Ya Gotta Save It

(First published on December 10, 2007)

I don’t know about you, but over the interminally many months (or is it years) this Presidential campaign has been going on, I have developed an almost sure-fire dead-on method to winnow out the winners from the losers- on both  sides. I’ll pass over the Democrats quickly since I’m not a Democrat. Whoever tries the hardest to ape the supposed mannerisms (but not the policies since this would be impossible) of JFK is quickly eliminated. Over the years this list has become a long one and has included such worthies as: Senator Gary Hart (he had a bad case), Presidents Carter and Clinton. This  also means that’s all she wrote for former N.C. Senator John Edwards- the most Kennedy-esque of their campaign. So much for them- for now

As to the Republicans, whoever invokes the name of Ronald Reagan the most ( and a meter would not be able to keep up with the extent of this in the so-called debates they’ve held), is also eliminated from consideration. This would be a toughie but this standard would appear to have already knocked out McCain, Romney, Hunter, Tancredo, and Giuliani- just for starters. Now it doesn’t eliminate somebody who has been compared to RR by the media- after all what would they know?

Look folks, Ronald Reagan was one-of-a-kind. He was a unique man of his times who coped with problems in ways not common to the troubles we see ourselves in today. His most amazing achievement, in fact, might have been going from Democrat to Republican- alone a lifetime worth of accomplishment. More to the point, those times are over now. He has gone to his much-deserved final rest and it is our mission to move on. It is interesting to me that when commentators weigh in on RR’s Presidency, they usually focus on the Cold War victory (a valid point) and thereafter his rhetoric. Whatever the angle they look from,they tend to be much more charitable towards Reagan than they ever were when he was in office. I suspect they never really “got it” since his agenda was never their’s in any case. When people look back on RR’s two terms, they tend to remember his only memorable error to have been Iran-contra.

My own memory was somewhat different because it is filtered through a libertarian lens. Reagan was one of two public figures in my time (the other was Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan) that never made it into public office in his prime- roughly the decade of the sixties in both cases. Reagan always had a powerful presence on front of a camera and his greatest moment was his ringing endorsement speech for 1964 Republican nominee Sen Barry Goldwater. It was called “A Time For Choosing” and, even after Goldwater lost the election, RR was considered by many to be a shoo-in for the 68 Republican nomination. This must have scared the powers-that-be in D.C. half to death. They got Reagan elected Governor of California (twice) to put the old delay on his coming to Washington for as long as they possibly could. Watergate and Jimmy Carter did the rest of the work. When Reagan finally made it to the White House in 1981, he was way past his prime, had neither of the houses of Congress, and the broad outlines of a sharply divided electorate( 50/50) that persists to this day were well in place. Nearly fifteen more years of a quasi-welfare state under two putatively conservative Republicans, and a far-out liberal Democrat had advanced the body politic well down a road of decline to the point where hardly anybody has any idea what the Republic has lost (since its Founding I mean). Reagan had, in the meantime, mellowed out considerably , and had some certainly disturbing compromising tendencies that he had developed as the CA Governor. This, plus the fact (one that BushII has encountered) that the bureaucracies in D.C. remained staffed with folks whose primary loyalty was to their jobs with open lines (at all times) to the GLOBE, the NY TIMES, and the WASHINGTON POST, resulted in a pretty fairly neutered 2-term Presidency. RR got primacy in foreign policy; the Democrats got the rest. This was a compromise that you never heard about. This is also why we got the combination of political weakness plus the incredible expenditures to win the Cold War while throwing budget money at the opposition to placate them (while RR’s buddies built a massively expensive warfare state at the same time). The upshot was that the country got caught in the middle between the two warring, intractable tribes (who would not be denied their shot at the public trough) and public debt exploded.

Ronald Reagan does seem also to have a standard that has also been used in judging another controversial President- Lincoln. Folks, mostly in University history departments, tend to watch what he said, not what he did. For instance, while Reagan stood around smiling, nodding and waving (for whoever happened to be watching), behind the scenes his political allies on the right were brutally executing their agendas on their suddenly-weak political enemies: unions, gays, opposition regimes, foreign dissidents and anybody else they had been waiting to settle scores with. This pattern is much more traditional that you know. Lincoln, you may recall, did much the same in his time. Under the cover of a war over secession ( that he had largely started), he exploited the missing Democratic opposition to get a long-sought-for internal improvements agenda enacted. Then he unleashed his blue-uniformed minions on the population like a pack of dogs to both propagandize for Unionism and viciously trample over the rights of anyone who got in his way. Today’s big government traces its origins back to the excesses of the Lincoln administration. Then his allies in the scholarly world built, into the core curriculum, the scrubbed-up version (complete with obligatory hero worship) of that time of crisis into the brand new nationalized school systems so they could pander their false versions of these ruthless war criminals’ tenure in power for veritably generations of young minds to come right down to today. This is why we revere Lincoln- and why we will likely do the same with Reagan. Roosevelt falls into this category as well.

The lesson can be concealed (for a time) but it cannot forever be hidden. The truth is that both sides lost the Cold War. Obviously, the Soviets lost- the absolute standard. We won that conflict by literally spending (on armaments) them into oblivion. Their country literally fell apart, and is only now beginning to get to its feet- with a little help from oil prices and a brand new Czar to boot. The USA lost because of what we had to do to win. Our two nations, so much at loggerheads for so long, became very much alike internally but especially in regards to our policies overseas. We approved, and sometimes executed, programs and vicious schemes that eventually came back home for use against our own people. Only a small amount of how-we-won-the-war (Cold War style) is known to the public. Its not likely to ever be known. Too many reputations and legacies are simply on the line for the truth to ever emerge in our lifetimes. Its just another segment of something precious that has been lost to us- unbeknownst to virtually all. But you cannot conceal numbers (though budget flim-flam is high art in D.C.). The winning of the Cold War plus all our add-on expenditures since then (the terror war among so many others) has likely put us in bankruptcy. No government official would ever say those words because our economy functions almost entirely on confidence now. Wallowing in an incredibly mis-managed, depreciated currency, they hide in their offices- fudging the real budget numbers, debt figures, various reports on virtually everything- and only pray that the day of reckoning (everyone knows is coming) doesn’t happen on their watch.

The answers we seek will not be found in some new program. In fact, it won’t come from the government at all. Salvation ( even survival) must come from a new generation of Founding Fathers, sons of liberty etc., who figure out what is really going on, rise from within us and then take us back to our very national foundations so we can  find the answers together. Our nation will return to the basics, question all the premises, weigh what we have jointly discovered about ourselves and our history; then totally sell out to a vision of what would be best for the country. It might be conservative- maybe something more. And this will happen in our lifetimes. Because America is still great enough to face the truth- and act on it.

WE CAN DO THIS!                      

For The Nonce———PV