It is there in his letters to his wife and others. I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead. Both governed basically as conservatives — Reagan out of conviction; there still were big differences.
Trump was an immigration-basher from the get-go. Reagan also could acknowledge mistakes; he made his share. But the facts and evidence tell me it is not. Exhibit A is Stefanik , the young New Yorker who started six years ago as the leader of moderate Republicans in the House.
On many issues — taxes, immigration, the environment — there is room for a little nuance. When it comes to devotion to Trump, there is none. The Democrats still invoke FDR three quarters of a century after his death. For Republicans, Trump has made the party of Reagan yesteryear. Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for the Wall Street Journal. Reagan was mythologized while he was still alive.
It's not unusual for presidents to be more popular after they leave, but Reagan's jump is still impressive. Out of nine presidents compared by Gallup , Reagan's average approval jumped the most after leaving office — 11 percentage points — aside from Kennedy 13 after being killed in office and Ford Looking at only the most recent polls, Reagan has now gained 21 points — far more than any other president measured.
Why do Americans remember Reagan so much more kindly than history suggests they should? One reason may be that Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease after leaving office, so politicians and journalists who had once been critical of his legacy were less likely to point out his flaws.
Reagan's disappearance from public life nearly six years after he left office also made it easy for conservatives of all stripes to claim his mantle. As late-night host Stephen Colbert recently pointed out to candidate Ted Cruz , Reagan's record as president deviates significantly from both his own rhetoric and the policy positions attributed to him by modern candidates.
That's why today you hear about the Reagan who instituted a massive tax cut in , not the Reagan who, when revenue from supply-side economic theories failed to materialize, reversed course to sign the largest peacetime tax increase in history in , and then to raise taxes again in and Candidates will talk about the Reagan who cut government regulation, but not the one who increased the size of the federal government and the national debt.
We hear about the Reagan who demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev "tear down this wall" and called Soviet Russia an "evil empire," but not the Reagan who later met diplomatically with Soviet leaders to form the foundation of nuclear disarmament. Perhaps the main reason that Reagan is mentioned so frequently may simply be because, as Bill Whalen of the Hoover Institution wrote before September's debate, while Democrats had Clinton and Barack Obama to fill the void after Kennedy, Republicans have had no recent candidates who can match Reagan's charm.
But pretending to be an imaginary version of Reagan does the candidates no services — no one really believes that Romney or Donald Trump are Reagan reincarnated, and many voters are too young to be nostalgic about Reagan anyway. According to data shared with CNBC by consumer data company Resonate , 7 percent of people who said that they vote Republican weren't even alive when Reagan left office, and more than a third of Republican voters weren't of voting age.
Reagan did his best to be even-handed in the Middle East. Though a fervent supporter of Israel, he took a tough line on its invasion of Lebanon to drive out the Palestine Liberation Organization, eventually compelling the Israeli government to stop the bombardment of West Beirut because of the civilian casualty toll.
He then proposed a general Middle East peace deal whereby Israel agreed to withdraw from territory captured in in return for Arab agreement to its right to exist — the first ever American endorsement of Palestinian West Bank autonomy. When this found little favour with the warring parties, Reagan promoted an ill-fated international peacekeeping mission in Lebanon.
However, Syrian-supported Lebanese Muslim groups become suspicious that the US contingent was in reality supporting the pro-Israeli Maronite Christian government in Beirut.
In October , the newly formed Hezbollah, backed by Syria and Iran, carried out a suicide-bombing mission that killed American service personnel. Unable to retaliate effectively and wishing to avoid further loss of life, the US government and its international partners withdrew their peacekeeping forces in February Despite suffering a setback far greater than Jimmy Carter in the long-running Iranian hostage crisis of —81, Reagan did not pay a political price at home for this failure.
Such conviction ignores the reality that Reagan was a pragmatic conservative rather than an ideological purist. Reagan was not interested in a kamikaze assault on the entitlement state that benefited the middle class — he reached agreement with the Democrats to guarantee the long-term solvency of the Social Security pension programme and did not threaten healthcare programmes. To the dismay of some moral conservatives, especially the Christian right, he was unwilling to invest political capital in promoting constitutional amendments to outlaw abortion and permit school prayer.
He needed some Democratic support to attain his objectives because the opposition party retained control of the House of Representatives throughout his presidency. Willingness to compromise and engage in horse-trading was essential for doing so.
Yet whatever his own popularity with cross-party voters, he could not get them to back Republicans in congressional elections. In essence, his legacy was to make some conservative ideas, notably on low taxes, more appealing to voters without turning America into a conservative or indeed a Republican nation. Reagan followed a succession of failed presidents — Lyndon Johnson was driven from office by Vietnam; Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment over Watergate; and Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter inherited what many pundits called an imperilled presidency because its authority was much weakened compared to its midth-century heyday.
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