Mourning in America

Ronald Reagan died a little more than a week ago. His death has brought back to life for many a remarkable era that began in 1981, raged in full for eight years, and for many practical and political reasons has continued until this day.

For the past week, American flags all across Virginia and the nation have been flown at half-staff in remembrance of this great man. The official observances are now over. But our peoples’ spirits will remain high as we continue recalling the extraordinary optimism Reagan brought with him to the White House and instilled in all. It was an optimism that would never fade.

Reagan entered his presidency after a string of less-than-successful ones – those of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter – and in ’81 the odds were against his being any better. America was in turmoil on both its domestic and foreign policy fronts. We were slumped at home under the weight of a repressive economic malaise, beset by double-digit inflation and high interest rates, and for a year we’d watched nightly, helplessly on television the crisis surrounding the Americans held hostage in Iran.

But it soon became apparent, at home and abroad, that America was under a new and different kind of management. Reagan had a presence about him that resonated and was respected. He also had a pragmatism that complemented his optimism, a combination that almost guaranteed a certain level of presidential success, all else being equal.

His pragmatism was honed during his days as California’s governor. He rode into Sacramento having had no more elected experience than his six straight wins and seven years as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a leftist Hollywood union. As governor, Reagan faced a Democratic state legislature and a $200 million budget deficit left by his predecessor. He immediately reached out to the assembly’s controlling Democrat, legendary House Speaker Jess Unruh, and established common cause. Within about two weeks of his inaugural, Reagan boosted income and sales taxes by about $1 billion, taking pressure off skyrocketing local real estate taxes while giving the state enough money to pay its bills and fund its core services. Years later, he issued tax refunds.

When Reagan hit Washington, he did the same thing. He reached out to House Speaker Tip O’Neill, an old-style Boston liberal, and tapped their common Irish heritage to acknowledge gentlemanly their differences and become allies when possible. Oh, to be sure, Reagan and O’Neill had their front-page battles, such as those over welfare reform and Reagan’s ’82 tax cuts, but they enjoyed a mutual respect and worked together in years ahead to even raise taxes a few times to offset growing deficits.

Yes, it was Reagan’s conservative-but-pragmatic domestic policies that helped pull our economy from the doldrums and produce a nearly unprecedented period of growth and prosperity. He was a man, and his was a time, defined first by his rock-ribbed conservative “Time to Choose” speech for Barry Goldwater at the ’64 GOP convention and later by the Milton Friedman, laissez-faire “Free to Choose” economic principles he enacted as president.

It was a principle and pragmatism to which America responded, first its voters and then both its workers and consumers. His leadership was evident, and his presidency would instill a new pride across the land. Shortly after he took office, people were already feeling it was “Morning in America,” and that was long before his ’84 reelection campaign theme would intone such.

Across the seas, Reagan was seen as the great cold warrior who’d succeeded in rebuilding America’s military and reaffirming, without question, our nation’s standing in the world. He continued Harry Truman’s policy of containment and simultaneously preached peace through strength, only to see such peace materialize when the Russian bear backed down, communism fell, and Eastern European nations became free and democratic.

Perhaps the most vivid and symbolic images of Reagan’s foreign policy successes were his ’87 Berlin demand to the Russian president – “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – and that very wall’s bulldozing just two years later. This was the same Gorbachev, mind you, with whom Reagan had met in Reykjavic the year before his Berlin speech and brokered what at the time was the most significant reduction in nuclear missile stockpiles.

The Ronald Reagan America got was the one it’d hoped for in 1980. That was when so many Catholics, Southern Baptists, and traditionally Democratic blue-collar workers came together in an unprecedented way to elect the former Hollywood actor, union chief, and governor. It also was that same coalition – and a heck of a lot more – that would stick with him four years later and give him a landslide victory for a second term. Today, Reagan is one of only a dozen presidents to have served eight years.

Reagan was a candidate and president who brought millions of new voters into the Republican Party. The same infectious optimism that bolstered a nation jolted awake a party that’d suffered an overly long hangover from the failed Nixon presidency. He added to the party’s base a generation of unmolded twenty-somethings and several generations of disenchanted, conservative Democrats. Many from that broad-based coalition that first delivered Reagan the White House are still active in the party today.

Reagan, at 69, was the oldest man ever to be elected president, and at 93 he lived longer than any former chief executive. Somehow, the length of his life seems fitting for a great man who did so much.

A grateful nation we are. A nation in mourning we are, too.