Is it already Monday? The weekend just flew by again, and I had a three day weekend. Let’s get started with a Monday open thread.
But they don’t have to. Here are three ways that progressives can take back the political debate by turning the Reagan legacy on its head:
1.Reagan had a big-spending economic stimulus plan. It’s true. As noted in the book, the economic turnaround of the 1980s had little or nothing to do with Reagan’s income tax cut that was heavily weighted to the rich but was instead the result of other factors, including the tight money policies of then-Fed chairman Paul Volcker (now an Obama adviser) and a global collapse of oil prices. But there was something else: Reagan also created thousands upon thousands of new jobs across America with a spending program that caused the federal deficit to skyrocket. It was called the Reagan defense buildup.
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2.Reagan would not have allowed many of the terror tactics started by Bush and Cheney and continued in the face of pressure by the Obama administration. Don’t believe it? — let me count the ways:
A) Reagan was a staunch opponent of torture by Americans, signing in 1988 the International Convention Against Torture, which said “[n]o exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”
B) The official policy of the Reagan administration was civilian trials for terrorists, as elaborated in a speech by the official overseeing the policy, Paul Bremer (yes, THAT Paul Bremer) who said in 1987 “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law against them.”
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3.Obama can best honor Ronald Reagan in this centennial year not by another statue, but by continuing to work toward the grand goal that the 40th president and the 44th president both share: Ridding the world of nuclear weapons.