Reagan was thought, with good reason, to be an empty-headed old buffoon, a silly, hollow suit in the White House. This was thought of him by many people both foreign and domestic.
Irbis wrote:Gaidin wrote:For all of Iran-Contra and the crapshoots that happen during any given presidency, Reagan did have a legitimate presidency.
I am sorry, I don't consider poisoning the whole planet by 'greed is good, deregulate' mentality as shining success. Then, you have him (as you pointed out) illegally support genocidal right wingers all over the world, illegally invaded several countries, created Taliban, and give jumpstart to USA being corrupted by cancer of colossal military-industrial complex spending more than the rest of the world combined. All while ballooning US debt.
Stop. Think.
Gaidin isn't saying Reagan did a good job, or even an adequate job! He's saying he had
legitimacy.
The American people voted him into office expecting him to do certain things, he did those things. They were bad things, but he did more-or-less faithfully carry out policies that he and his supporters (including some intellectuals with real graduate degrees, inexplicably) had settled on and
thought (I still can't understand why) would be good for the country.
Almost every other president the United States has ever had did a better, or rather a less-bad, job than Ronald Reagan in my opinion. But Reagan
did show appropriate conduct in public, generally refrained from turning American politics into a circus, and in general managed to at least sort-of kind-of carry out the duties of his office. He carried them out
badly, he carried them out in ways that were based on skewed, stupid policies and ill-informed worldview. but he didn't let sheer raging immaturity prevent him from even attempting to carry them out at all.
None of this is impressive. Please try to comprehend that what I and others are saying is NOT the same "Reagan was the greatest president ever!" crap you're apparently expecting all Americans to deliver at every opportunity. Indeed, Reagan was one of the
worst presidents the US has ever had in my opinion.
But he was a bad president in the sense that a bad lawyer loses your case by delivering unpersuasive speeches.
Trump would be a bad president in the sense that a bad lawyer loses your case by showing up to court drunk and dropping his pants in the courtroom.
What part of the above strikes you as legitimate, exactly?
My poli-sci 100 professor said that the 'legitimacy' of a government had two parts.
One part is being 'responsive:' does the government do what the people tell it to? The other is being 'responsible:' does the government make actual attempts to deal with the situations it's supposed to deal with?
The Reagan administration was 'responsive' in that it did what voters were telling it to do. Those voters were fools for voting for Reagan... but they
did vote for Reagan, knowing what he said he was going to do. And even reelected him, and elected his vice-president in 1988 to put the icing on the cake.
The Reagan administration was not 'responsible' in the sense of doing the RIGHT things in response to the problems of the 1980s... but it still DID things. It didn't just entirely ignore problems and abdicate its responsibilities and blame the opposing party for everything. It did what it sincerely (wrongly) thought it should do, what it had told everyone it was going to do. It made everything or nearly everything
worse in countless ways... but it did in fact take actions and claim responsibility for the results. Mostly.
Thus, while the Reagan administration was
bad, it was not 'illegitimate' in the sense that a bunch of unelected squatters moving into the White House would be illegitimate. Or in the sense that a military coup of unelected generals running the country would be illegitimate. Or in the sense that a president who simply threw up their hands and spent all their time playing table tennis would lose legitimacy.
Simon_Jester wrote:Reagan, at least, had a measure of dignity. As long as politicians show some dignity and refrain from childishly mocking their opponents, then there are limits to how far they can fall apart even if they're wrong about policy issues.
Dignity? He had only as much dignity as he could fake by acting. He was the clown who joked about delegalizing Soviet Union and launching all missiles on TV. He also authored Able Archer 83, operation that looked so close to what NATO would do to launch sudden first strike, without any warning, that Soviets raised all units to Defcon 1 equivalent. All it would take during these two critical periods to launch full scale nuclear war would be something like freak meteorite strike or military communication failure.
Does that strike you as someone who ever bothers to think about possible consequences of what he yaps about?
Reagan's foreign policy was staggeringly incompetent and he had literally no concept of how to handle or interact with the Soviets, and he could have gotten us all killed because he was an idiot. It was fortunate for the US that the US could afford the military buildup he arranged, and that the Soviet Union was conveniently starting to unravel, during his time in office. Neither of those factors was his doing.
But you're dodging the point. Able Archer 83 was incredibly poorly advised, but that reflects on whether Reagan was a good president or a bad one, not on whether he was such a clown that he was unable to be a president at all.
I never want to see the day America has
yet another president as bad as Reagan. But Trump would, amazingly, manage to be worse in important ways.
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Zaune wrote:I think the point that Simon's trying to make is that however bad a job Reagan may have done as President, he did an infinitely better job of it than Donald Euphemism-For-A-Fart is going to do in the hopefully unlikely event he wins.
Channel72 wrote:Can we just agree that Reagan was ... less of a circus sideshow than Trump? That's essentially what Simon seems to be saying. Of course, any extended formal defense of that notion will inevitably lead to stumbling around, grasping for evidence of Reagan's "stateliness" - but I think most people, in general, when shown a random selection of Reagan footage vs. a random selection of Trump footage would at least instictively think "okay, Reagan behaves more like a typical US President", whereas Trump could very well be at home on an episode of Jerry Springer.
Thanas wrote:That I have no problem with, Reagan was a trained actor after all.
Channel and Zaune have very accurately represented my point, between them.
There are a number of metrics by which we can judge whether someone is 'presidential.' I can't think of a single such metric on which Trump scores higher than Reagan, even though Reagan himself would score below average on nearly every one of them.
And in my mind there is some dividing line between a "serious presidency" and a "farcical presidency."
In my eyes, Reagan managed (perhaps by virtue of his acting skills, perhaps because it was a more sober time) to stay mostly above the line. That didn't make him in any way a good president; I can't think of two presidencies that caused more long term harm to the US off the top of my head. But he at least passed
one of the many, many standards to which we should hold our presidents.
Trump would, based on his conduct and words, fail this same standard. And of course at the same time he'd be failing all the same ones Reagan failed.
