Word: reagan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reading through Reagan's speeches, from "The California Years" to "Farewell Address to the Nation," you have to wade through a lot of bullshit. But hidden beneath the hyperbole and right-wing paranoia is an important message for liberals. Although Reagan really is clueless and mendacious, he levels some criticisms at contemporary liberalism that liberals are foolish to ignore...
...Reagan may have gotten the specific facts wrong, but he was on to something important. It wasn't the solutions he offered, but the problems he identified that won him such wide support. His speeches reveal that his true flair was tapping public discontent with the status quo, not selling his policy proposals...
Liberals consistently offered a blanket defense of a status quo that was clearly inadequate, simply because they thought Reagan's alternatives were worse. When liberals should have been honestly assessing the shortcomings of their programs and seeking to correct them, they were using Reagan's inarticulate criticisms as evidence that no problem existed...
...Government isn't the solution; it's the problem." As a candidate and a President, Ronald Reagan loved that line. But Reagan seemed simply to be indulging in harmless hyperbole or offering his version of the time-honored aphorism that government is best when it governs least. Surely he did not seriously propose to dismantle an institution that had brought the U.S. through two world wars, restored stability during the Depression and played a major part in developing one of the highest standards of living on earth...
...Washington was "the problem" when Reagan took office in 1981, it looks like a costly irrelevancy today. After almost nine years of the Reagan Revolution, Americans may wonder whether the Government -- from Congress to the White House, from the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget -- can govern at all anymore...