Differing Opinions about the Gipper*

Sunday was Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday.

Up to now, the former U.S. president and champion of small government has been a controversial figure — now he’s even a role model for Barack Obama.

Widow Nancy will appropriately lay a wreath in front of the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. Air Force jets will do a flyover salute. During halftime at the Super Bowl, a video will be devoted to him. His son Ron, meanwhile, will provide the furor since he revealed in a memoir that his father suffered from Alzheimer’s disease while he was still in the Oval Office.

Reagan would have celebrated his 100th birthday last Sunday. Plenty of buzz. The newspaper columns are full of essays; Obama will give a speech, if only a brief one. Time called Reagan a role model, meaning that Obama is trying in many ways to emulate the former president.

When ex-California Gov. Reagan was elected president, he was ridiculed by many as an aging movie actor who wanted to dabble in politics almost as if the Oval Office were just another Hollywood set. During the recession, unemployment rose, his popularity plummeted and Republicans were punished at the first midterm elections. Then the economy improved, and with the slogan “Morning in America,” the Gipper (a nickname he inherited because of a film role he once played) became a happy optimist. When he left office in 1989, he was second only to Franklin D. Roosevelt in popularity.

Little wonder then that Obama diligently studied that chapter in history hoping to get a few pointers for his own comeback. During Christmas vacation in Hawaii, he read the 800-page Reagan biography written by Lou Cannon, something his staff promptly trumpeted from the rooftops. Recently, he said something in USA Today that sounded almost like repentance. He said that as a student he was strongly opposed to the conservatives but that Reagan’s world leadership role was just as indisputable as his talent for communicating with America.

Playing with Fire

No matter. Opinions about Reagan will always differ. It was Reagan who called the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire” and put billions into defense in order to bankrupt it. Many Democrats see him as a Cold War warrior who was playing with fire, but it’s striking how colorful the black-and-white pictures painted of him become in reality. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz says anti-Communism was at the core of Reagan’s belief, but it was that same Reagan who quickly understood how serious Gorbachev’s offer of perestroika was and responded with his call to tear down the Berlin Wall. Walter Mondale compared him to a dog whose bark was worse than his bite, saying that Reagan was quite cautious in reality. Others simply see him as lucky Ron, in the right place at the right time when the Soviet Union began to implode.

What concerns Americans the most about the Reagan era is not the fall of the Berlin Wall but rather the paradigm shift that took place during the ‘80s. Reagan opposed the concept of government as a player, something that had been symbolized by Roosevelt’s New Deal. Reagan preached that government was the problem, not the solution. To this day, Republicans like John Boehner and Mitt Romney worship him like a saint because of that.

Upon closer inspection, however, even that looks more like a myth. Reagan’s armaments buildup program ran concurrent with his rhetoric about economizing so that government spending as a portion of GDP sank only from 22 percent to 21 percent. Meanwhile, the national debt tripled.

*Translator’s Note: The concepts and some of the phraseology in the German language original from which this translation was done appear to have been taken directly from an article originally published in English on mcclatchy.com but the Austrian newspaper, der Standard, does not acknowledge that fact.