This is a very important point that is often overlooked these days. Recessions are generally caused by lack of confidence. In a vicious cycle (not buying because of worry you might lose your job), a declining economy or credit crisis becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just as cheerleaders and coaches profess optimism even when their team is losing, it is one of the President’s duties to foster economic optimism whether justified or not.
I wonder how many Americans have forgotten that when FDR famously said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”, he wasn’t speaking of War, but of the recession of the early 1930’s.
This is one reason I became disgusted with GWB immediately after his 2000 election – he deliberately talked the economy down. (He knew recession was likely, but wanted the fall to come soon to ensure it was blamed on Clinton.)
And why I’m disgusted by right-wing hypocrites who pretend that Obama’s optimistic words are inappropriate, while they themselves seek to talk the economy down.
My feelings exactly. I was living in Berlin and went to America House for both election nights where he won, and both times I was in shock that he won.
Plus, it still pisses me off that every time they show images of the Berlin Wall being torn down, they show his stupid statement of “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
As if that platitude had one iota of influence on what happened and why the Wall was eventually torn down. Not!
I will also say that I was damned sure the guy had Alzheimer’s the last few years in office, despite all denials. I felt sorry for him, but was also amazed they didn’t just admit it and have him gracefully exit office due to “medical reasons”. I thought that was dangerous and reckless - and from all reports after the fact, he really was having some serious issues those last years.
The “Teflon” nickname wasn’t started by Iran-Contra. It arose because of the relatively large number of Reagan-administration officials indicted and actually imprisoned that didn’t seem to tarnish their boss in any way. In fact, I remember a popular theme during Iran Contra being that the Teflon had finally cracked. Democrats took the senate in the 1986 partly for this reason.
I was traveling around Europe shortly after Reagan’s Libya strike. It was not uncommon for someone who did not know English to go, upon learning I was an American, “Reagan, pow-pow,” and other shooting noises while making a “gun” with his hand.
My recollections, having lived and voted through it:
When Carter was President the country was running about a $40 billion deficit and his opponents, including Reagan, were saying that this deficit was bankrupting the country. Carter took over a post Nixon/Ford, post Vietnam situation where the government and the military were a mess. The military had just lost a war and was in chaos. A lot of equipment had been lost and the Air Force was dysfunctional because more planes were inoperable than functional.
In Reagan’s early years the economy continued to flounder. A Democratic congress approved his budget which poured a massive amount of money into the military. Much of it was wasted. The deficit ballooned. Under the Reagan/Bush years it went to $300 billion/year. It was a situation where Uncle Ronnie took out the credit card, spent like a drunken sailor, and made everyone think the everyone was rich. That led to the famous Dick Cheney quote where he said, " Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter." Yes, the economy started to look good but it wasn’t very good for the lower and middle class. The money was going to the top. It was in those years that the disparity between the upper incomes and the lower incomes became very apparent.
Reagan’s second term was a disaster. The calculating minds that he brought in for his first term left to make their money in the private sector. That’s when you had Iran/Contra, the HUD scandal and a bunch of other stuff that really proved that the guy was asleep at the switch. He was not in control. Yet, he still had a following that wanted to make him a saint. He was nowhere near that. The deficits rose, he handed it off to GHWB, and the problems compounded. When GHWB realized that he had to raise taxed he got defeated. Not because he was a bad guy but because he went back on a statement he shouldn’t have made and because he was pragmatic.
So yes, the Reagan Presidency was the Mickey Mouse Club. Americans bought into it because it made us feel good, not that it was real. These days, Reagan would have no traction in the Republican Party. He was too liberal and too willing to compromise.
The point is that his actions spoke far louder than anything he did say or might have said. Suspending drilling in the Gulf, vetoing the pipeline, EPA regulations to make the cost of coal power plants prohibitive which raises the cost of energy which raises the cost of everything, etc.
The pretense is Obama’s. Again, his actions speak far louder than his words. He’s the hypocrite.
I don’t recall anyone who thought he was an evil genius. There was a SNL sketch where the entire joke was they portrayed Reagan as being a secret mastermind who was actually in charge of all the things being done by his administration.
Reagan’s big promises was that he would shrink the government, build up a strong military to defend America from the Soviet threat, and restore old-fashioned morality to America.
He certainly didn’t shrink the government - the amount of government spending and government employees both grew during his administration. He spent a lot of money on a military build-up but it turned out the Soviet Union was falling apart and hadn’t been a real threat. And America didn’t seem any more moral in 1988 than it had been in 1980 - it is an objective fact that the Reagan administration set a new record for felony convictions of its members.
Overall, I’d have a hard time defending his term as being an unqualified success.
Reagan gave great speech. He was the best cheerleader I’ve ever seen. It didn’t matter that it was empty air. Rich people and Wall street loved him. He cut taxes on capital gains like they had never been cut before and deregulated as it had never been done. The deficit skyrocketed and, though it took a long time, deregulated finance finally caught up with us in 2008.
Back then the hatred between the right and left was much less and there was a reverence and civility to ones view of the presidency. Comedy less so, but among the general public it wasn’t a constant attack on the office. That did not come until republican bitterness over the election of Clinton. From then on it has been constant petty bickering and the blowing out of proportion of any small incident. Talk radio hadn’t matured until then. You can blame Rush for the state of relations between parties now.
He would chop wood, eat jelly beans and was in a movie with a monkey.
Televangelist were elevated from half drunk looking, high pressure confidence men out to bilk the elderly out of everything they’ve got to a station national political importance.
He made appointments like James Watt that acted like their job was to destroy the agency they managed.
He was constantly telling us how far behind the USSR we were in weapons so we would spend ridiculous amounts on defense, and doing so made everyone proud.
He was a combination of comforting, apocalyptic, insane and proud.