July 17, 2006
THERE'S A REASON OLLIE NORTH HAD TO FUND THE CONTRAS:
The Reagan Myth (FRED BARNES, July 17, 2006, Opinion Journal)
[I]t's...on the spending issue that the Reagan myth--Reagan as the relentless swashbuckler against spending--is most pronounced. He won an estimated $35 billion in spending cuts in 1981, his first year in office. After that, spending soared, so much so that his budget director David Stockman, who found himself on the losing end of spending arguments, wrote a White House memoir with the subtitle, "Why the Reagan Revolution Failed."With Reagan in the White House, spending reached 23.5% of GDP in 1984, the peak year of the military buildup. Under Mr. Bush, the top spending year is 2005 at 20.1% of GDP, though it is expected to rise as high as 20.7% this year, driven upward by Iraq and hurricane relief.
Mr. Reagan was a small government conservative, but he found it impossible to govern that way. He made tradeoffs. He gave up the fight to curb domestic spending in exchange for congressional approval of increased defense spending. He cut taxes deeply but signed three smaller tax hikes. Rather than try to reform Social Security, he agreed to increase payroll taxes.
The Gipper's big spending ways are indeed the issue that makes folks like Peggy Nonan and Bruce Bartlett sound the silliest, but it's a more important measure of his liberalism relative to W that he did everything in his power to prop up the Second Way Welfare State. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 17, 2006 9:03 AM
Which would we rather have, W with spending or Hanoi John with more spending?
Some of us learned something in 1964.
Posted by: Lou Gots at July 17, 2006 9:47 AMYou forgive your father for his failings faster than you forgive your brother, even for lesser weaknesses. Outside of folks like William F. Buckley Jr., few of the pundits of today were around in positions of influence for the Goldwater debacle and the slow rebuilding of conservative support after that, led by Reagan. Combine that with Reagan's survival of his assassination attempts and his tangable accomplishments, and they're willing to overlook trespasses like the spending (or the tax increase that followed the '81 tax cut, or the lack of progress to revsere Roe, or the lack of immigration reform, or the appointment of O'Conner and Kennedy to the bench.
Bush on the other hand is not only as a contemporary rather than a parental figure of the pundit class, but also annoys some of the east coast conservative elites in the same way he annoys their liberal brethren, because he didn't follow the normal path to prominence and achived his success after spending his first two decades as an adult slacking off (Jeb was supposed to be the presidential one in the family; George was just going to be managing general partner of an American League baseball team until Clayton Williams made his rape joke and Bush 41's irritant Ann Richards became governor.). They don't dislike him, but the are a trifle irked and that means he gets the benefit of the doubt on stuff like Harriet Miers or immigration far less than Reagan did
Posted by: John at July 17, 2006 9:50 AMThe Gipper did sign the 80's immigration bill into law, pure amnesty, no punishment of illegals, no punishment of those who hired illegals, no border control. I prefer Bush's guest worker program with border control.
Posted by: ic at July 17, 2006 12:05 PMIt is entertaining to hear Limbaugh, Hannity, et al, raggin' on Bush for not following Reagan's footsteps on spending, immigration, and Hezbollah. Marine barracks, anyone?
Posted by: ghostcat at July 17, 2006 2:50 PMghostcat:
I personally get a real kick out of it. Many conservatives seem to have real memory problems. I once posted a segment on this blog from Robert Novak around 1987 about how the Reagan administration had turned out to be such a disappointment when it came to battling the Soviets. Yeah, he said that.
Same thing with Bush -- all this stuff will be forgotten once he's out of office and he'll be the same kind of conservative hero Reagan was.
Posted by: Matt Murphy at July 17, 2006 5:13 PM