- In death as in life, Ronald Reagan's sense of timing
and theatre did not fail him. His final goodbye could not have come at
a better moment for his party and the embattled man who would remain president.
George Bush has not hesitated to bathe himself in the afterglow of his
hero's last act. If you log on to the Bush/Cheney re-election site, georgewbush.com,
the home page has replaced all reference to Bush or Cheney with a single
image: Ronald Reagan.
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- The semiotics are blunt: Bush equals Reagan. But as much
as George Bush would like you to think that he is the heir to the legacy
of Ronald Reagan, and as much as there are points of similarity, the comparison
does not stand up to closer inspection.
-
- Reagan's presidency coalesced around two big ideas. Cut
taxes massively and defeat a global evil. On the surface, George Bush's
presidency pivots around the same ideas. He's hoping that if his surrogates
say it enough, people will absorb it as the truth. But just as Lloyd Bensen
once told a presumptuous Dan Quayle, "I knew Jack Kennedy ... and
you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy," the American people knew the great
communicator and they know George Bush is no Ronald Reagan.
-
- When Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an "evil
empire", it was a dramatic, grand gesture. Finally a US president
introduced moral clarity to the cold war, after decades of accommodation
and stalemate.
-
- But he did not follow by preparing to invade East Germany.
Reagan may have sounded like a cowboy, but he acted like a diplomat. Dispatching
George Shultz to Moscow countless times was the embodiment of the doctrine
"walk softly and carry a big stick".
-
- Reagan spent the Soviets into submission with the backing
of the greatest coalition the world has ever known, NATO, and eventually
ended half a century of world-threatening enmity at the Reykjavik summit
without a shot being fired.
-
- The pretender to Reagan's legacy sounded like a cowboy
when he lashed out at the "axis of evil" in his 2002 state of
the union address and then proceeded to act like one. He had been preparing
for war for two years before he made the speech.
-
- While Reagan deftly used diplomacy to dismantle the Soviet
Union, Bush scoffed at the notion in his rush to war, and in so doing dismantled
relations with NATO allies that had taken decades to cement.
-
- While the Soviet Union's expansionism was axiomatic,
its repression of freedom irrefutable, Iraq's evil was contained. Its threat
to the world was an invention in the service of political ambition, a dangerous
diversion from the stated goal, the global war on terror.
-
- And while we are still negotiating how to destroy the
hundreds of nuclear missiles in the former Soviet Union, we have yet to
find WMD of any kind in Iraq.
-
- Since Bush is inviting the comparison to Reagan, lets
indulge him further. The results are not favourable when you stand the
great communicator next to Mr Malaprop. Reagan's one-liners are legendary;
they filled a book with Bush's garbled utterances.
-
- Reagan's optimistic oratory had a way of carrying even
an audience ideologically opposed to him. Watching a Bush speech, on the
other hand, is like watching a car crash in slow motion. You know something
horrible is about to happen to the English language, but you cannot look
away.
-
- The one area where Bush does faithfully mimic Reagan
is not something to crow about. Besides being the great communicator, Reagan
was of course the great tax cutter, for the rich that is.
-
- He ran up the greatest budget deficit this nation has
ever known, until George W came along.
-
- In the end Reagan will be remembered most for his sense
of political theatre. No president, Democrat or Republican has come close
to Reagan's way with stagecraft. He was famously more concerned with how
his picture looked on the front page than with how the text around it read.
-
- And so it was again this week. The perfectly flag-draped
casket shoved ugly headlines on Bush White House torture memorandums to
the side or below the fold. This week the picture trumped what would have
been the lead story.
-
- But, once President Reagan is laid to rest and the eulogies
are delivered, politics will return to normal once again. Bush is hoping
the ghost of the Gipper will yet rescue him from political oblivion, win
one more for the GOP.
-
- But by November that may just be wishful thinking. President
Bush will stand or fall on his own record, and that picture isn't a pretty
one.
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- - Philip James is a former senior Democratic party strategist.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1236675,00.html
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