Ronald Reagan and the Soul of the Democratic Party

Here's what Obama said:

I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times...I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

WaPO, quoting Barack Obama

First, that's counterfactual history, a fantasy created by the Reagan mythologizers.  But I don't want to make this diary too long, so I'll move past that for now.

I was alive in the 1960s and 1970s.  I was 15 years old in 1970, and quite politically aware throughout the 1970s and had been since about 1967.  

I am six years older than Barack Obama, but we have totally different views on the 60s and 70s.  Those "excesses" to which he refers include the civil rights movement, the beginnings of affirmative action, the women's rights movement, the Native American movement, the Latino movements, farm workers struggles led by Cesar Chavez, the environmental movement, the GLBT liberation movements, the fight against the Vietnam War, workers movements ... .

The government had grown and grown.  But that was a good thing: Medicare, Medicaid, anti-poverty programs, the expansion of higher education and student loan programs, the "war on poverty," the creation of the EPA in the early 70s, OSHA ... .

Before the 1960s, most working class childdren did not go to college.  Financial aid (Pell Grants (Sen. Claiborne Pell (D.R.I.) and others) were created by Democrats who expanded governement.  Reagan opposed all these expansions.

The Government had grown and grown to help Americans.  LBJ's Great Society, while not perfect, was a logical continuation of the New Deal.  

"I was born in 1953. Like the rest of my generation, I took the America I grew up in for granted – in fact, like many in my generation I railed against the very real injustices of our society, marched against the bombing of Cambodia, went door to door for liberal candidates. It's only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation's history."

The Great Compression: The middle-class society I grew up in didn't evolve gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic historians call what happened the Great Compression, and it's a seminal episode in American history.

Middle class America: That's the country I grew up in. It was a society without extremes of wealth or poverty, a society of broadly shared prosperity, partly because strong unions, a high minimum wage, and a progressive tax system helped limit inequality.

The great divergence: Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We're no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared: between 1979 and 2005 the real income of the median household rose only 13 percent, but the income of the richest 0.1% of Americans rose 296 percent.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Liberal.

As may be apparent, Barack Obama's remarks pissed me off personally.  I understand he has a strategy of triangulating against "baby boomers," hippies, LIBERALS, and progressive activists.  The age thing always amused me, since Barack is 45 or 46.  

And it is no accident that he chose Ronald Reagan as an example.  Those Republican voters he seeks hear quite well the message.  So do I.

I'll begin with David Bonior's full remarks, remarks with which I competely concur

Senator Obama was wrong -- frightfully so -- in using Ronald Reagan as an example of voters reaching for change.

The breadth of change Ronald Reagan brought was crippling for millions of Americans with the two worst recessions since the Depression, a complete disregard for the rights of American labor, and tax cuts that lined the pockets of the richest Americans at the expense of fiscal sanity and the well-being of the most vulnerable in our society.

"Senator Obama may have been more interested in contrasting Reagan with Bill Clinton, but it shows particularly bad judgment to suggest this is the kind or even the breadth of change Americans want. Instead of lauding Ronald Reagan, Senator Obama would do better to remember that it was presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy who helped move this country forward."

Edwards Campaign Statement On Senator Obama's Comments On President Reagan

Who is David Bonior and what does he know about Ronald Regan?  

Bonior was a Democratic member of the Michigan State House of Representatives from 1973 to 1976. In 1976, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Michigan's 12th District (based in Macomb County) for the 95th and to the twelve succeeding Congresses, serving from January 3, 1977 to January 3, 2003.

From 1991 to 2002, Bonior was the House Democratic Whip. He served as Majority Whip in the 102nd and 103rd Congresses. He was Minority Whip for the 104th through 107th Congresses. While the Democrats were in the majority, Bonior was the third-ranking Democrat in the House, behind the Speaker and House Majority Leader. While they were in the minority, Bonior was second-in-command behind the Minority Leader.

wikipedia

Here is George Will on David Bonior in 2002:

Baghdad Bonior  

By George Will
TownHall.com | Thursday, October 03, 2002

Hitler found ``Lord Haw Haw''--William Joyce, who broadcast German propaganda to Britain during the Second World War--in the dregs of British extremism. But Saddam Hussein finds American collaborators among senior congressional Democrats.

Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC's ``This Week'' from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam Hussein at his word, but should not take President Bush at his. McDermott, in his seventh term representing Seattle, said Iraqi officials promised him and his traveling companion, Rep. David Bonior, a 13-term Michigan Democrat, that weapons inspectors would be ``allowed to look anywhere.''

Bonior, until recently second-ranking in the House Democratic leadership, said sources no less reliable than Saddam's minions told them that inspectors will have an ``unrestricted ability to go where they want.'' McDermott said: ``I think you have to take the Iraqis on their value--at their face value.'' And: ``I think the president would mislead the American people.''

George Will, October 03, 2002

George Will considers him a traitor.  High praise in my book.

Let's go back to the Reagan era.  Bonior was a stalwart fighter against Reagan's evil wars on the Central American people:

"We are being asked to support as freedom fighters paramilitary forces who burn homes, destroy crops, who murder, who torture, who rape and kidnap innocent civilians."

Richard Reeves, Ronald Reagan, The Triumph of Imagination, quoting David Bonior

[Bonior]led the charge against Reagan-era Central America policy, particularly U.S. support for the Nicaraguan contras. Bonior, along with then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill, then-Majority Leader Jim Wright, and Reps. Edward Boland and Joe Moakley, worked closely with church groups to make the House the focal point of opposition to U.S. funding for the anti-Sandinista rebels.

National Catholic Reporter,  Oct 25, 2002  by Joe Feuerherd

I know, I know.  Some of you are too young to remember Reagan's wars in Central America.  And history classes never got that far before the end of the year.  

Here are a few links if you care to learn.  It matters.

NY Times,  Wrong From the Start; Reagan's Contra War, Reagan's Failure, February 7, 1988

In 1986, Vietnam veteran Charlie Liteky laid his Congressional Medal of Honor at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. He wrote a letter to then-President Ronald Reagan saying he was returning the medal in protest of US support for right wing death squads in Central America, such as the Contras in Nicaragua.

In Vietnam, Litkey was a US Army chaplain who saved some 20 US soldiers. During the 1980s, Liteky spent extensive time in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and el Salvador. He was an organizer of the first ever protest at the US Army School of the Americas, which trained many of the paramilitary leaders in Central America.

Charles Liteky - Congressional Medal of Honor Winner, Reagan Was An Accomplice to the Death of Literally Thousands and Thousands of People

That will get you started, if you give a damn.  You all know how to google.  The lives of those people in Central America murdered and tortured by the Reagan administration have just as much value as the Americanos who read this blog.  War crimes were committed against humanity by that administration and we ignore it, just as many ignore the crimes of Bush today.  The Constitution (Iran/Contra) was subverted by Ronald Reagan, just as Bush does today.

Let's take a not-so-fond look back at the Reagan years.  How about the struggle against apartheid:

Allied with Apartheid: Reagan Supported Racist South African Gvt
Throughout his presidency, Reagan supported the apartheid government in South Africa and even labeled Nelson Mandela's African National Congress a notorious terrorist organization.

Democracy Now

Domestically, he opposed every legislative remedy for African Americans, betraying a meanness of spirit and an open racism. As Sidney Blumenthal wrote in The Guardian in 2003:

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it "humiliating to the South"), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house," he said, "he has a right to do so."

After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: "I believe in states' rights."

snip

Reagan, then, wasn't following party tradition; he was making a grab for the white racist vote—and it worked. Southern Democrats abandoned the party en masse for one more welcoming to white supremacy. No wonder so many loved, and still love, the man: He validated people's whiteness.

TomPaine.com

Let's look at what Reagan did to working people:

Labor Leader Assails Reagan Over 'Union-Busting' Tactics

Published: August 16, 1981

'We are not going to be silent witnesses of our own destruction,'' said Jim Baker, Region 6 director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

NY Times

They were not slient, but they witnessed the beginnings of the destruction of the labor movement.

Republican presidents never have had much regard for unions, which almost invariably have opposed their election. But until Reagan, no GOP president had dared to challenge labor's firm legal standing, gained through Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-1930s.

snip

He waged almost continuous war against organized labor.

snip

Reagan's war on labor began in the summer of 1981, when he fired 13,000 striking air traffic controllers and destroyed their union. As Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson noted, that was "an unambiguous signal that employers need feel little or no obligation to their workers, and employers got that message loud and clear -- illegally firing workers who sought to unionize, replacing permanent employees who could collect benefits with temps who could not, shipping factories and jobs abroad."

Reagan gave dedicated union foes direct control of the federal agencies that were designed originally to protect and further the rights and interests of workers and their unions.

Ronald Reagan's War on labor

Mario Cuomo on Reagan at the 1984 Democratic National Convention:

It's an old story. It's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans -- The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. "The strong" -- "The strong," they tell us, "will inherit the land."

We Democrats believe in something else.

We democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees -- wagon train after wagon train -- to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and native Americans -- all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America. For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.

snip

Now for 50 years -- for 50 years we Democrats created a better future for our children, using traditional Democratic principles as a fixed beacon, giving us direction and purpose, but constantly innovating, adapting to new realities: Roosevelt's alphabet programs; Truman's NATO and the GI Bill of Rights; Kennedy's intelligent tax incentives and the Alliance for Progress; Johnson's civil rights; Carter's human rights and the nearly miraculous Camp David Peace Accord.

We believe in a single -- We believe in a single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any speech that I could write what a proper government should be: the idea of family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another's pain, sharing one another's blessings -- reasonably, honestly, fairly, without respect to race, or sex, or geography, or political affiliation.

Mario Matthew Cuomo, 1984 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address, "A Tale of Two Cities"

Jesse Jackson in 1984:

This Administration has made life more miserable for the poor. Its attitude has been contemptuous. Its policies and programs have been cruel and unfair to working people. They must be held accountable in November for increasing infant mortality among the poor. In Detroit one of the great cities of the western world, babies are dying at the same rate as Honduras, the most underdeveloped nation in our hemisphere. This Administration must be held accountable for policies that have contributed to the growing poverty in America.

snip

Mr. Reagan will ask us to pray, and I believe in prayer. I have come to this way by the power of prayer. But then, we must watch false prophecy.

He cuts energy assistance to the poor, cuts breakfast programs from children, cuts lunch programs from children, cuts job training from children, and then says to an empty table, "Let us pray." Apparently, he is not familiar with the structure of a prayer. You thank the Lord for the food that you are about to receive, not the food that just left. I think that we should pray, but don't pray for the food that left. Pray for the man that took the food to leave. We need a change. We need a change in November.

Jesse Jackson, 1984 Democratic National Convention Address

I could go on and on.  Reagan led directly to George Bush II.  The evil began by Ronald Reagan found fruition in the despotic rule of George Bush II.  

John Edwards correctly rejects Senator Obama's framing:

"When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people," said Edwards.

"He was openly – openly – intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country. He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment."

"I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change."

cbsnews

I am a Democrat.  I oppose all Ronald Reagan stands for.  The only excess there was in the 1960s and 1970s was an excess of fear.  The Democratic Party failed to go far enough in creating a just society.  But that's not what Obama meant.  He accepted and perpetuated a pernicious myth about Reagan.

I apologize for the rant, but this is personal to me.  I don't rant much, but this one deserves a rant.

If you believe in transforming the Democratic Party, contribute today at
http://www.johnedwards.com/

What Teddy Kennedy said in 1980 is just as true today:

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.