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I say mediocre because the damage he did to this country was slightly offset by his image, an image that did a lot of good around the world (as well as in numerous movies to come). Why do I think Reagan wasn’t really that good, let’s take a look:
CHARACTER:
Reagan was a racist. If his rhetoric wasn’t enough, his actions certainly demonstrated a notable distain for blacks, women, and other minority Americans. Let’s start with words:
“Welfare queen.” A pejorative that entered the American lexicon following a Reagan story describing a hypothetical welfare scammer from Chicago’s South Side. Reagan intentionally used race as a way to assault welfare and decried it, and other liberal programs, as expensive social experiments. Not only did he neglect to mention that white on welfare far out numbers and minority, or the accepted welfare programs in the form of housing assistance and farm aid, or the fact that project homes began following WWII and were primarily occupied by whites before the GI Bill provided home loans and Levitt towns roamed free, what he neglected to mention was that these programs got results.
When Medicare, Medicaid, and the Welfare system were introduced, 20% of Americans lived in poverty. By the end of the decade, that was cut in half. The programs Reagan decried worked, and I’m proof of sorts. My Grand Mother raised my mother and her six siblings in poverty, with the assistance of these programs. Through hard work and sacrifice, my mom and every one of my mom’s siblings went to college.
But Reagan didn’t just talk like a racist, he was one:
“Philadelphia, county seat of Mississippi’s Neshoba County, is famous for a couple of things. That is where three civil rights workers — Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman — were murdered in 1964. And that is where, in 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan chose to launch his election campaign, with a ringing endorsement of “states’ rights.”
Reagan went to Mississippi and told a crowd that he approved of what had happened there, and that during his presidency, they could feel safe doing it once again.
Reagan also hated the homeless:
“Well, it’s been so exaggerated. Millions, there aren’t millions. Real research reveals probably 300,000 or less, nationwide. And a lot of those are the type of people that have made that choice. For example, more than 40% of them are retarded, mentally deficient people, that is the result of the ACLU. Look at the girl in NY who went to court after Koch had ordered her to get off the street and be put in a shelter. She went to court and actually fought, under her Constitutional rights, to go on living in that cardboard box on the street.“
Firstly, there ARE millions of people who are homeless. The real thing he didn’t mention was that many them are mentally ill and VETERANS. President Reagan halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 (the government’s housing voucher subsidization program). Between the years of 1980 and 1989 HUD’s budget authority was reduced from $74 billion to $19 billion.
“One of Reagan’s most enduring legacies is the steep increase in homeless people. By the late 1980s, the number of homeless had swollen to 600,000 on any given night and 1.2 million over the course of a year.”
“Many were Vietnam veterans, children and laid-off workers.”
In early 1984 on Good Morning America, Reagan defended himself against charges of callousness toward the poor in a classic blaming-the-victim statement saying that “people who are sleeping on the grates…the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice.”
All of this for failed military projects and tax cuts.
Reagan was also a draft dodger. A big one, and coincidentally started the Republican trend of draft dodging:
“On May 15, 1942, and was assigned to AAF Public Relations and subsequently to the 1st Motion Picture Unit (officially, the “18th AAF Base Unit”) in Culver City, California. On January 14, 1943 he was promoted to First Lieutenant and was sent to the Provisional Task Force Show Unit of This Is The Army at Burbank, California. He returned to the 1st Motion Picture Unit after completing this duty and was promoted to Captain on July 22, 1943.”
George H W Bush must have been blinded with rage after losing to a draft dodger, while he was kicking ass in the pacific.
Reagan’s economic policies were just plain dumb, so dumb that his own Vice President didn’t even believe in them:
We come back to GHW Bush for this one with his now famous description of Reagan economics: “It just isn’t going to work, and it’s very interesting that the man who invested this type of what I call a voodoo economic policy… “ – Speech at Carnegie Mellon University addressed to Ronald Reagan
(note: before he was VP, but it’s laughable to believe he magically changed his mind given his own tax policy and raises during his administration)
They were also unstudied:
“In the four years that I served as Secretary of the Treasury, I never saw President Reagan alone and never discussed economic philosophy or fiscal and monetary policy with him one-on-one….The President never told me what he believed or what he wanted to accomplish in the field of economics.” – Donald Regan, the President’s former Secretary of the Treasury, and later Chief of Staff
They were also hypocritical and irresponsible:
-Debt more than tripled from 900 billion dollars to 2.8 trillion dollars during Reagan’s tenure.
-private investment as a percentage of GDP also averaged lower under Reagan
-real wages declined during the Reagan Presidency
- The ATM (Alternative Minimum Tax) “hits middle class Americans the hardest by reducing their deductions and effectively raising their taxes. Meanwhile, the highest income earners (with incomes exceeding $1,000,000) are proportionately less affected thereby shifting the tax burden away from the richest 0.5%.”
-Reagan style deregulation has been cited as a key component of the late-2000s recession and the large national debt accrued under Reagan has not been paid off as of 2009.
-the unemployment rate averaged higher under Reagan (6.75% vs. 6.35%)
Now some of you are saying, how is any of this idiocy hypocritical? While Reagan was spending gravely into debt, he was also pushing for a Constitutional amendment that required the federal government to have a balanced budget. What a joke.
He didn’t beat the Reds, they beat themselves:
Reagan effectively did what he was known for during WWII, skipped the fighting and just showed up at the end of the cold war in time for the after party.
Facts:
-The Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse when Reagan became president
- Glasnost: a policy that created openness and “ increased freedom of the press and the transparency of state institutions. Glasnost was intended to reduce the corruption at the top of the Communist Party and moderate the abuse of power in the Central Committee. Glasnost also enabled increased contact between Soviet citizens and the western world, particularly with the United States, contributing to the accelerating détente between the two nations.”
-This policy also “The Union’s component republics to declare their autonomy from Moscow, with the Baltic states withdrawing from the Union entirely. The 1989 revolutionary wave that swept across Central and Eastern Europe overthrew the Soviet-style communist states, such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, Romania being the only Eastern-bloc country to topple its communist regime violently and execute its head of state.”
-This was combined with “Perestroika relaxed the production quota system, allowed private ownership of businesses and paved the way for foreign investment. These measures were intended to redirect the country’s resources from costly Cold War military commitments to more profitable areas in the civilian sector.”
-This gave at a time of economic strife in the Soviet Union and was coupled with large military expenditures (ok this was spurred by Reagan, but got so out of hand that he had to sign START I)
-The Soviets officially declaring that they would no longer intervene in the affairs of allied states in Eastern Europe also helped
What really let’s you know that Reagan didn’t beat Communism: Bush had no idea that it would fall, and the CIA was completely surprised by the fall of communism in the USSR, a fact that led to Vice President Cheney’s distain for the institution.
What should be noted is that around 1988, Deng Xiao Peng was implementing roughly the same economic policies, WITHOUT the new freedoms, illustrating that the USSR could have survived and thrived longer if it were not for policies they themselves instituted.
His administration violated the constitution and lied about it:
“In the early 80’s, President Reagan illegally sold arms to America’s once and future dick enemy, Iran. Reagan used the profits to fund the Contras, Nicaraguan rebels. They, in turn, used the money to kill more Nicaraguans. Reagan then pretended not to remember what he did. His role in this act inadvertently led to the worst show ever created: Equal Time with Paul Begala and Oliver North. “
- According to The New York Times, the United States supplied the following arms to Iran:
August 20, 1985. 96 TOW anti-tank missiles
September 14, 1985. 408 more TOWs
November 24, 1985. 18 Hawk anti-aircraft missiles
February 17, 1986. 500 TOWs
February 27, 1986. 500 TOWs
May 24, 1986. 508 TOWs, 240 Hawk spare parts
August 4, 1986. More Hawk spares
October 28, 1986. 500 TOWs
- “Oliver North, a military aide to the United States National Security Council (NSC), proposed a new plan for selling arms to Iran, which included two major adjustments: instead of selling arms through Israel, the sale was to be direct, and a portion of the proceeds would go to Contras, or Nicaraguan guerilla fighters opposed to communism, at a markup. North proposed a $15 million markup, while contracted arms broker Ghorbanifar added a 41% markup of his own.”
-Who were the contras?: “The record of the contras in the field, as opposed to their official professions of democratic faith, is one of consistent and bloody abuse of human rights, of murder, torture, mutilation, rape, arson, destruction and kidnapping.”
He was soft and impotent on terrorism:
-Following the bombing in Beruit, Reagan gave a response to terrorism that Clinton would laugh at (Clinton being the toughest terror fighter till bush, doubled the anti-terror budget, creator of the predator craft, began the shutdown terror funding sources, etc…).
-He fired a few missiles and gave “In fact…. no serious retaliation for the Beirut bombing from the Americans, besides a few shellings. In December 1983, U.S. aircraft from the U.S.S. Enterprise CVN-65 battle group attacked Syrian targets in Lebanon, but this was in response to Syrian missile attacks on planes, not the barracks bombing. Multi service Ground support units were withdrawn from Beirut post attack on the marine barracks due to retaliatory threats.”
-His weak response led to the growth and new prominence for the group Hezbollah.
-He worried more about “Operation Urgent Fury where the United States invaded Grenada after he became concerned that the world’s second largest producer of nutmeg would fall into communist hands,” than vengeance for fallen Americans.
Finally, he led the fight to SPREAD AIDS:
“His inaction during the early stages of the AIDS epidemic also led to the “trickle down” of autoimmune disease, and, eventually, to the movie version of Rent.” –Dickepedia
Writing in the Washington Post in late 1985, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, stated: “It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic’s existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals.”
Little did he know that it would spread to straight folks to:
-In 1987: 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases.
SIX YEARS AFTER THE FIRST DISCOVERY IN 1981, Reagan took action:
- “How that information is used must be up to schools and parents, not government. But let’s be honest with ourselves, AIDS information can not be what some call ‘value neutral.’ After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don’t medicine and morality teach the same lessons.” – Regan on the AIDS Epidemic
So as you can see, Reagan was a mediocre President at best… and dick at his worst.
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