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Ronald Reagan: Dunce and Policy Wonk

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roo_ster:
Finally got around to readoing the prez & beer thread and what struck me was grampster's post:

--- Quote from: http://www.armedpolitesociety.com/index.php?topic=27217.msg531679#msg531679 ---I spent a couple of days with Ronald Reagan as a LE body guard when he was Governor of California.  He was in my town on the stump for Nixon.  In fact, when I drove Gov. Reagan from the airport, I had Jerry Ford in the back seat with him.  Ford was a long time congressman representing the district I lived in.  Interesting conversation going on.  There were student riots breaking out at Berkley and Reagan had me get him to a phone so he could call out the California Guard.

I found him a delightful man and very well read.  He carried a couple boxes of books around with him and had several newspapers he read daily.  Knowledgable about a lot of things.  He and I snuck out of the hotel and I took him to a men's store nearby so he could buy an overcoat.  He was very good in remembering names.  At the fund raising banquet that night, the muckety mucks told another officer and I we could go in the kitchen and they'd have some food for us.  Reagan was a few feet away, and he turned around and told the guy to set up another table in the auditorium close to the dais.  He said "Take care of these men, they're with me."  A little while later, while we were chowing down, he looked over at us, winked, and gave a thumbs up.

I got a couple of personal notes from him later when he was President.  He was nothing like the man he was portrayed to be by critics and those who did not like him.  He was smarter, bolder, better read, kinder, faithful than all of his critics.  He outsmarted them, out manuvered them and made fools out of most of them.  He was a great American. 
--- End quote ---

I am not a big fan of the Reagan fetishists.  They strike me as creepy, as all hero-worshippers do. 

I think this comes from my foundational beliefs about humanity, as I believe that humans are born bad/sinful/etc. and that every triumph, civilizing achievement, and effective act of compassion is through excruciating effort(0) (be it immediate or developed over time).  I think that even the best of us are flawed and that when one of us is presented as a paragon of virtue or some such, there is something corrupt at their heart.  It may be petty, it may be gross, but all are flawed.

That being said, in Reagan, we had the usual leftist smear of the "dumb conservative." Leftists and the general public must really be dense for this myth to live on as long as it has.  EVERY Republican candidate has been dumb and only losers can be accorded any civility and not so labeled.

As grampster discovered, Reagan was no dunce.  Matter of fact, Reagon was a pretty fair policy wonk and had the proof: his radio addresses during the 1970s.  Some might say, "He had speechwriters write them and he just read the script."  Well, he did read from a script for those addresses, but 2/3 of the time, Reagan was the one who wrote it and did so in long hand.  These survived and were put into book form:
Reagan, In His Own Hand
http://www.amazon.com/Reagan-His-Own-Hand-Revolutionary/dp/074320123X

This was all conveniently forgotten for the 1980 campaign, which was a darned nasty affair during which Jimmy Carter's wife even got nasty.

WHat does it say of the media when Bill Clinton was orgasmically described as a Deep ThinkerTM for marking up & editing the works of his speech writers, but Reagan was an amiable fool despite writing 750+ speeches just in the years 1975-1979.

The media may have been mostly in the tank for Clinton, but it was completely IN the tank for Obama, and they insisted he ride their shoulders to keep from getting wet.  The way they fawned over BHO's bio and his extensive list of no-account jobs with nothing to show for them relative to any of his opponents, primary or general election was something to behold.

Yeah, BHO is such an intellectual and living embodiment of leadership, especially compared to Reagan's thin resume of Screen Actor's Guild (union) president (multiple terms), two terms as Governor of California, primary candidacy in 1976, his enlisted and officer's service in the Army, and his film career.





(0) As such hard-won achievements, they are to be admired & appreciated and those responsible lauded for overcoming their human nature.

Monkeyleg:
Nixon was a very prolific speech writer, and his most memorable lines and phrases were usually ones he'd written himself. The "checkers" speech is a classic.

Nixon took a lot of hard  knocks from the press as well, but wasn't called dumb. Maybe that's because he wasn't really conservative.

TommyGunn:
While Reagan had his flaws (as we all do) I will always remember him fondly as the best president this country has had in my lifetime.  He went through a process that taught him through life to be a real conservative rather than have some phoney-baloney "epiphany", and when people today point out something he did that seems "liberal" it can invariably be traced to a point in his life prior to this lesson.

Nixon, OTOH, while not stupid was also no conservative.  He gave us new big government agencies, price controls and other Big Government trappings, and was a egotistical narcissist with a paranoid streak .... an enemies list (not as unique as some think but, still ....) and who was unwilling to cut his losses when they were cutable.  His saving grace was his resignation before putting the country through a impeachment hearing which he would have lost in both houses (which unfortunatly Clinton could not bring himself to emulate) and that he managed to get us out of the langoring horror of Vietnam.

AZRedhawk44:
This whole "dumb conservative" thing seems to be an unholy union between academia/intelligentsia and liberals.

Prior to the disturbing assumption that Ivory Tower academics were somehow authorities on accomplishing real work in the real world, they weren't accorded any notice in government or politics.  The rare exceptions to this were scientists who actually produced a tangible, useful product after their labors in the Ivory Tower.

Now, we are ruled by the embodiment of everything that is worst about Academia.  The hubris, the lack of accountability (until November 2012 at least), the lack of productivity and even the raw ego to pursue the wrong hypothesis just because the experiment has begun and MUST be carried out to its conclusion - despite the glaring obvious failure at this early stage.

I think America gets it, though.

Which is why voices like Palin and Paul are getting more air time.  There's flaws in both spokespeople I mentioned, but someone will come along and unify the best components of those type of speakers, and be a force to be reckoned with, that will put the Obama/Clinton/Carter academia machine back in the time-out corner for a generation or two.

grampster:
Someday, the greatest poker bluff of all time will be recognized.  There was a movie series by the same name.

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