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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
When Reagan was governor, he worried about the "very dangerous precedent" of the state Constitution's recall provision being exploited by "well-organized groups for political recrimination." Yes, that's right. Though Reagan's latter-day acolytes led the lusty campaign to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003, Reagan would not have approved. And for good reason: He was the subject of two recall attempts himself. The first came in 1968, and it wasn't hard to understand why a group of liberal organizers, working on a shoestring, were able to obtain hundreds of thousands of signatures for his ouster: His approval rating was an anemic 30 percent. (In the next few weeks you are unlikely to hear that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan had roughly equivalent degrees of popularity during their presidencies, with Clinton's often higher, including when both left office.)
The activists in the second recall attempt weren't liberals, however. In 1967, Reagan, after campaigning, as he always did, as a tax cutter, passed the single largest tax hike in the history of any state up to that point. By 1971, some of his former supporters on the right had tired of what they saw as Reagan's serial betrayals of conservative principles and launched a recall movement of their own.
We didn't hear a lot about that movement when conservatives were dropping Reagan's name left and right in support of their bid to run Gov. Gray Davis out of Sacramento on a rail in large part because he had ... raised taxes.
Reagan's hagiographers, having their cake, eating their cake and smearing their cake all over the historical record, have a word for the occasions when this supposedly principled man violated his principles: They call them "pragmatism." But liberals have to give the man credit for his ability, unlike President Bush, to shift course when he was walking into a wall.
Still, it's too easy to convert the image of Reagan the pragmatist into a Reagan who wasn't really right wing. And from that it is but a short step to the most irritating Reagan myth of all: that he was nothing but a sunny optimist. Do not forget that he also frightened people with talk of apocalypse.
Reagan first came to public prominence as a political figure in the early '60s. The movie actor, hard on his luck, had become a kind of roving motivational speaker for General Electric. More and more, however, as he became more and more conservative, his talks focused on politics. Much of Reagan's stomping ground of Southern California had converted itself into a kind of McCarthyite petri dish, breeding paranoid patio dads and housewives by the thousands, each one eager and ready to find Reds beneath, beside and on top of every bed.
On any given weekend, interested citizens in Orange County could watch showings of films like "Communism on the Map" -- a geopolitical melodrama in which blood- or pink-colored ink leached over country after country, sparing only Spain, Switzerland and the United States (which was covered by a giant question mark) -- or find a study group assiduously poring over the organizational structure of what J. Edgar Hoover laughably called a "state within a state" -- the almost nonexistent Communist Party.
Reagan soon became one of the hottest tickets on the anti-Communist lecture circuit -- where sunny optimism was not the order of the day. "We have 10 years," he would say in just about every speech. "Not 10 years to make up our mind." (He was referring to the choice as to whether to embrace the Republican right or the march of communism, among whose avatars he numbered, in a famous 1960 letter to Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy.) But "10 years to win or lose -- by 1970 the world will be all slave or all free."
