OPINION & EDITORIAL
Reagan: an awful president
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Friday, February 8, 2002
While I don’t want to spoil anyone’s birthday party, I feel compelled to respond to the current trend of Reagan deification that has been so evident in The Badger Herald this week.
Normally, Americans wait until our national leaders have died to offer their whitewashed eulogies and undeserved praise; Richard Nixon’s funeral comes to mind. In former President Ronald Reagan’s case, however, his bout with Alzheimer’s disease and retreat from the public eye seem to have presented ample opportunity.
Since the iconoclasts at the Herald have given us a closer look at the utopian bliss that was the Reagan administration, I thought it might be instructive to look at the other side of the 1980s.
Number one on the big list of Reagan-era achievements is the economic prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s. Apparently, some Herald columnists would have us believe every American spent the decade rolling naked atop piles of cash.
How did this phenomenon that we call Reaganomics actually work? Through massive deficit spending combined with generous tax-cuts for the wealthy, Reagan’s “trickle-down” economic policies did just what the name would imply.
Wealth “trickled-down” from the top of our national economic hierarchy until there was practically nothing left, contributing to a tremendous widening of this country’s income gap. This exacerbated the trend of marked urban decline that had been developing since the 1960s.
Don’t worry — Gipper didn’t forget about inner cities entirely. By sinking billions of dollars into a “war on drugs” that had no hope of ridding American society of the horrors of drug addiction, our government incarcerated significant numbers of people from urban minority populations, tearing apart their already-tattered social fabric.
We often forget to acknowledge another neglected, distinctly American group of patriots: our loyal and diligent defense contractors. Let it never be said that President Reagan let this group of heroes go hungry. By initiating “Star Wars” in 1983, the Reagan administration spent approximately $60 billion on the development of a satellite-based missile defense system to protect us from that most evil of evil empires, the Soviet Union.
Nineteen years later, we have nothing to show for it and another president fixated on the elusive goal of missile defense. Some would counter that this massive defense spending led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. There is certainly much weight to that argument, but let us not ignore the other factors that contributed to the Soviet Union’s fall, such as a devastating, decade-long war in Afghanistan.
It has become fashionable to portray the Clinton administration as having invented scandal. The 1980s were not without their political embarrassments. Iran-Contra is an overlooked episode in American political history in which Reagan lied about trading arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages, while funneling money to support rightist counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua. Which should carry more historical significance: some semen on a blue Gap dress or trading arms for hostages in order to quash social revolution?
Let’s take one last look at the domestic front. Ronald Reagan wasn’t the only one to make a splash on the national scene in 1981. There was a new, mysterious disease in town, AIDS, which was rapidly tightening its vice-grip on the gay populations of cities like New York and San Francisco.
One has to wonder why President Reagan waited until 1985 to utter in public the dreaded word “AIDS.” Why did he wait another two years to establish the President’s Commission on AIDS?
Today, 21years later, we have the luxury of historical perspective, and I am not naive enough to place the blame for a complex public-health crisis entirely on one man. However, President Reagan demonstrated clear negligence in the face of what would mutate into a harrowing global pandemic that shows no signs of relenting.
Why did the Gipper drop the ball? Because Americans in the 1980s didn’t care about a disease that was killing a bunch of promiscuous New York fags until it started killing soccer moms, hemophiliacs and celebrities. That is the cold, hard truth.
So, until the Herald’s self-appointed guardians of free speech and intellectual diversity acknowledge the 1980s were more than BMWs and Big Gulps, spare me your one-sided and delusional remembrances of a “great American” and a simpler, purer era.
Adam Lynn (adlynn@students.wisc.edu) is a senior majoring in political science.
