Remembering Nancy

What I remember about Nancy Reagan is how vicerally she was hated by the left.  They called her Queen Nancy simply because the Reagans reintroduced decorum into the White House functions.  State dinners replaced Fritz and Grits and Rockabilly music.  When she grew protective of Ronald’s travelling after his attempted assassination, consulting an astrologer at one point, the media gleefully howled about how she had given up Christianity.  When in 1994, five years after he’d been in office, they announced that he had beginnings of Alzheimers, apparently ABC began a high effort of investigative journalism to find evidence that RR had Alzheimers while in office.  This was related by George Stephanopoulos at the time of his funeral.  Evidently they couldn’t find anything.  I’ve never seen a sensational report on this.

            So why did the Reagan’s get to be so petulantly hated?  Why was ABC still trying to dig up dirt on them 15 years after he’d been in office?  William Safire of the NY Times wrote about this just after Reagan’s term.  He said that if you, as a member of an opposition party, can hold your head high while your opponent is in office, they are no threat.  That is, if you can continue to say, ‘we wuz right all along’, then your opponent is no big deal.  But there is nothing more embarrassing in politics than predicting a disastrous result of your opponent’s actions, and then having just the opposite occur.  And so Reagan came in with supply side economics and cut taxes, saying that the government would receive actually more revenue.  The Democrats predicted huge deficits.  Instead, revenue swelled, the deficits, engineered by the Democrat Congress, held steady.  Reagan said he was going to “get the government off the people’s backs” by deregulation.  Instead of creating chaos, as the Dems warned, it created an economic boom.  He built up the military and talked tough to the Soviets.  Dems predicted we’d lose every ally and cause Vietnams all over the world. Instead communism fell.  Reagan hung tough with arms negotiations in Iceland and a year later, Russia capitulated entirely.  The doubling of the GDP, the end of the cold war, the satisfied Americans with conservatism in the 80’s just made the Democrats wild with anger. Instead of the country being worn out by Reagan’s policies, by 1988 they elected George Bush by a landslide.  Only when Clinton completely rethought the Democrat ideals and was a centrist did the Dems win again, but it wasn’t satisfying to the ardent leftists.  I think it still haunts the Dems today who have gone way way left with Obama and his executive fiats, hold everything to be Bush’s fault.  Some of it is displaced hatred for Reagan.

            I think this is well worth remembering as they will inevitably review Nancy Reagan’s life. The journalists who grew up in the seventies amid the free drugs and free love hippies, found no utopia in Watergate. It ended in drug dependency and venereal disease and advocacy journalism that inadvertently spawned FOX News.  The President who just wanted to get us back to the things that had made our country exceptional and his wife who just wanted a Dolly Madison re-do of the White House and Just Say No to drugs, ended up changing the country for over a generation.  Their lives still echo today.