In Praise of Reagan

Well, sort of.

The context is the perennial question (recently raised again by Harry Reid) of whether Bush really is the Worst President Ever. Matt Yglesias, taking issue with Reid, made the astonishing claim that Bush was "somewhat better than Ronald Reagan"; Mark Schmitt smacked him down. Josh Marshall, agreeing with Schmitt, put his finger on the fundamental difference between the two:

Reagan had the ability, simply, to change his mind. You might say it's the ability to allow the facts to overcome your mind or as our secular saint, President Lincoln, put it, far more eloquently, the ability to 'disenthrall ourselves.'

And that is an ability the current occupant of the White House entirely lacks -- a fact which is on display now as he again crosses the country arguing that black is white and up is down.

President Bush represents something different from the normal sloshing back and forth between liberalism and conservatism. He's a radical. He's set on a destructive course, laced with corruption and fed by extremism. And he mistakenly believes that stubborness and ignorance constitute a virtue he calls 'leadership'.

I don't think there's much question that President Bush is the most conservative president in modern American history. But the issue is not his conservatism; it's his radicalism and destructiveness, his willingness to wreck the state. 'Worst ever' covers a lot of ground. But I think there's a good argument to be made that he is.

God knows I'm no fan of Reagan...but I think we have to give him credit for this (for, e.g., raising taxes when it became necessary to do so, or acknowledging that Gorbachev was a very different person from his predecessors) if we are to understand exactly how bad--how radical, how dogmatic, how far removed from reality--Bush has proven to be.

[That's all, folks]