and has become an American icon. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama made a point of praising Reagan as a transformative figure. Twenty-five years ago, however, Reagan was the conservative that liberals loved to hate—a veritable George W. Bush of his time. Today, with Reagan’s legacy secure, conservatives should revisit the Reagan era with a more critical eye. The challenge for us now is to understand how greatness can co-exist with profound flaws, as it did in so many of our Founding Fathers.
The case for Reagan’s greatness as commander-in-chief is simple: he led us to victory in the Cold War. As both candidate and president, Reagan challenged the conventional wisdom that America could not afford to strive for victory over the Soviet Union, or even that America must reconcile itself to an inevitable decline. In the 1990s, prominent scholars of international relations ruminated over the failure of their entire profession to anticipate the end of Cold War, let alone a nearly-bloodless American triumph. In contrast, Reagan told the British Parliament in June 1982 that the terminal crisis of communism may have already begun….
Further down he writes this:
The most troubling aspect of Reagan’s tenure as commander-in-chief, from the perspective of both inveterate critics and many sincere admirers, is the scandal that became known as Iran-Contra. Conservative celebrations of Reagan’s legacy tend to pass quickly over the scandal or dismiss it as a Democratic bid to criminalize legitimate differences of opinion. Unquestionably, Democrats sought to extract maximum advantage from the President’s vulnerability. Yet Reagan’s own failures as a leader made the scandal possible and probably inevitable. In contrast to the extraordinary insight that Reagan demonstrated with regard to the Soviet Union, his assessments of Nicaragua and Iran rested on a perilous measure of wishful thinking. Other factors played an important role, especially Reagan’s hands-off management style and hesitation to discipline his subordinates. But above all, Reagan was a man of ideas. The low points of Reagan’s tenure, just like the triumphs, are best understood through the prism of his ideas.
This is only one small section. Read it in its entirety to get the complete details.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.