Word: reaganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Potomac -- Frank Sinatra, that champion of family virtue, staging an Inauguration for his old friends Ronald, Jane Wyman's ex-husband, and Nancy, the goddaughter of a famous lesbian (the silent-screen star Alla Nazimova). We have all heard that revolutions devour their own, but how could the Reagan Revolution, of all things, end in a war against Hollywood...
...that matter, after Reagan's Feelgood Era, did the Republicans feel so terrible? It was morning after in America. George Bush was understandably puzzled, almost to the point of paralysis. He thought he had done everything right -- won the cold war, won a hot war, made a showy raid on Panama, brought down the yellow ribbons, brought on the victory parades. Unlike the Kennedys with Castro, Carter with Khomeini or Reagan with Gaddafi, Bush had got his man, the first tyrant to bother him -- he ran Noriega to ground in Panama's papal nunciature, tortured him with rock music...
...anything, Bush thought he was going to make up for the deficiencies of the Reagan years. He pointedly said in his early days as President that he would insist on ethical government, that he would be kinder and gentler, that he would be a "hands on" President. The contrast with laid-back Ronnie and his scandals was never very subtle. The shallow Hollywood glitz, which was useful for regaining the White House from Jimmy Carter, would be replaced by solid Republican virtues now that patrician George was in the Oval Office. The simpleminded rhetoric about an evil empire would yield...
...real surprise, given that background, is that Reagan was more flexible abroad and more attentive at home than Bush. Hollywood, it turns out, had given Reagan more real civility, even magnanimity, than Andover and Yale had bestowed on Bush. Reagan's rhetoric was simplistic but not mean. His "welfare queen" was a campaign exaggeration, but it did not rise out of the sewers of the mind that gave us a distorted history of Willie Horton. Even his opponents had to admit that Ronald Reagan was basically a nice man -- a thing harder for Bush's defenders to claim after...
What can explain these striking reversals of all reasonable expectations? The truth is that Bush, even as he tried to flail free of Reagan's absentminded embrace, remained the prisoner of his predecessor. Reaganism without Reagan is not an easy thing to sustain, and Bush's improvements just made things worse. This is evident in the three main areas of his failure...