i have this fear that the media is going to kick the reagan legacy project into overdrive and we're going to get stuck with an undeserved monument to bonzo
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There they go again
March 13, 2001
By Ralph Nader
Grover G. Norquist, chairman of the Reagan Legacy Project, is a man with a rapid mission. He and his colleagues want to place the former president's name on one location after another, while the ailing Gipper is still alive and accorded public sympathy for his condition. For once Reagan passes, he joins other deceased presidents on a more level playing field for such honorifics. Historically, places are named after presidents who have left this world.
Norquist scored big in 1998 when he pushed through Congress the renaming, at some millions of dollars' cost, of National Airport in Washington, D.C., to Reagan Washington National Airport. The hapless Democrats, beset by Clinton's Lewinsky scandal, never thought of countering with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, or a certain winner, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The four-star general was commanding the war in western Europe against Hitler, while Ronald Reagan was in Hollywood making wartime training films.
The next naming success by Norquist was the largest new government office building in D.C., an architectural blah with large cost overruns. Some conservatives were embarrassed by the building's excessive costs. But then Ronald Reagan sent annual budgets with huge built-in deficits through Congress, according to the Wall Street Journal, that tripled the federal deficit during his eight years from about $900 billion in 1980 to more than $3 trillion before he left office. He added more deficit dollars than all the previous presidents put together.
On March 4th, an aircraft carrier still under construction was named USS Ronald Reagan. Now Mr. Norquist and allies are turning their attention to two new locations. One is the $10 bill, presently printed with a picture of Alexander Hamilton. They want Reagan's smiling visage to replace Hamilton and are seeking a Congressional enactment to get this done. They expect the Democrats to remain hapless.
The next project is more audacious – carve a piece of Mount Rushmore next to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. On this move, geology comes to the rescue of the Democrats. No way, says Senator Tim Johnson (D-S.D.). This slab of pegmatitic granite, he is advised by Douglas A. Blankenship, a geomechanics consultant in South Dakota, is too veined with cracks and too crowded to take another 60-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide head. Oh well.
-snip-
The amazing aspect of these fervent Reagan namers is that their hero never had that kind of ego or hubris. Reagan may have been corporate-centric but he was not egocentric. Rather, he was a jolly, shoulder shrugging, amiable politician. He made people laugh about very serious matters.
In the classic book Reagan's Reign of Error, by Mark Green and Gail MacColl (Pantheon, 1987), there is a collection of many of the Gipper's gaffes, such as: "We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."
"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal."
"A fearless mass waiting for handouts," referring to California's elderly on Medicaid.
In 1980 he said "Our military is absolutely incapable of defending this country."
He once said that 80 percent of pollution comes from trees and other vegetation. Twice he stated that a Trident nuclear missile once launched could be recalled. None of this mattered to his supporters. Nor did his consistent record of supporting corporations over consumers, the environment, and workers, or spending tax dollars for corporate welfare over children's poverty programs.
Reagan's political legacy is that style, smile, and rhetoric prevail over substance and the actual record of things done and not done. Now if there was a monument to that triumph, it would be a great civics lesson for the country.
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