Why Reagan is a legend

If the Commonwealth had to pick a hero, Ronald Reagan would be a good choice. After all, it was President Reagan who conferred U.S. citizenship on the island folks, an act that has been followed by a gravy train of sweet moolah that puts the financial sucrose in the term Uncle Sugar.

Of course, if you go anywhere near the English-language media, they have soured the sweetness of Reagan’s dignified stature by grinding in into mush with the millstones of Posthumous Saturation Coverage. Among all the romp in the pomp, though, I’ve gotten a lot of email questions from foreign readers, many of them workers or managers on Saipan, who are trying to gauge the American psyche on this matter. Namely, this: “What’s the deal with Ronald Reagan? Why was he so popular?”

Well, that’s a fair question. Let me see if I can cook up a fair answer.

You can’t separate a man from his times, and Reagan secured the presidency in really bleak times for the United States. Not bleak as in crisis of Great Depression or WWII proportions, but bleak as in a vague and all encompassing despair, like a wet blanket had settled over the nation and was slowly smothering everyone’s hopes. President Jimmy Carter just wasn’t hitting the right buttons there in the Oval Office.

Inflation was roaring out of control, and I remember well those double-digit interest rates and the obscene, wealth-depleting costs of my parents’ mortgage and car payments as they sweat the bills each month.

A gas crisis hit, and was countered with total incompetence.

And on the geopolitical stage, a handful of rag-tag Iranian yahoos holding U.S. hostages managed to geld Uncle Sam, while Carter looked like a deer frozen in headlights.

No disrespect intended to Mr. Carter, since he is a man of great intelligence and character. He just had lousy luck in Washington. And he had no knack for economics.

Still, lousy luck is, well, lousy, and economics is mighty unforgiving of messing up, and any way you looked at it back then, U.S. policy—economic, military, whatever—was an utter disaster. Want to understand Reagan’s popularity? You have to understand this first. It’s a context thing.

And then Ronald Reagan appeared and he turned things around. The smothering blanket was lifted. The sun came out. Things got better. That’s what happened. The details don’t matter.

Meanwhile, consider that TV is the center of life in the USA, where the average American now watches 5.3 hours per day (yes, per DAY) of television. Reagan wasn’t the first TV president, but he was the best. He was telegenic. He was poised. He had an obvious sense of humor. He was dignified, but not stuffy, not cocky, not glib, not pompous. He seemed bigger than the title of President, not the other way around.

He seemed bigger than life, really, which is why so many people were so shaken a few days ago when they found that he wasn’t.

Personally, there were some Reagan policies that I did not mesh with. Not everyone in his administration was on my warm-and-fuzzy list. But, so what? He was still a great among greats. In fact, in contemplating the man’s legacy, perhaps the best reflection on him is who his shrill and vocal enemies are. If screeching neurotics, child molesters, and welfare queens go apoplectic at the mention of his name…well….that puts points in Reagan’s favor right there.

Ronald Reagan is an American legend, who was legendarily good to the people of the Commonwealth, too.