MB Civic

Alterman in The Nation ..

It struck me as a rather outlandish note of brainless fealty to myth when, in 1999, one of the former president’s earliest hagiographers, Dinesh D’Souza, wrote, Jesus-people style, “We simply need to ask in every situation that arises, What would Reagan have done?” This was two years after Grover Norquist began his Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which succeeded in renaming Washington National Airport after Reagan and then went on to campaign for a significant public work to bear Reagan’s name in all fifty states and something—anything—after him in all of America’s 3,054 counties. The success of this project—not merely in naming stuff but in reversing the nation’s memory of that presidency—is breathtaking. As author Will Bunch reminds us, Reagan’s current high standing in polls of ex-presidents is a recent phenomenon. While a 2010 CNN poll about presidents of the past fifty years put Reagan just behind Clinton and JFK, his ratings while in office would have also put him behind Eisenhower, LBJ and the first Bush. “Shortly after Reagan left office,” Bunch notes, “several polls found even the much-maligned Jimmy Carter to be more popular.”

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