De-mythifying Reagan

Sunday February 6th, is Ronald Reagan’s 100^th birthday.  

Even though I voted for Ronald Reagan, the candidate, over the President Jimmy Carter in 1980, I soured on Reagan once he became president.  It wasn’t the man I didn’t like so much as the arrogant, pompous, power-hungry people around him that drove me to become the passionate Democrat I remain today.

Over time my view of Ronald Reagan, the politician, shifted.  To be clear I have little patience for his conservative policies. Trickle-down economics, in my never-to-be-humble opinion, is one of the classic policy failures of the 20^th century. 

Rather over time I grew to appreciate, then admire and later love Ronald Reagan, the man, specifically for his indomitable spirit of hope and optimism.  Reagan’s 1984 campaign slogan, ‘Its morning in America’  remains a touchstone for the country, especially given the many economic, global and social challenges confronting the United States today.  

Much of what we remember about Ronald Reagan however, is more myth than reality.  According to the Washington Post Saturday these myths are “misconceptions resulting from the passage of time or from calculated attempts to rebuild or remake Reagan's legacy.”

Here are 5 myths about Ronald Reagan’s legacy listed in the Post that the facts of history just don’t support:

Reagan was one of our most popular presidents - Reagan's average approval rating during the eight years that he was in office was, according to Gallup, 52.8 percent.  That places Reagan not just behind Kennedy, Clinton and Eisenhower, but Johnson and Bush Sr. as well.

Reagan was a tax-cutter - President Reagan signed measures that increased federal taxes every year of his two-term presidency except the first and the last.  The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was, at the time, the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.

Reagan was a war hawk -Though Reagan expanded the U.S. military and launched new weapons programs, his real contributions to the end of the Cold War were his willingness to negotiate arms reductions with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his encouragement of Gorbachev as a domestic reformer.  

Reagan shrank the federal government - Federal spending grew by an average of 2.5 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, while Reagan was president. The national debt exploded, increasing from about $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion. The number of federal employees grew from 2.8 million to 3 million under Reagan, in large part because of his buildup at the Pentagon. 

Reagan was a conservative culture warrior - Although he published a book in 1983 about his staunch opposition to abortion (overlooking the fact that he had legalized abortion in California as governor in the late 1960s), President Reagan never sought a constitutional ban on abortion.  In 1981, Reagan unintentionally did more than any other president to prevent the Roe v. Wade abortion ruling from being overturned when he appointed Sandra Day O'Connor to the Supreme Court. O'Connor mostly upheld abortion rights during her 25 years as a justice.