The 40th president of the United States undoubtedly had great charm. He also, in the opinion of many, did great harm.
By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek
June 21 issue - When the rumor began floating around Washington that John McCain might be prevailed on to take the second spot on the Democratic presidential ticket, you could almost hear the sibilant sound of political operatives gleefully rubbing their hands together. A war hero! A former POW! Even when McCain demurred, the buzz continued. A straight shooter! A plain talker! A Republican!
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How confusing this was to those who understood that the poor cannot eat plain talk and that many a straight shooter is antagonistic to gun control. Senator McCain has opposed so many positions that Sen. John Kerry supports that the notion of the two running together was the ultimate Jekyll-Hyde ticket. Women who care about abortion rights knew that McCain had a zero rating from pro-choice groups; African-Americans knew he had been hostile to affirmative action. But none of that mattered as the dream (or, if you care about issues, nightmare) ticket was hashed over publicly. McCain the stand-up guy utterly trumped his own record.
Last week the man who elevated this triumph of personality over policy was laid to rest, but the shift in emphasis of which he was the greatest standard-bearer lives on. Ronald Reagan was lauded for many things during his long march from his home to the Capitol and back to a gravesite in California, but chief among them was the persona that had beguiled so many. "There you go again," he might have said with that trademark twinkle as he watched the parade of images: fence builder, horseback rider, a man for whom the word "avuncular" might have been newly minted, a man voters liked instinctively from afar.
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It was not only that his personality cast his policies in shadow, but that it made them seem improbable. How could a man with such a winning demeanor be so hostile to the poor that he permitted the Agriculture Department to chintz out on school lunches by proclaiming ketchup a vegetable? How could a man who was every inch the fatherly caretaker run up the deficit to nearly three times its former size, fire all those air-traffic controllers and refuse for so long to speak out on behalf of AIDS victims? How could a man who rode the range on horseback support opening public land to developers or contend that trees were responsible for pollution?
Much of the coverage of the former president has done clumsily what he did with style: it has made the man the centerpiece and relegated those pesky political stands to the periphery. Anyone who suggests that charisma was no substitute for the safety net is shouted down with a "not yet" or a "no way." It is presented as bad grace to criticize a man who suffered so long in the shadowy maze of Alzheimer's. But it behooves us now to do precisely what Reagan himself once did: to separate the persona from the positions. The 40th president of the United States undoubtedly had great charm. He also, in the opinion of many, did great harm.
America is a country that saddles its future with a jerry-built past. If we are to go on seeing ourselves as the best of all possible nations, we must smooth away the inconvenient rough spots with the pumice of revision. After Richard Nixon died, it seemed as if the most conspicuous moment of his administration had been opening relations with China, not opening the White House to corruption and disgrace. This may have been charitable and convenient. It did not have the advantage of being accurate.
It is even more important that a balanced picture of the Reagan presidency emerge because its shadow hangs over our political landscape today. Not simply in the suggestion that poverty is a character failure, or that unions are impediments to progress. Not simply in the absurd notion that more money for the wealthy inevitably trickles down to the bottom of the income pyramid, or that the means justify the ends, as some argued in the Iran-contra scandal and as some would argue about the Iraq war today.
It is important that we consider the harm that can be done when we make assumptions based on a winning demeanor that blind us to the actions behind the grin or the glad hand. Sometimes this works in the obverse. There were many reasons that Americans believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. There was bad reporting and bad intelligence. But I suspect that many people believed the assertion because he was a bad man. And it was easy to conclude that a bad man will do bad things, even if there is insufficient evidence for one bad thing in particular.
It is also easy to believe that a man who appears good inevitably will do good things. But in modern politics, who and what a man really is, his complexities and his contradictions, can be papered over by TV ads and public events. And no more so than when the man is an actor who has, after many years, found the role he was born to play. It behooves us, at this moment, to understand that we cannot usefully go on like this, conflating likability and leadership.
