A Totally Late Post on Reagan

When I first became aware of "the President of the United States" Reagan was in office. He was the first image of the President I ever saw.

I remember in 1984 being aghast when I learned my father voted for Reagan over Mondale. At the time, I was 6 and had already associated Democrat with good and Republican with bad. That's what happens when you grow up in Northern California. My father was a life long Democrat and for him to vote for a Republican didn't make any sense to me.

My mother exacerbated the situation by being shocked herself. She is a pretty much a yellow dog democrat and I'm sure was equally responsible for my good/bad understanding at that young age.

I went all through college pretty sure Reagan was somehow wrong about something, although everything seemed to point the other way. I mean, he did push us to victory in the Cold War without a nuclear bomb going off, an amazing (in a historical sense) feat. He spent a ton of money during the 80s, but our economy never seemed to crush under it's own weight as doomsdayers predicted.

Even now, I'm pretty sure it wasn't Reagan's doing that we are allright economically. I think it largely has to do with having a lot of smart policy experts that have guided our economy in the right direction the past 20 years. Even so, if Clinton deserves credit for being fiscally smart - which he does....Reagan deserves credit for creating the environment in which Clinton thrived, ie the post-cold war happy go lucky world, which we will forever associate with the 1990s.

And he's still not my type of guy, Reagan. He must be somehow responsible for poor schools, or some of the underfunding of social services, or the arts, or something. But as he passed away, as with Nixon, I always feel this sense of history and solidarity with what it means to have a President of a political system of which I'm really proud of, despite it's problems. We don't have a king, kaiser, furur, or someone we're forced to like. In fact, we usually have someone we put under constant scrutiny and question all their decisions, support some, don't support others, and then we move on to someone else, a little more or a little less qualified. But when you put all those people and the times in which they were elected President together, they make up the history of our country and symbolize something larger than themselves - the system and the people they represented. And something about that is pretty cool.