The Reagan Legacy Project, Redux

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“He was an actor, and he understood there was somebody who planned the lighting, somebody who built the set and wrote the script.”

- Reagan advance man Jim Hooley

This blog is gonna be all Ronald Reagan, all week. And you can blame Grover Norquist for that.

Let me explain.

This upcoming Friday, June 5th, 2009, will mark the five-year anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s death at the age of 93. You may remember that event, since it kicked off an inescapable weeklong orgy of Reagan worship on all the major networks, focused around a seven-day state funeral and cross-country procession. It was a masterpiece of media management, a testament to The Great Communicator’s strong grasp of stagecraft, even in death. Even the most naïve among us would assume there was more to the spectacle than a spontaneous show of national grief, but I doubt even the most cynical would’ve have guessed just how un-spontaneous the event actually was. Will Bunch has brought the world’s attention to a little-seen Wall Street Journal article about Operation Serenade, the code-name for the highly-choreographed mission to make sure the Gipper went out in style. The operation – a decade in the making – was executed by a lot of the same people who crafted Reagan’s image while he was president, using their tried and true “HPS” formula: Headline, Picture, Story. And, according to the above-quoted Hooley, the HPS for the weeklong funeral was simple: “Ronald Reagan as a man who won the Cold War, who brought back America’s faith in itself.”  I’m guessing the fifty thousand tiny American flags they provided for the procession didn’t hurt.

Concurrent to that effort, but lacking the patience to wait until the man was actually dead, was Grover Norquist’s Reagan Legacy Project, an ambitious effort started in 1997 to name nearly everything not nailed down in honor of Ronald Reagan. Their goal is to have a landmark in every county in the U.S. (3067, if you’re counting) have his name slapped on it. They’re not quite there yet, but if you look at what they’ve already got renamed, you can’t say they’re sleeping on the job: the D.C. airport, obviously, but also dozens of schools, freeways, post offices, medical centers, and strangely, a penthouse suite at the Century Plaza Hotel in L.A. There was even a push to put him on the dime, which would’ve been oddly appropriate considering how eager Reagan was to erase FDR’s legacy during his presidency.

It’s a little hypocritical incongruous, let’s say, for the rabidly anti-government Norquist to throw his weight and name behind Ronald Reagan’s legacy. This is the man who who once said he wanted to reduce government “to the size where I can drown it in the bathtub”, and compared the morality that allows the estate tax to the one that allowed the Holocaust. And yet he’s mythologizing a president who tripled the federal deficit, added 200, 000 workers to the federal payroll, and signed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. But, then again, he may just be aping Reagan himself, who shook an angry fist against big government with one hand while pointing his cronies to the federal trough with the other. Thanks to him, we can safely say that cognitive dissonance is now a permanent feature of conservative governance.

It’s that kind of tension – between what Reagan actually did and what his revisionist supporters and his political enemies claim he did – that I want to explore this week, a sort of Reagan Legacy Project of my own. Ronald Reagan casts an enormous shadow over our political landscape, arguably larger than any president since FDR. How his accomplishments and failures are interpreted continues to shape our leaders, their actions, and by extension, our lives.  Determining his actual legacy is more relevant than just an academic exercise, and certainly something much more alive  than mere revisionist history.  I hope you’ll join me as I try to make sense of it all.