For those of us who rememember them well, the Reagan years were a time in which there was ample reason for people of conscience to continually keep shaking their heads. Were it not for the fact that the current presidency has been so much worse, those years would've been this republic's worst since the Harding/Coolidge/Hoover era. In fact, Reagan proudly identified Coolidge as a political hero.
It's interesting to note that, w/o the Reagan presidency, we would not have a GWB presidency. W/o having been Reagan's VP, GHWB would never have become prez, and, w/o Poppy having been prez, W would never have become prez. That's not the real issue, however.
The real issue is the following record:
- Labor--busted PATCO, had horrible NLRB appointments, and made a crooked contractor his first Labor Secretary;
- Environment--said that trees caused pollution, and made James Watt his first Interior Secretary;
- Civil Rights--employed one token black cabinet member (HUD secretary Pierce), whom he mistook for an urban mayor, and named Clarence Thomas EEOC chair;
- Judicial nominations--put Scalia on the Court, bumped Rehnquist up to CJ, and tried to put Bork on the Court;
- Tax policy--slashed taxes for the wealthy and for corporate American in a process that his own OMB Chief called "hogs feeding at the trough...the level of greed was really out of control;"
- Foreign policy--sent Rummy to Iraq to make nice w/ SH, and traded arms for hostages w/ the hated Ayatollah while expressly denying that he was doing so; and
- Nuclear policy--cracked jokes about starting thermonuclear war, and initiated "missile defense" program that has been a pork barrel fixture of the military/industrial complex to this day.
I won't even get into Central America policy or AIDs policy or slashing social programs. I won't mention the fact that it became apparent in Reagan's first debate w/ Mondale that the deck wasn't quite full and that entire suits seemed to fade away in his 2d term. If I were to fully detail all of those sins, this post would be several times longer.
I will point out that there are those of us who tried to fight him at every turn. There were those of us who worked hard for Mondale b/c we knew how awful things were in Reagan's first term and that we had to do what we could to try to stop a 2d. There are those of us who donated to Dem Senate campaigns in '86 in a successful effort to wrest back control of that body. There are those of us whose blood boiled when Reaganites routinely lampooned Tip O'Neill, a good and a decent man who made us proud to be Dems.
I have been told numerous times that this is a Dem site and that support of 3d party candidates is not welcome here. I respect that viewpoint. I cannot respect, however, any support on an explictly Dem site for the 2d worst president that this country has had in the past 75 years.