Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (24 page)

Columnists sneered that Bush was the biggest “overprivileged frat moron to appear in the public eye since star-spangled superdunce Dan Quayle,”
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and that if Bush could “hold his own” with Quayle, they could form the candidacy of “dumb and dumber.”
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Another columnist stated that Bush “could be considered just another Dan Quayle”—except Quayle was at least a good golfer.
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Even the highly accomplished tutu model, Ron Reagan Jr., got in on the act, scoffing that Bush was “probably the least qualified person ever to be nominated by a major party. What is his accomplishment? That he’s no longer an obnoxious drunk?” If he weren’t family, Ron Jr. would have called his father a worthless idiot, too.

The left’s single most impressive use of the “dumb” argument was against Ronald Reagan. Trying to document the widespread belief that Reagan was dumb would be like trying to document a general societal animosity toward the flu. Reagan’s stupidity was touted in late-night jokes, Broadway plays, the nation’s editorial pages, and morning TV shows. It was pervasive, unquestioned, something all cultured people simply took for granted. A lesser man would have been destroyed by the relentless attacks.

More enraging than the media’s gibes about Reagan’s stupidity were their patronizing expressions of phony concern about Reagan’s mental acuity. Reagan’s supporters were called upon to assure
New York Times
reporters that Reagan is “not a stupid person at all.”
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As with all liberal smear campaigns, eventually the slur became its own reality.

In the 1980 presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter’s reported strategy was to portray Reagan as “untested, old, dumb, simplistic, [an] actor, naive, inexperienced, Republican, right wing,”
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as
National Journal reporter
Ronald Brownstein put it. When Walter Mondale ran against Reagan four years later, Brownstein said the Mondale campaign had “dusted off” the old Carter list, dropping only the “inexperienced” charge.
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Even the
New York Times
expressed exasperation with Mondale for adopting as his sole debate strategy “calling Ronald Reagan dumb.”
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Mondale’s daughter Eleanor campaigned for her father wearing a button that said no mo’ron for president. Mondale said she was “terribly afraid about what is going to happen to this country.”
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With only slightly more nuance, Mondale himself said: “What we need is a President who’s in touch with reality.”

Former governor Edmund (Pat) Brown made the compelling point that “anybody that’s for Reagan is stupid.”
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Reagan was called an “amiable dunce” by Clark Clifford (who by contrast, was “an unctuous sleazeball,” as Andrew Ferguson put it).
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In 1982, Mike Royko wrote in the
Chicago Sun-Times:
“No matter how you look at it, Reagan has managed to goof things up in record time.”
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In a 1986 column (comparing Reagan to Muammar Qaddafi) Pete Hamill spoke of Reagan’s “fuzzyheaded political ideology” and his tendency to reduce “political thinking to dumb slogans.”
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Shortly after Reagan won the largest electoral landslide in history, Gore Vidal quipped, “President Reagan’s library burned down, both books. The tragedy was, he had not finished coloring the books.”
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In contradistinction to the anti-Reagan bile of college dropout Michael Moore, Vidal’s remark was at least a joke. It’s just that it’s always the same joke. In an attack too pointlessly complicated to quote in full here, Richard Cohen of the
Washington Post
wrote: “Picture Ronald Reagan. Okay, now picture him as a giant knee.... He really is a knee-jerk conservative.”
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University professors filled letters-to-the-editor sections with snotty jeers at stupid old Reagan, such as one that referred to “the simpleminded pronouncements of grandpa Reagan.”
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A joke popular with the liberal sect throughout the Reagan years was “George Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Ronald Reagan can’t tell the difference.”
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-

Toward the end of Reagan’s amazingly successful second term, American Enterprise Institute’s William Schneider authoritatively announced—as Schneider announces all liberal clichés—that the Reagan presidency was eight years of “simpleminded bromides.”
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There was even a Broadway play written by Garry Trudeau of
Doonesbury
fame, the theme of which was: Reagan is dumb. (When the play bombed, the failure was attributed to the Reagan character’s being too lovable.
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)

Throughout the Reagan years, opposition to any administration policy—any policy at all—never had to be explained beyond calling it dumb. Since all sophisticated people knew Reagan was stupid, the proposition that his policies were stupid because he was stupid was, ispo facto, a good argument. Republican Vin Weber (R-Minn.) objected to Reagan’s proposed education cuts by calling the cuts “dumb.” Representative Henry Gonzalez (D-Tex.) said the denial of a visa to Nicaraguan leader Tomas Borge was an example of Reagan showing his “mental senility”—as opposed to one of those other types of senility.
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When then-Senator Al Gore was campaigning for president in 1988, he attacked Vice President Bush for supporting some Reagan policies that were “unfathomably dumb.”
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Opponents of Reagan’s proposal to privatize Amtrak explained that the idea was “dumb.”
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New York Mayor Ed Koch said Reagan’s plan to eliminate federal mass-transit subsidies was “the dumbest thing I’ve heard of in years.”
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Columnist Mike Royko said that, in the opinion of “several hundred of the nation’s top scientists—physicists, engineers, mathematicians and others,” Reagan’s missile defense system was “a dumb idea.”
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And this is how liberals developed their formidable debating skills.

Another classic from the Reagan-Is-Dumb genre was an op-ed piece in the
Washington Post
attacking Reagan for his proposal to disband the Council of Economic Advisers. The article thoughtfully explained: “[N]othing is so downright dumb as the consideration President Reagan is giving to junking the Council of Economic Advisers.”
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All in all, you weren’t likely to learn much from the column if your reaction to Reagan’s proposal wasn’t already
“How in God’s name are we going to get along without the Council of Economic Advisers!”
The article included the powerful testimony from “one of the two surviving members of the CEA” who strenuously opposed the elimination of his job.

But not to lose sight of the main point, the article stressed that Reagan was dumb. His plan to eliminate the invaluable CEA reflected “a more general distaste at the White House for alternative ideas, especially from economists and academics of all kinds.” Strictly speaking, this
was
an alternative idea: Instead of having the CEA (old idea), Reagan was going to get rid of it (new idea). But whatever—Reagan’s idea of eliminating the CEA was dumb because Reagan was dumb.

Foreign dignitaries quickly adapted to the native culture by telling reporters they, too, thought Reagan was dumb.
New York Times
columnist James Reston wrote that visiting NATO officials had “no confidence” in President Reagan and questioned his “knowledge of the facts.”
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To really drive the point home, Reston noted that the foreign ministers were “highly intelligent” and “make elegant toasts.” The elegant toastmasters believed “diplomacy is an exercise in compromise,” and that “compromise is the goal.” Reagan, by contrast, “thinks it’s a struggle between winners and losers.” Scaring the wits out of liberals everywhere, Reston reported that Reagan’s “objective is to win.” And then when Reagan did win the Cold War, they said he was lucky.

It’s always the same story about delightful sophisticates sneering at Republican presidents; the actual Republican is utterly fungible. Thus, in an eerie coincidence, the
New York Times
made the shocking discovery that foreign leaders were smirking about another “dumb” Republican president seventeen years later. (The
Times
has a sensitive barometer for these things.) Maureen Dowd reported that many foreign leaders held President Bush in disdain: “Gerhard Schroder thinks that he and W. had no communication when they met, and that W. had trouble remembering his name. Tony Blair has to call Bill Clinton to find a sympathetic ear.”
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Most embarrassing for Bush, Dowd said snide remarks were being made about Bush at a recent Georgetown cocktail party. Robert McNamara, mastermind of America’s defeat in Vietnam, was sniping about Bush’s handling of the Chinese plane crisis. Bush, it seems, had departed from the prized McNamara dispute-resolution technique, which consists of starting a ground war in a jungle, losing the war, condemning millions of people to live under a communist tyranny, and then casually announcing twenty-five years later that you knew the war was doomed from the start. McNamara probably makes elegant toasts, too.

When Reagan was up for a second term in 1984, liberals deftly switched their argument from “dumb” to “senile.” Since they always thought Reagan was an idiot, only the finely honed talents of skilled American reporters could detect the subtle distinction between innate stupidity and age-related senility. Without irony, the
Washington Post
reported: “Democrats, usually sensitive about raising the issue, openly suggested that Reagan, 73, was too old to serve another four years.”
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Striking a particularly smarmy note, the
Economist
advised Reagan to “think hard” before running again. Nothing personal, but he was senile. For reasons having to do with his “virtues as much as his manifest faults as a president,” the
Economist
was foursquare against a second term. “By hanging on in old age Mr. Reagan might undermine his legacy more than if he leaves it persuasively behind him now.”

When Reagan began his (spectacularly successful) second term, he was seventy-three years old. A majority of the Justices on the Supreme Court were older than he was, including liberal icons William Brennan, seventy-seven; Thurgood Marshall, seventy-five, and Harry Blackmun, seventy-five.
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Yet there was no media hysteria over the senile old guys deciding life and death issues from the Supreme Court, no campaign to get those old coots to hang up their stirrups.

Attempting to duck charges of ageism, the media began deploying old people for the Reagan senility watch. Naturally, the
New York Times
led the way. In June 1984, the paper ran an article by George W. Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Ball was—it was duly noted—seventy-four years old.
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In an incredibly creepy column, Ball (“who is 74 years old”) ran through Reagan’s chances of dying during the next four years. Apparently, the actuarial tables indicated that Reagan had only “a two-thirds chance” of living for four more years. Becoming increasingly macabre, Ball (“who is 74 years old”) noted that Reagan’s chances were “even less” if he were re-elected since in this century “one-eighth of our dead Presidents were assassinated.”

All in all, it was a column that would have provoked a visit from the Secret Service during the Clinton administration.

The “real hazard,” said Ball (“who is 74 years old”), was not that Reagan would be assassinated, but that he “will become ill, senile or slow in thought and reactions.” Frighteningly, he might be unable to surrender to the Soviet Union with the alacrity desired at the
New York Times.

Ball (“who is 74 years old”) went on to describe in unseemly detail a paralytic Democrat president, Woodrow Wilson, who functioned “only marginally and fitfully” and was unable to sign or veto legislation (an appalling amount of which managed to become law anyway). Ball excused Wilson’s blithering senility on the grounds that we had just won World War I—”fortunately”!—and the nation was safe from foreign attack. And happily, the Wilsonian peace lasted until the consequences of Wilson’s partition of Germany led like night into day to World War II.

But that was different: Wilson was a Democrat. Or as Ball phonily distinguished the cases, in 1984 “we face an antagonist armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.” Citing his own experience as an advisor to President John F. Kennedy when Kennedy almost got us all killed during the Cuban missile crisis, Ball wrote: “How could we deal with a Soviet Union whose leaders knew that the only man empowered to push the nuclear button ‘was too ill to think or act decisively?” Of course, if they read the
New York Times,
Soviet leaders already thought Reagan was too stupid to “act decisively.”

Ball concluded soothingly: “God help our country if we ever have to face such a tragic mess!” You wouldn’t want a senile old guy like Reagan handling the Cold War. If he had been any more spritely, Reagan might have dispatched Red China, too.

Not long after the
Times’s
old-geezer attack, the
Washington Post
found its own septuagenarian to attack Reagan.
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To seem less vicious than he was, the Post’s septuagenarian styled his attack on Reagan’s mental acuity in the folksy, condescending tone young people find so irritating. He described the crippling effects of old age, saying, “one 73er, perhaps, has a better feel for another” and “one 73-year-old can see those telltale signs of slowing down in another.” Drawing analogies from his own mental breakdown to the acumen of the man who was about to win the Cold War, he said: “We 73-year-olds simply don’t think as fast as we used to; it’s more of an effort when we try.” He proclaimed Reagan “not dumb but—well, 73 years old.”