We've all heard they mythology. We've all bought into it to some degree. Ronald Reagan great slayer of America's enemies. Ronald Reagan never negotiated with terrorists. Ronald Reagan never backed down from a fight.
We've internalized the propaganda and have allowed America's discourse to be dominated for the past decade based upon a mythical man that never existed.
Peter Bienart has a great take down of the Reagan Myth and how Obama and Reagan are quite similar and by contrast how different George W. Bush was.
If you were Ronald Reagan and you're about to leave office, what do you think you're biggest regret in office would have been? You didn't cut taxes enough? You didn't cut entitlement programs enough? You didn't eliminate the Department of Education? Well we actually know what the answer to this is.
Midge Decter, Podhoretz's wife and a noted neoconservative in her own right, declared herself "disgusted" by Reagan's capitulation in Lebanon. But to Reagan, the mistake was having sent the Marines in the first place. Almost five years later, in his final moments as president, he told press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that "the only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon." Then he saluted and walked out of the Oval Office for the last time.
Yeah, his greatest regret was sending the Marines to die in Lebanon. But Good ole Ronald Reagan was tough in other areas right? He fought the evil communists in South America right? He was the hawk's hawk! Not so fast...
"Those sons of bitches won't be happy until we have 25,000 troops in Managua," Reagan told chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein near the end of his presidency, "and I'm not going to do it."
Of course we know who 'Those sons of bitches' are. They're the same sons of bitches that wanted a half a million troops in Bagdhad and Tehran.
But on Israel you say, surely the Gipper would never let down our BFF in the world the Israelis. But...
For starters, Reagan was not exactly seen as tough on terror in Jerusalem. A few months into his presidency, he announced that the United States would sell AWACS surveillance planes to Riyadh, advanced aircraft that would make it harder for Israel to launch a pre-emptive military strike against Saudi Arabia (as it had done against Egypt in 1967). When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin expressed "profound regret and unreserved opposition," Reagan shot back that it was "not the business of other nations to make American foreign policy."
In 1981, when Israel did strike Iraq, bombing its Osirak nuclear reactor, Reagan backed a U.N. resolution condemning the move. And in 1982, when Israel attacked West Beirut in an effort to destroy Yasir Arafat's PLO, Reagan told Begin that Israel's behavior constituted a "holocaust." (Begin, whose parents and older brother were murdered by the Nazis, did not appreciate the line.)
You can read Beinart's article for yourself but what should strike you is that the same right wing hawks who are now screaming that Obama is soft on defense and not projecting enough military might around the world are the same people who at the time were decrying Ronald Reagan as being weak on national defense.
In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having "shamed himself and the country" in his "craven eagerness" to give away the nuclear store. Washington Post columnist George Will said the administration had crumpled "like a punctured balloon." When Reagan signed the INF Treaty, most Republicans vying to succeed him came out in opposition. Grassroots conservative leaders established the Anti-Appeasement Alliance to oppose ratification and ran newspaper advertisements comparing Gorbachev to Hitler and Reagan to Neville Chamberlain. Reagan, wailed Will, is "elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy."
So in a lot of respects Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were the same. They were more centrist that people seem to believe, willing to, for good or bad, disappoint the further extremes of their party. Reagan however was a master showman, and while he didn't exactly engage in all hawkish acts he certainly did put on a good show of it. As the article notes, George H.W. Bush was much more the hawk in action than was Reagan.
This showmanship is what Obama's Presidency lacks. He was the master showman during his 2008. 'Yes We Can!" "We are the Change We've Been Looking For!" But since being elected his Presidency has been very cerebral and boring, which isn't to say it is bad, just cerebral and boring.
George W. Bush as President was interestingly enough more along the lines of the mythological Reagan. Tax cuts at all costs. War mongering and projection of 'freedom' across the globe. All hawk heart. Little pragmatism.
So where does that leave us? Well first of all with a boring and cerebral President who if he doesn't polish his showmanship a little bit may just turn into the same thing the last boring and cerebral President, George H.W. Bush did, a one termer.
But for us the best way to combat the Reagan Myth, the President who made America feel good about themselves, is to learn more about who Ronald Reagan really was. Deconstruct the myth through stubbornly insisting on facts the same way the wingnut stubbornly insist of mythology. Don't try to tear down the man, which won't work because of fondness people have for him, but focus on setting the record straight.
Ronald Reagan wasn't the worldwide hawk people would have us believe.
Ronald Reagan was the one who signed legislation to save Social Security and Medicare.
Ronald Reagan wasn't the man who never met a tax cut he didn't like.
The alternative is to constantly play the game on the opposition's field.