Landslide (55 page)

Reagan paused, taking in some laughter of his own. Then he continued: “Well, before someone hands
me
a note, I will close these remarks.”

A
S ALWAYS
,
R
EAGAN
’
S
sense of timing was better than Johnson’s. That sense served him well throughout his presidency. In his second term in office, the Iran-Contra scandal, in which officials in the Reagan White House were revealed to have defied an embargo and sold arms to Iran in order to fund rebels illegally in Nicaragua, shook the nation’s confidence in Reagan. But the course of history, which had worked against Johnson so spectacularly at the end of his presidency, boosted Reagan at the end of his. As Reagan prepared to leave office, the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe fractured and the Soviet Union itself began to show signs of mortal strain. It was the total victory over the Communist menace that Reagan had hoped for, envisioned, and promised since the beginning of his political career. He left office a beloved president, the first sitting president since Roosevelt to see his party win the White House for a third consecutive term. And, thanks in large part to devoted disciples in later generations who still thrill to his story, his reputation for greatness continues to grow.

That would have pleased Reagan. He carried his dream—to be
the hero—with him to the end. Shortly before leaving the White House, he wrote to Joy Hodges, the old friend who’d wangled him a screen test in his first days in Hollywood, urging Reagan never to put on his glasses again. “
There will be some things of course that we will miss when we leave here,” he told her, “but we are really looking forward to California and boots and saddles. I have a horse waiting for me at the ranch. I hope he’s ready for a lot of riding.”

But sitting atop a horse was not how Reagan would spend his final days. Nearly six years after leaving the White House, Reagan announced that he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and was retiring from public life. The man who liked nothing so much as the “heady wine” feel of the eyes of the world upon him was never seen in a formal capacity again. He died in 2004 at the age of ninety-three. His state funeral was the grandest send-off for any president since the funeral of President Kennedy four decades before.

Reagan wanted his country to believe in the story he told. Four decades before his death, in the midst of a turbulent thousand days, he had warned his country that it faced a momentous choice: “
We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.” At the end, Reagan believed that the danger had passed, that the country had made the right choice. “I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life,” Reagan wrote at the end of his farewell letter to the country. “I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

Leaving the stage for the last time, Reagan wanted his people to believe the same thing that, forty years earlier, Lyndon Johnson had sought so desperately to prove—that the time of trial was over, that from now on, all would be well. That was what each of them wanted, always: to tell the story of a noble hero, a story with a happy end.

“
I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead.”

From Reagan’s pen, the words look reassuring, capturing the sunny optimism that was his specialty as president. But in the mouths of today’s politicians, where similar words often appear, they sound hollow, at best an improbable wish, at worst an insane delusion.

Indeed, so much of Johnson’s and Reagan’s grand visions for the country ring false when today’s leaders call on them. Those visions have persisted over the past half century, shaping the political debate. But neither Reagan’s nor Johnson’s myth has served its respective party, or its country, well.

Johnson’s promises of a government-led utopia haunted his Democratic Party for the remainder of the twentieth century—years of trial and trauma in which the government too often failed its people. For decades, liberals clung to the story they’d embraced after the stinging 1966 midterm defeat—the story that cast off Lyndon Johnson, his Vietnam policy, and the hawkish side of Cold War liberalism but retained Johnson’s utopian vision of government. Up against the Reagan vision—
Believe in America, limit the government, unleash the transformative power of individuals pursuing the American dream
—the liberal story proved a political disaster. Outside of the extraordinary post-Watergate elections of 1974 and 1976, the Democrats failed for more than two decades to find a plausible
strategy to connect with the American middle. The party surrendered the White House to the Republicans for twenty out of twenty-four years.

Courtesy Richard Nixon Library

Finally, in 1992, a Democratic candidate, Bill Clinton, won the White House by offering a “third way,” distinct from the governing visions of both right and left. Yet Clinton quickly discovered that the old myths were not easy to escape. When, early in his term, Clinton attempted to pass a program for universal health care, Republicans decried the return of Great Society overreach. The public listened. In the congressional elections halfway through Clinton’s first term, the GOP ran against the president as an old-style Big Government liberal and captured both houses of Congress, a stunning rebuke that echoed the one Johnson had suffered at the midterm nearly thirty years earlier.

Clinton had much in common with his fellow southerner Johnson: a rare empathy and a genius for interpersonal politics, a host of insatiable appetites, a voluble temperament.

But in crucial ways Clinton was also like Reagan, with a keen sense for where public mood was headed and how to speak to the public’s hopes and fears. And perhaps most crucially, Clinton possessed Reagan’s uncanny capacity for pragmatism in matters of his own self-interest. He responded to his midterm loss by co-opting the Reagan vision, declaring “
The era of Big Government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union address. That same year he signed into law his signal domestic achievement, a welfare reform law aimed at
limiting
the government safety net. When he won reelection for the presidency in the fall of that year, it was a return from the wilderness for the Democrats—Clinton was the first reelected Democratic president since FDR. But the triumph owed much to Reagan’s vision, and very little to Johnson’s.

Despite its long string of electoral successes, the Reagan myth had its limitations as well. These were apparent even while Reagan was still president. In office, Reagan struggled to produce a positive governing agenda that complemented his antigovernment rhetoric.
“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” his campaign for reelection promised, but both his political and policy advisers knew that Reagan had no substantive domestic program in place for a second term. The great achievement of that term would be tax reform, an effort that lowered corporate tax rates but attacked business-friendly tax breaks and maintained the status quo size of government. It was not the stuff of conservative revolution.

And that was precisely the point. In the White House, Reagan’s more pragmatic aides quickly perceived that the public that had voted for the conservative revolutionary did not really want conservative revolution. Americans liked the sound of limiting government in theory but had little tolerance for limiting popular government entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare—or for cutting back on national defense. Rather than address this contradiction and risk the president’s popularity, Reagan’s aides simply let it be, puffing up the image of the president as a crusader against Big Government, an image they knew had more basis in fantasy than fact.

It was good politics for Reagan, but soon enough this fantasy would come to haunt his Republican heirs. The first victim was his successor as president, George H. W. Bush, a model citizen of the Republican Party’s realist wing. Looking squarely at the staggering deficits of the Reagan years, Bush violated a campaign pledge and struck a deal with a Democratic-controlled Congress to raise taxes in order to put the country’s fiscal affairs in order. Conservatives in Congress promptly labeled their president a traitor to Reagan’s legacy and broke with him, ensuring Bush’s defeat in the next election.

The lesson was not lost on Bush’s son, who wished his own presidency in the first decade of the twenty-first century to be bathed in Reagan-like glory. George W. Bush’s White House aides obsessively mimicked Reagan’s use of “optics”—eschewing messy and contradictory details in favor of simple, clear, and stirring symbols. The most memorable product of this mimicry came in May 2003 aboard the USS
Abraham Lincoln
, where Bush emerged in a flight suit to proclaim the end of major combat operations in Iraq under a banner
reading “Mission Accomplished.” The event would prove a lasting embarrassment: Bush’s Iraq war would, in fact, last for nearly a decade longer, kill and injure thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, and cost nearly a trillion dollars.

The “Mission Accomplished” debacle revealed the dangers facing presidents in an age when politics are divorced from reality. In office, Bush and his powerful vice president, Dick Cheney, pursued contradictory policies—two costly wars and the creation of a massive national security surveillance state were matched with a generous tax cut for wealthy Americans, loosening of federal regulations, and the creation of a new entitlement for senior citizens. Advised that this toxic mix would bring on staggering deficits, Cheney shrugged: “
Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.”

But while they were eager to relive Reagan’s myth, Bush and Cheney lacked his pragmatic instinct to adjust in the face of shifting public mood. And they also lacked Reagan’s luck. Reality intruded on the latter years of the Bush presidency: the occupation of Iraq unraveled; the federal government appeared powerless to help the citizens of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their city; a financial crisis devastated the American economy. By the time Bush and Cheney left office in January 2009, the Republican Party’s national image was more seriously damaged than it had been at any point since Barry Goldwater’s disastrous campaign of 1964.

And yet the Republicans who have come after them have doubled down on the old myth, accepting the Reagan of fantasy as a figure of historical fact. In the contemporary conservative version of history, Reagan dramatically shrank government and earned the public’s everlasting affection and gratitude in return. Big Government persists after Reagan, Reagan’s contemporary admirers admit, but only because liberals and Washington elites have used government programs to buy off the public’s votes and used allies in the media to cloak their unpopular policies. Like the utopian liberals of the Johnson era, who headily promoted untested new programs, thinking they were finishing the work of Roosevelt, these contemporary conservatives
seek to drastically shrink government in the belief that they are fulfilling the vision of Reagan and answering the public will.

The result for the Republican Party of the twenty-first century has been the same as for the Democratic Party in the sixties: disaster. Today’s Reagan fantasists, with their hostility to government programs and their distaste for reality, have driven the American middle away. Their message no longer resonates with the centrist, suburban voters who were so influential in the old Reagan coalition. And it has alienated the party from the rising majority coalition of the new millennium. This new majority is younger, more diverse, and more urban than its Reagan-era predecessor, and its constituents appear more disposed to want government services and policies to aid their rise to affluence. Belief in the Reagan myth, that utopia will come from a revolutionary reinvention of government that is near at hand, has left the twenty-first-century GOP as a minority party with no obvious path out of the wilderness.

Today’s Democrats have clearly benefited politically from the Republicans’ problems. They have won the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections. But in governing, the old visions haunt them still. This springs in part from the great damage that the lingering myths of Reagan and Johnson have done to government itself. Each of the myths discredited government. Reagan’s did it overtly, maintaining that government was the source of America’s problems. Johnson’s did it by example, making promises for government that it could not possibly fulfill. As a result, a generation of Americans has come of age with little faith in government’s ability to do much of anything. Today’s America faces a host of complex problems that demand strong federal action. Among them are the catastrophic potential of global climate change, the strain on the nation’s finances of an aging population, and the disruptive effects on the workforce caused by the transition to a technology-based economy. But the memory of the old myths makes it nearly impossible to summon the political support for large-scale government action of any kind.