Tear Down This Myth: The Right-Wing Distortion of the Reagan Legacy by Will Bunch

Author:Will Bunch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: non.fiction
ISBN: 9781416597636
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Ironically, in 1991, when America: What Went Wrong? was first published as a series in the Inquirer, George H. W. Bush set a record for the highest approval rating ever for an American president. He was reaping the benefit of a remarkably quick and relatively casualty-free (for our side) military victory over Saddam Hussein, which undid the dictator’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Foreign policy was clearly the number one passion for the first ex-CIA chief to become president, and in many ways his more aggressive approach was a stark departure from Reagan. Bush’s 1989 invasion of Noriega’s Panama was the complete opposite of the Gipper’s diplomacy-oriented approach to the problem. The war that ousted Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in the late winter of 1991, a United Nations operation with America in the lead, had a similar political impact as Reagan’s action in Grenada, but more so because the stakes in the Persian Gulf were obviously so much higher. With Bush’s approval rating peaking at 91 percent after the war, the best-known Democrats were loath to challenge the incumbent; for a time the Democrats who did traipse around Iowa and New Hampshire in anticipation of the 1992 election were known as “the Seven Dwarfs.”

Ironically, it would be far-right conservatives, particularly the most die-hard Reaganites, and a new breed of angry independent, amplified by the echo chamber of talk radio, who would sense the weakness of Bush before the opposition party did. In August 1991, the conservative Heritage Foundation threw a party to mark the tenth anniversary of the Reagan tax cut; Bush was not even invited to attend. One of the guests, the gung-ho Reaganite Paul Craig Roberts, told the Washington Times that “unfortunately in America the Republican Party is showing elements of brain deadness.” By then, staunch conservative activist Pat Buchanan, who worked for a short time as a speechwriter in the Reagan White House, was already proceeding with the unthinkable: a GOP primary challenge to the sitting president. Buchanan, an isolationist on foreign policy, didn’t like the president’s actions in the Persian Gulf, but he and his supporters were mainly energized by Bush’s abandonment of his “no new taxes” pledge. “George Bush has defined himself,” Buchanan declared as he weighed a presidential bid. “He is a big government man all the way.”

But Buchanan would not be the only unusual challenger to the president. The growing universe of male-dominated political talk radio and cable-TV gabfests had a new and unlikely hero in a big-eared, twang-talking, and sometimes awkward high-tech billionaire, a political independent named Ross Perot who had never held public office before. Perot went on TV shows such as CNN’s increasingly popular Larry King Live, sounding not so much like a billionaire but rather the mad-as-hell Howard Beale in the movie Network. Perot carried the same zeal to America’s ever-rising, foreign-owned debt that Reagan had brought to the tax issue a dozen years earlier. “Now, let’s go down to grassroots America where the people are hurting and everybody’s saying,

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