Will Bunch from Attytood and the Philadelphia Daily News here. Over the past four years, I've found that trying to blog about politics from an overwhelmingly progressive point of view on a mainstream newspaper website has been a daunting challenge -- a daily battle with right-wing trolls and the like. From time to time, I've posted my work here before the more supportive confines of Daily Kos, and I'm grateful for your responses, especially earlier this year when Barack Obama answered my question to him about prosecutions of the Bush administration for war crimes and their other offenses.
Tonight, I'm back to semi-formally announce my new project -- and enlist the help of Kossacks in a mission that I think most of you can get behind.
You would think that if there was ever a political repudiation of the legacy of Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president, it would the events of Nov. 4, 2008. In delivering an Electoral College landslide to Barack Obama and thus rejecting John McCain -- a self-described "foot soldier" in the so-called Reagan revolution -- the American voter spoke with a clear voice on that historic night. The people said "no" to corporate greed that festered unchecked by government regulations, "no" to a system that has increased the gulf between the very rich and our broad American middle class for more than a quarter century, and "no" to a foreign policy that seeks to promote American exceptionalism at the barrel of a gun.
The people "got it" on 11/04/08 -- but amazingly it's still not clear how well the message was received, by the political powers that be, on Wall Street or in the newsrooms where my colleagues in the mainstream media toil.
Tomorrow, President-elect Obama is expected to name a man who was Reagan's deputy director of the CIA, Robert Gates, as his holdover Secretary of Defense. That may not prove to be an awful decision, but it does raise more questions about what lessons that Obama -- who praised the Gipper at several key moments during the 2008 campaign -- really thinks he learned from Reagan, and whether those lessons will hold him back from, in his own words, the change we need in the White House.
Because even with the Democrats' overwhelming victory, there will remain many power brokers who fully absorbed and continued to push the Ronald Reagan myth that was actively shaped in the late 1990s by right-wing activists like Grover Norquist -- that there is no budget problem that can't be solved by more tax cutting, that there is no business activity that can't be improved by less regulation, that there is issue in foreign relations that can't be addressed with militarism -- and that any kind of sacrifice that might help ease problems like fossil fuel supply and pollution is for wimps.
Here's one example. The week before Thanksgiving, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson gave a major speech in which he voiced concern that the economic crisis -- clearly the result of government regulators and other grown-ups looking the other way for the last quarter-century -- imposed a new risk for the American economy: A risk of putting TOO MUCH regulation back on Wall Street's activities. Paulson delivered these words in a setting that was all too appropriate: The Ronald Reagan Library, in Simi Valley, Calif.
Early this year, I joined others in feeling alarm at the way this distorted view of what Ronald Reagan accomplished in the 1980s had taken over the American body politic. Working with my agent Will Lippincott, a supporter of progressive writers and causes, and then with the aptly named Free Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, the result is a book that will come out on Feb. 3, 2009 -- three days before what would have been Reagan's 98th birthday, exactly two weeks after Barack Obama begins charting a new course for America. It seeks nothing less than to begin the process of undoing the Reagan myth. In fact, it is called "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future."
Simply put, the book seeks to roll back some of the worst distortions that have been successfully sold to the American people: That he was one of the most popular modern presidents (he wasn't -- FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Clinton and LBJ were all more popular); that his tax cut caused the bull market of the 1980s (it didn't -- but it did widen the gap between rich and poor); and that Reagan won the Cold War (when in fact the USSR collapsed more for economic reasons, not because of the Gipper's wasteful arms buildup). It seeks to put the focus back on some of Reagan's major failures, the massive debts and consumerist binge that we pay for today, or the remarkably short-sighted energy policies that literally ripped the solar panels off the White House roof. It even notes that since the 1990s, conservatives have whitewashed Reagan's better qualities, which included a willingness to (gasp!) talk to American enemies like Mikhail Gorbachev and a sincere desire to eliminate nuclear weapons. You can read more about the premise of "Tear Down This Myth" here.
In recent weeks, I've been able to share the book with some progressive writers and I've been grateful for a positive response: As to be published on the book jacket, Andrew Bacevich of "The Limits of Power" said the book is "as feisty as it is fearless" and that it "begins the process, long overdue, of deflating Ronald Reagan's overinflated reputation," while "Nixonland"'s Rick Perlstein called it "a must-read for all who cherish truth in history." My purpose in coming to the Daily Kos community is not to promote sales of the book (although that day will come :-) -- closer to the actual pub. date, when concentrated sales might be more effective) but to raise some early awareness.
I do hope that "Tear Down This Myth" reaches a wide audience, and not just for the usual reasons of writerly pride, etc. One other reason is quite simply this: I don't know about you, but I'm tired of seeing shlocky, lie-filled but bulk-purchased right wing books like "Obama Nation" dominating the political best-seller lists. The progressive movement has built a fabulous infrastructure on the Web, and yet it can still be used much better to promote progressive authors, much as Obama used his netroots advantage and his small donors to outsmart the GOP and its billionaire "bulk purchasers" of political influence.
But there's something else: Rolling back the Reagan myth isn't just a book idea but a cause, and I think it's something we can all get behind. Already, too many pundits and inside-the-Beltway naysayers are trying to write off the 2008 election results as a fluke, brought on by a bear market economy or by an out-of-touch nominee in McCain, and not as the surge of progressives and sensible moderates seeking to take back America from the extremists who hijacked Reagan's legacy and then the government. And so in working together to undo the Reagan myth, we can send a powerful signal to the elites -- that the struggle continues, and that we are ascendant. Taking back the White House was one thing, but taking back history is going to be an even harder job. I hope that you can help me on my small piece of that mission.