Professors around the Triangle area couldn’t restrain themselves in a Durham Herald-Sun article exploring President Reagan’s legacy. Back-handed praise was all they could muster.
Here are examples of some of the silliness advanced by those who purportedly teach your children:
* Reagan ran up the second-largest federal budget deficits in history, next to those of George W. Bush’s.
Any professor advancing this proposition is (pardon me my anger-inducing weekend) unqualified to be teaching anybody anything of public importance. Reagan’s (and Bush’s) deficits are not the largest in American history, if the deficits are measured sensibly (as a share of the budget or the economy) rather than superficially (in nominal dollars). Franklin Roosevelt presided over much larger deficits, for example ? three to four times as large during the 1943-45 period ? as likely did other wartime presidents, though the numbers are a bit hard to quantify for 19th-century federal budgets and economies. I’m not defending the two Republicans on their spending, which I think excessive, but this is nonsense. Reagan and Bush set deficit records only if you limit the analysis to non-wartime budgets and then assume that winning the Cold War and trying to win the Islamofascist War don?t count.
* Reagan set the stage for a significant reduction of the federal government’s role in the economy.
I wish. When Reagan was elected in 1980, federal expenditures accounted for 20.6 percent of GDP. In 1989, after bulging in mid-decade, they had ?fallen? to 20.8 percent of GDP. By the time Clinton was elected in 1992, they had pushed up to 22.5 percent. In 2000, they were 19.1 percent. Even if you give Reagan some credit for budget restraint of the 1990s ? and that?s not unreasonable, given that the Reaganite-inspired Republican Congress was the main driving force (along with Clinton?s acquiesence) ? we are still not talking about a significant reduction in relative size.
* Reagan won’t be remembered as one of the nation’s great presidents.
This is more speculative, but I think it is wrongheaded. Historians and the general public have somewhat of a bias towards presidents who serve during America’s victorious wars. That’s why great and principled presidents such as Grover Cleveland (a personal fave) don’t rank higher than, say, Woodrow Wilson, who was essentially a disaster as a president.
Whatever one thinks of Reagan’s domestic policies, he will be remembered as the man who presided over the West’s final victory over the Soviet empire. That will elevate him in the public imagination, and many historians will grit their teeth and defer to that.