The first time I heard of Ronald Reagan was in 1976 when he ran against Ford in the Republican Presidential primaries. My mother just loved Ronnie (she had hated Nixon with a passion). In the summer of 1977 (I think), Reagan addressed a session at the ABA convention at the Fairmont in San Francisco, and my mother was mad at my father for not getting tickets to see him. As fate would have it, we were walking down the side of the hotel just as Reagan left a side door to get in a waiting limo. We had to stop to let hm and his group by. My father and I waited, but my mother said nothing. It turned out she hadn’t even noticed him.
In 1980 I would vote for Ed Clark, the Libertarian candidate for President, in part because Carter had already conceded by the time I voted in the late afternoon in California. In 1984 I enthusiastically voted for Reagan. I wasn’t surprised he won by such a huge landslide in 1984. While taking a taxi ride to the airport in 1983 after a friend’s wedding in New Haven (yes, Yale), the black female cabbie was cooing about Reagan; maybe she was just buttering up her two white boy riders looking for a tip, but I don’t think so. The whole direction of the country had changed under Ronnie.
It’s hard to believe in what poor shape we were in 1980. President Carter inherited a lousy situation and only made things worse. He blamed our problems on a miasma of negativity, not flawed policy. The economy was in a shambles with high unemployement and high inflation. Japan was poised to beat our economic ass and the Soviet Union was winning the cold war. Even the Boston Globe ran a fake headline “More Mush From the Wimp” about a Carter speech. The elites had thrown in the towel (where it remains today) and were yammering away about how the US had always been lousy and just plain wrong (just like today).
But Reagan’s optimism was infectious. He said the problem with the economy wasn’t something government should fix, but government itself. It took awhile, but his cutting taxes and reining in government regulation put the economy back on track (in the eighties, prosperity was called greed, when a Democrat became President in the nineties, it turned back into prosperity). He challanged the Soviets instead of retreating — and I mean this economically, militarily, and most importantly morally.
The left likes to claim that victory in the cold war was bi-partisan. Well, the fight was bi-partisan up to the Vietnam war, when the left gave up. It began to embrace dictators of the left, like the Sandinistas. By the end, the left and the Democratic party were fighting against fighting the war all they could — economically, militarily, and morally.
The left likes to claim that the politics of personal destruction started with Clinton. Ha. It started with the second politician in the depths of time and have continued ever since. From time to time it may abate, but believe me, Reagan was vilified by the left throughout his time in office and long afterward.
Reagan changed America and the world. Prosperity returned to America, and the evil empire of the Soviet Union was ended with a wimper and not a bang. And that’s why Reagan was elected in a landslide in 1984, and why Bush Sr. was elected in 1988 (if we couldn’t have Ronnie, at least we could have his VP), and why Reagan was one of the great presidents. Yes, he made mistakes on the little stuff. But he knew what he wanted to do, he knew how he wanted to do it, and through great perserverence he saw it through, in both domestic and foreign policy. I don’t often admit this, but my mother was right to love him.
