WHAT DIFFERENCES?:

First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double: The stature gap between the Great Communicator and his slavish imitator is not just about acting. (Frank Rich, 6/13/04, NY Times)

[W]hether one likes either president or not, the difference between them remains far greater than any similarities, and that difference has more ramifications during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the heartwarming role of himself." Though he never studied with Lee Strasberg, he practiced the method; his performance was based, however loosely, on the emotional memory of a difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this background during the Depression, developing the considerable ambition needed to work his way through college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his vision of America as a place where perseverance could pay off for anyone. It was indeed the heartwarming role of himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own biography eventually stripped out).

Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger success story. Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during the war, but as a teenage riverfront lifeguard in Illinois, he rescued 77 people, demonstrating early on the physical courage that would see him through an assassination attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business, he was always engaged in politics (to the point of alienating his first wife, Jane Wyman, who found his preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce labor and blacklisting battles.

Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond Hollywood. A contract player who became "Errol Flynn of the B's," he wasn't a big enough star to merit all the perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to serving (at age 42) as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy, showgirl-laden revue at the Last Frontier casino on the Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E. spokesman, he spent years meeting workers in the company factories that he repeatedly toured when off camera.

Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a "welfare queen") and preached family values he didn't practice with his own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred Bloomingdale. [...]

Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an interview in which Tom Brokaw challenged his efforts to pull off a bigger flimflam than impersonating Ronald Reagan — the conflation of the Iraq war with World War II. "You referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack on America' that we went through during our time," Mr. Brokaw said. "But that wasn't Iraq who did that, that was al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the World War II dead behind him, the president retreated to his familiar script ("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think the lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did not sound like someone who had ever experienced pain of the life-and-death intensity that comes with war. The problem is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's lilting vocal delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it doesn't contain at least a kernel of emotional truth.

We've reached new territory in the pathology of the Left when Bush-hatred forces Frank Rich to speak even mildly favorably about Ronald Reagan, a president whose every action he likely opposed at the time. As regards his final point here, it's worth recalling that at the moment in his presidency most similar to 9-11, when Islamic extremists blew up the Marine barracks in Beirut, he toppled the Marxist government of Grenada. Mr. Reagan, unlike a Tom Brokaw or a Frank Rich, would not have needed an explanation of why we deposed Saddam even if he had no connection to 9-11. We should also note that while he'll never shake his reputation, Mr. Bush has given a series of speeches and made uinnumerable high stakes public appearances--from his convention acceptance speech to his debates with Al Gore to his innaugural address to his stem cell chat to his post-9-11 speeches to several State of the Unions to, most recently, his eulogy this week--that were every bit as good as any performance Ronald Reagan ever gave. Only the conceit that he's a stumble-bum prevents the acknowledgement that, rather than being fifteen or twenty occassions when he's risen above his limitations, Mr. Bush is one of the more effective communicators we've ever had in the presidency. He may lack the fluidity of a JFK or a Reagan, but benefits greatly from precisely the fact that he's mining his own soul when he speaks.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2004 11:08 AM