The Reagan Rainbow

[Addison]

Heavy rain fell on Tampico, Illinois, on November 3, 1980, and by late afternoon, when it cleared up, a majestic double rainbow materialized in the sky above the quiet prairie village. Lloyd McElhiney, manager of the Tampico grain elevator, noticed it first—how it swooped from the clouds onto Main Street’s single-block stretch, and how its luminous arc seemed to point, decisively, to the walkup apartment where Ronald Reagan was born. So he darted home for a camera, just fast enough to capture the scene on grainy Polaroid.

The next day, Reagan was elected president by a landslide, the most decisive non-incumbent upset since 1932.

The election spelled triumph for conservative intellectual circles, still reeling from the trauma of Goldwater’s defeat in 1964. It signaled victory for the Religious Right, freshly mobilized by the emergence of the Moral Majority in 1979. It restored prestige to a GOP that had been wounded by Watergate’s lingering disgrace.

And it brought a rich tumult of unnamable emotion to Tampico, Illinois, where locals recall watching Reagan’s victory speech on TV that night and tearing up when he spoke the name of their town. “That guy,” muttered an older gentleman at the time, a lifelong Democrat, “he’s just one of us.”[2]

Someone mailed the photo of the Reagan Rainbow to the president-elect, who pasted the copy into a personal scrapbook and kept it in an Oval Office desk drawer for eight years. As townspeople tell it, he would turn to the image for inspiration. To their delight, he mentioned it in his memoir.

“Ronald called the postcard eerie,” says Amy McElhiney, the photographer’s widow, who led visitors through the birthplace for twelve years before growing too frail. “We like to call it prophetic.”

. . .

http://therumpus.net/2013/05/beyond-americana/

[ruffburr]

1. I Thought it was supposed to-

Be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Not a not a senile, Hate mongering, Union busting, Country destroying Piece of crap ( IMO he is why the U.S. is so screwed up today)

[savebigbird]

2. Sorry,

but I don't visit Democratic Underground to read articles which glorify Reagan. Definitely not.

[Addison]

3. It's more complex than that

Such as this passage:

"There were other things, too. There were AIDS, the four-letter word Reagan did not publicly utter until 1987, and Grenada, the teeny 132.8-square-mile Caribbean Commonwealth realm that he did—and how—in 1983. There were the homeless, the parents and veterans and children living in cars, on the streets, in Salvation Army relief centers, who were the subject of 1,585 New York Times articles published between 1981 and 1988.[9] There was Alzheimer’s, confusion, the tenuous grasp of policy details that set in quietly between the Iran-Contra scandal and the swearing in of George H. W. Bush. There were welfare cuts, the income gap, skyrocketing debt, the budding revelation that in Reaganland, federal deficits are of no matter at all."