I’m here at the Wall Street Journal “D” Conference, where I finally got the Internet connection in my room working after an hour of fiddling (problem turned out to be — no joke — a loose cable, but not a loose ethernet cable; rather, a loose connection from the mini-hub to the wall-jack– sheesh!). So I’ll have to post notes on Bill Gates’ talk tomorrow.
But first, a note on the passing of Ronald Reagan. This conference began with a moment of silence in memory of the 40th president. (It is, after all, a Wall Street Journal event.) I’m sorry for his relatives and friends that he’s dead; I had a relative who suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I know how painful that is.
But can we stop with the canonization, please? Maybe too many Americans are now too young to remember, or maybe Reagan looks good by comparison with the current occupant of the White House, or maybe the passage of time just makes us all forgetful.
But Reagan — however “nice” a man he was — was no saint, and in fact in most ways he was a terrible president. I know, de mortui nil nisi bonum and all that, but there is a great whitewashing going on in the media, and I can’t stand it.
I was a senior in college when Reagan was elected — in a very close election which he’d probably have lost had it not been for the participation of a third party candidate (John Anderson) — and that moment was like the start of a dark age. As a fiery young writer of editorials for my college paper I’d railed against Carter for his compromises with conservatism, and proudly chose to cast my first vote for an American president not for Carter against Reagan but for Barry Commoner.
It was a stubborn gesture, and in retrospect a dumb one. Too much was at stake to throw my vote away just so I could feel consistent. (Naderites, take heed.) America would have been a lot better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president. This was true while he was alive, and it is no less true now that he is gone.
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