Whatever you say about Ronald Reagan, the man could get more mileage out of a bad joke than any other figure in American history. He could deliver even quasi-joking quips that left his opponents flustered even as they found him charming. Who could ever forget that trenchant remark he made in the 1980 Presidential debate to poor old unlikable Jimmy Carter? Shaking his head in mock exasperation, he destroyed Carter with a simple "There you go again."
Many people remember this exchange as the beginning of the end of the Carter presidency. The incumbent looked pedantic, sputtering and lost. Reagan, on the other hand, looked like a president should. The result was a historic landslide that marked the realignment of the American electorate. However, very few people remember exactly what it was that Carter had said preceding Reagan's devastating quip.
Governor Reagan, as a matter of fact, began his political career campaigning around this nation against Medicare. Now, we have an opportunity to move toward national health insurance, with an emphasis on the prevention of disease, an emphasis on out-patient care, not in-patient care; an emphasis on hospital cost containment to hold down the cost of hospital care far those who are ill, an emphasis on catastrophic health insurance, so that if a family is threatened with being wiped out economically because of a very high medical bill, then the insurance would help pay for it. These are the kinds of elements of a national health insurance, important to the American people. Governor Reagan, again, typically is against such a proposal.
The facts were on Carter's side. Had he won the election, the visionary programs he backed may well have been the law of the land some thirty years before Obama ushered his health insurance reform through Congress. But on the other hand, the American people did get to see that egghead Carter get a folksy smackdown.
However, perhaps Reagan's most famous and ultimately most devastating bad joke had to be his line about "The nine most terrifying words in the English Language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
As I watch the federal government mobilizing to help the thousands of people victimized by the latest batch of tornadoes to sweep through the Southeast I've been thinking about that joke a lot. That joke was, on the whole, even more destructive of the public good than any other I can think of. It's pervaded the culture and the party of Reagan has seen to it that the dream of its first president, that of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, could, if not be drowned in a bathtub, at least despair of ever fulfilling its charge as the last of those requirements. While special interests devour the public good for their own profit, our nation as a whole remains wedded to the idea that government is a bad thing, precisely when we need it most.
When Obama decided to give in to the GOP and their demands that tax breaks for the wealthy be included in any deal, he said that one could not change a thirty-year narrative in government in a few short years. Obama is wrong. Reagan did just that and we have been paying the price for his folksy-screw-you-to-the-wall fairy tale ever since.
I believe that one way we can fight back against this bullshit is to point out how empty that saying really is. There seem fewer better places to do that than the Southern States Obama is touring right now. Every federal official who moves in to assist the relief effort from the Chief executive right down to FEMA secretaries should be instructed to introduce themselves with one simple line:
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.