What Liberals Could Learn from Reagan

FORGET the $2 million in honoraria for his trip to Japan. The easiest bucks that former President Ronald Reagan will earn in his commercial ex-presidency will be the royalties from Speaking My Mind, a compilation of old ghost-written speeches slapped together and marketed for $24.95 per copy.

Although the book's jacket-hype calls it "a major work of documentary history and the...personal record of a beloved president," most of Speaking My Mind is less a valuable look inside Reagan's mind than a tribute to the rhetorical skills of his speechwriters.

Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches.

By Ronald Reagan

Simon and Schuster

$24.95, 432 pp.

In the annotation to the text, Reagan repeatedly asserts that the speeches in the book flew forth from his own inspired pen. In some cases, this is evidently true. It is in these speeches that we find the unforgettable gaffes such as "We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night...They were all on a diet."

The ghost-written speeches are equally easy to spot. The word "paradigm" looks impressive in the transcript of a speech, but sounded pretty silly when Reagan pronounced it "paradijem."

IF I had written this review about two years ago, I would have filled the page with more such examples of Reagan's evident intellectual ineptitude and brazen disregard for facts, not to mention his self-serving alibis and revisionism about prominent scandals. Speaking My Mind is a veritable treasure trove of Reagan gaffes and misstatements of the kind that filled up two volumes by Mark Green and Gail MacColl, There He Goes Again and Reagan's Reign of Error.

Two years ago, I would have revelled in smug liberal elitism and written a review that painted Reagan and everyone who voted for him as consummate fools. I would have also missed the most important part of Reagan's book.

Green and MacColl typify liberals' reaction to Reagan's oratory. They treated him as an amiable but vapid dunce who gave verbal expression to his ideological prejudices by fabricating statistics on every topic from Cadillacdriving welfare mothers to the Soviet missile build-up.

Reagan, they said, is not only stupid, but mendacious. His ideas are molded out of right-wing dogma and his facts are usually made up on the spot. Anyone who believes this guy is obviously a dunce, too. Why should we pay attention to anything he says?

This is not a wild caricature of prevailing liberal opinion. Liberal publications took obvious delight in exposing the falsehoods and hyperbole in Reagan's pronouncements. Mother Jones magazine even offered Reagan's Reign of Error as a subscription premium. Liberals assumed that if only people knew the facts, they would reject Reagan's simplistic demagoguery and turn to the enlightened liberal truth.

YET Reagan won two elections by landslides and was replaced by his chosen successor. Is Reagan really as stupid as liberals believe? And more important, are American voters really that stupid?

Although they usually don't phrase it quite so bluntly, most liberals believe that the answer to both of these questions is "yes." Therein lies the cause of their recent electoral misfortunes.

On the first count, liberals are mostly right. Reagan usually got the facts wrong when he railed against high taxes, Big Government, unnecessary regulations, welfare cheats, liberal hostility to religion, the communist threat, liberal softness on crime and defense--and all of his other ideological bugaboos. Sometimes he got confused. Sometimes he made stuff up.

But below the surface, he was often on to something important. Although some Americans voted for Reagan out of naked self-interest (people with six-figure incomes, for example) and others voted for him out of right-wing nuttiness or foolish patriotic euphoria, there aren't enough of these people to pull off a 49-state landslide. Reagan's message must have had some broader appeal.

Unfortunately, the liberal response to Reagan's message usually went something like this. Reagan says, "There's a useless layer of bureaucracy up on top of HEW [the Department of Health, Education and Welfare]. And it costs HEW three dollars in overhead to deliver one dollar to a needy person."

Liberals smugly retort that it actually costs 12 cents. Then they are satisfied that there really isn't a problem of useless bureaucracy. But Joe and Wanda Voter know better.

Reading through Reagan's speeches, from "The California Years" to "Farewell Address to the Nation," you have to wade through a lot of bullshit. But hidden beneath the hyperbole and right-wing paranoia is an important message for liberals. Although Reagan really is clueless and mendacious, he levels some criticisms at contemporary liberalism that liberals are foolish to ignore.

The federal welfare bureaucracy is inefficient. Liberals do fail to deal rationally with issues of national security and violent crime. A lot of government paperwork is unnecessary and counterproductive. Congress does waste a lot of money.

Reagan may have gotten the specific facts wrong, but he was on to something important. It wasn't the solutions he offered, but the problems he identified that won him such wide support. His speeches reveal that his true flair was tapping public discontent with the status quo, not selling his policy proposals.

Liberals consistently offered a blanket defense of a status quo that was clearly inadequate, simply because they thought Reagan's alternatives were worse. When liberals should have been honestly assessing the shortcomings of their programs and seeking to correct them, they were using Reagan's inarticulate criticisms as evidence that no problem existed.

It is no exaggeration to say that liberals' distaste for critical self-examination gave the country eight destructive years of Reaganism. Unless liberals abandon mindless defense of obvious failures, we can only look forward to many more.

If liberals want to find the issues that win presidential elections, they should pick up a copy of Speaking My Mind. And then offer a liberal version.