Word: reagan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is not a wild caricature of prevailing liberal opinion. Liberal publications took obvious delight in exposing the falsehoods and hyperbole in Reagan's pronouncements. Mother Jones magazine even offered Reagan's Reign of Error as a subscription premium. Liberals assumed that if only people knew the facts, they would reject Reagan's simplistic demagoguery and turn to the enlightened liberal truth...
...Reagan won two elections by landslides and was replaced by his chosen successor. Is Reagan really as stupid as liberals believe? And more important, are American voters really that stupid...
...first count, liberals are mostly right. Reagan usually got the facts wrong when he railed against high taxes, Big Government, unnecessary regulations, welfare cheats, liberal hostility to religion, the communist threat, liberal softness on crime and defense--and all of his other ideological bugaboos. Sometimes he got confused. Sometimes he made stuff...
...below the surface, he was often on to something important. Although some Americans voted for Reagan out of naked self-interest (people with six-figure incomes, for example) and others voted for him out of right-wing nuttiness or foolish patriotic euphoria, there aren't enough of these people to pull off a 49-state landslide. Reagan's message must have had some broader appeal...
Unfortunately, the liberal response to Reagan's message usually went something like this. Reagan says, "There's a useless layer of bureaucracy up on top of HEW [the Department of Health, Education and Welfare]. And it costs HEW three dollars in overhead to deliver one dollar to a needy person...