A vote for Obama is a vote to bring back the 1970s, when we were an economic basketcase at home and a helpless, pathetic giant abroad.
Or so implies Rick Esenberg in a Sunday column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Instead we should vote for John McCain, "a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution" to usher in happy days once again. Or something.
But while Ese slings some George Santayana -- "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- he has a hard time recalling what actually happened under Reagan. Instead, he reprises the Reagan fairytale that, while disconnected to reality, continues to cast a pall over our public discourse.
From the column:
As President Carter left office and 50 years of Democratic rule began to end, we suffered from levels of inflation and unemployment that are unimaginable to younger Americans.
So, 50 years or Democratic rule brought us crippling inflation and unemployment? I would have thought he could have mentioned lifting millions out of poverty, winning World War II, expanded civil rights, etc., but space is tight and it's a nice insinuating construction. That said, curious that none of Nixon's policies or, say, two oil shocks in a six-year span had anything to do with the Carter economy.
Sen. John McCain was, as he puts it, a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution. He and his colleagues won that war, and he hasn't forgotten what it taught us.
But the Shark has!
The 1980s brought us lower taxes and lighter regulation.
Well, it also brought us a sharp recession (1981-82, not Reagan's fault), the S&L crisis (partly Reagan's fault) and big deficits (Reagan's fault). And, as the Brawler has pointed out elsewhere, Reagan actually raised taxes during six of his eight years in office, and stuck it to the middle class during the Social Security bailout of 1983.
What followed was, notwithstanding our recent economic difficulties, a generation of growth and prosperity.
Actually the growth under Reagan was anemic compared to previous levels and much of the "growth" was the economy digging itself out of the hole of the 81-82 recession. He leaves out the fact that the economy grew under Clinton despite the 1993 tax increase -- which Ese's fellow supply siders claimed would send the economy (which had recently been in recession) into a tailspin. Sound familiar?
Later in the piece he says:
A president's most important responsibilities lie in the area of foreign policy and national security. During the past 30 years, the more muscular foreign policy ushered in by President Reagan has achieved things, such as the demise of communism, once thought impossible.
Here it seems that the Shark is endorsing the conservative triumphalist theory that Reagan defeated the Soviet Union by embarking on an arms race that bankrupted our cold war rival. Or maybe it was by invading Grenada or making a speech at the Berlin wall. Killing nuns in Central America? Whatever it is Shark's referring to, the demise of communism wasn't a Reagan achievement.
From Richard Rhodes' Arsenals of Folly (p.190):
But the evidence does not support this self-congratulatory claim. The Soviet arms buildup of the 1970s was largely complete by the time Reagan became president in 1981,and in any case Soviet defense budgets gradually increased, not decreased through 1988.
Neither George Shultz nor even Caspar Weinberger credited the triumphalist theory of Cold War victory. " I never really bought that,"Shultz told an interviewer. "The idea of building up our military capability was not to outspend them but to provide ourselves with adequate defenses." ...
Powers quotes former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin:
Throughout the Reagan presidency, the rising Soviet defense effort contributed to [the Soviet Union's] economic decline, but only marginally as it had in previous years. The troubles in our economy were the result of our own internal contradictions of autarky [i.e., economic self sufficiency], low investment and lack of innovation ...
Don't get the Brawler wrong: Reagan played a critical role in the Cold War. But it was by sitting down and negotiating with Gorbachev. (Gorbachev wanted to cut the defense budget to get funds to modernize the USSR. The reason he wanted to knock down Star Wars is because it would have strengthened the hand of his conservative rivals -- the USSR knew the thing wouldn't work or could be overwhelmed). It was Reagan's willingness to do that that ended the cold war. If Reagan had listened to the Irving Kristols of the world who accused him of being soft, Gorbachev would likely have to stuck to the hardline defense policies.
The Brawler realizes he's picking on a strand in Rick's (unpersuasive) endorsement of McCain (which mysteriously doesn't address the important issue of Bill Ayers). But he feels it's an important one. The "Reagan Revolution" as described by Esenberg is a fairy tale. And belief in fairy tales -- or worse, trying to recreate one -- is unhealthy for democracies.
Just in: Some might consider it worth pointing out that Reagan's muscular foreign policy and bellicose rhetoric came quite close to triggering a nuclear war:
Reagan's "evil empire" speech of March 1983 was widely noted in the Soviet Union , recalled Vladimir Slipchenko, then a member of the Soviet General Staff. "The military, the armed forces . . . used this," he added, "as a reason to begin a very intense preparation inside the military for a state of war." Furthermore, "we started to run huge strategic exercises. . . . These were the first military exercises in which we really tested our mobilization. We didn't just exercise the ground forces but also the strategic arms." Therefore, "for the military, the period when we were called the evil empire was actually very good and useful, because we achieved a very high military readiness. . . . We also rehearsed the situation when a non-nuclear war might turn into a nuclear war."
Soviet leaders, terrified that the Reagan administration was preparing a nuclear first strike against their country, nearly launched a nuclear war. In November 1983, during NATO's Able Archer military exercises, the jittery Soviet government became convinced that, under cover of the exercises, a U.S. nuclear attack upon the Soviet Union was underway. Consequently, Soviet nuclear forces were alerted, command staffs reviewed their strike missions, and nuclear weapons were readied for action. "The world did not quite reach the edge of the nuclear abyss," recalled Oleg Gordievsky, a U.S. intelligence agent within the KGB. "But during Able Archer 83 it had . . . come frighteningly close."
Thus, as Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, recalled: "The impact of Reagan's hard-line policy . . . was exactly the opposite of the one intended by Washington . It strengthened those in the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the security apparatus who had been pressing for a mirror-image of Reagan's own policy."
Nice take-down of the Reagan myth. I was actually surprised a bit that Rick is still trying the Obama = Carter gambit. He did the same in a March 2 JS op-ed, back when the McCain camp was testing out the line, too. Lacking the ability to substantiate it, the McCain camp dropped it pretty quickly. Not so for Rick. I tried to engage him on the point on a couple of occasions (see his March 3 and June 8 posts), but he never obliged. As always with Rick, it's about controlling what appears on the front while ignoring or minimizing the critiques in the back; heaven forbid what takes place in the latter ever be allowed to inform what appears on the former.
Posted by: Seth Zlotocha | October 28, 2008 at 07:24 AM