The real Reagan

In response to Krista Lafree’s column on Barack Obama titled “He’s not Reagan,” I can only assume that she was not yet born when Reagan was president, because she seems to have accepted the gauzy Fox News image of the “Gipper.” I was around then, so let me tell you what it was like.

Reagan was disengaged as president; his White House aides pretty much ran the government. This eventually led to the Iran Contra scandal, which Reagan claimed to know nothing about. Given his level of disengagement, he was probably telling the truth.

Reagan talked about family values but had poor relationships with his children and seldom attended church. His knowledge of the issues was shallow; he often read from cue cards, and his press conferences were over-rehearsed, staged events.

He refused to address the growing AIDS crisis until his own son confronted his inaction. And he launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, talking about “states’ rights” (code for reassuring white Southerners).

Reagan’s campaigns were long on show, short on substance, and he ushered in the era of the “photo-op” presidency, from which we still suffer. His economic policies made the rich richer and the poor poorer, and he called public-assistance recipients “welfare queens.” He had little interest in environmental protection and once said that trees cause air pollution!

Obama was the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review; Reagan was a student leader at Eureka College in Illinois. Not even a close comparison.

You’re right: Obama is no Reagan, and let’s all be thankful for that! The ’80s were an era of greed, corruption and indifference to the less fortunate, followed by a stock-market crash. Sound familiar? Seems to me the more accurate comparison would have been with George W. Bush.

Ron White
IU faculty