Reagan at 100: The tug-of-war over his legacy

last updated 8 January 2015

“The political world as a whole” has awakened to “the greatness in Reagan,” said Byron York in WashingtonExaminer.com. As we approach the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, Americans live in a nation and a world transformed by his “deep belief in liberty, free enterprise, and American exceptionalism.” Every potential GOP 2012 presidential candidate claims to be a “Reagan Republican,” and in a real sense they all are: Thirty years ago, he wrenched the party away from the “country club” moderates who sneered at true conservatives. Among Reagan’s unabashed admirers is a certain “Ivy League lawyer from Hawaii,” said Michael Scherer in Time. President Obama has studied Reagan’s presidency as a model of transformational leadership and political evolution; like Reagan, he has responded to a recession and a plunge in the polls with a strategic move to the middle.

The fond tributes to the Gipper are justified, said Ryan L. Cole in The American Spectator. But I take offense at seeing the Reagan legacy “appropriated” by the wrong people—like the current Democratic president. Liberals are suddenly keen to have us forget that they once heaped “histrionic levels of disgust” on Reagan, denigrating him as an “amiable dunce” fixated on free markets and anti-communism. We can’t let Democrats now smooth out Reagan’s “prickly partisan edges” in an effort to turn him into a “warm and cuddly” centrist. Sure, he made some compromises with the opposition; what president hasn’t? But “his triumphs were caused by his conservatism, not in spite of it.”

Maybe we liberals were “too harsh” about Reagan in the 1980s, said Walter Shapiro in PoliticsDaily.com. But it’s “21st-century conservatives” who have “airbrushed” the man’s record—his eight budget deficits, his “abject retreat” from Lebanon following the 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks, his secret and illegal sale of arms to Iran’s mullahs. Most of all, conservatives would prefer to forget that after slashing tax rates in 1981, Reagan raised them twice. Were he on the scene today, Reagan’s “tax realism” alone would likely lead to his denunciation as “a RINO (Republican in Name Only).” Reagan was also far too “sunny” for today’s Tea Party absolutists, said Nick Ragone in the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. Sadly, his cheerful optimism—his willingness to take half a loaf rather than none—would feel out of place in the “vituperative” politics of our age.