How Reagan's Legacy Lives On
The 40th President never balanced the federal budget, but he did change the national conversation about the role of government

Ronald Reagan utterly remade the American political landscape. Even Bill Clinton, as skilled a politician as America has known, had to conduct his entire presidency in the confined political space in which Reagan placed him. It was because of Reagan that Clinton had to promise to end welfare as we know it. It was because of Reagan that he spoke the fateful line, "The era of Big Government is over."

As it happens, it wasn't over—more on that later—but make no mistake, what Reagan brought forth was a revolution all the same. Like the Civil War and the New Deal, Reagan's years in the White House—1981 to 1989—were another of those hinges upon which history sometimes turns. On one side, a wounded but still vigorous liberalism with its faith in government as the answer to almost every question. On the other, a free market so triumphant—even after the tech bubble burst—that we look first to "growth," not government, to solve most problems. On one side, a U.S. still licking its wounds from Vietnam, reluctant to exercise its power. On the other, U.S. forces in Bosnia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. On one side, Russians invading Kabul. On the other, McDonald's invading Moscow.

Reagan, who was 93 when he died on June 5, was without a doubt the greatest communicator among postwar Presidents. Even J.F.K. could not play the effortless everyman as Reagan did. Every politician with national ambitions today tries to capture his easy way and Teflon character. All Republican candidates are conditioned now to always ask themselves, What would Reagan do?

He not only knew how to talk. He also knew how to use the power of his persuasion. "Reagan fundamentally changed the way President and Congress relate," says Al From, former head of the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed the Democratic Party toward the center—inspired partly by Reagan's success in pushing the G.O.P. to the right. "Before Reagan, if you wanted to get a big idea through Congress, you worked through the leadership. Reagan couldn't do that. The most important leader in Congress, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, was his enemy. So he figured out he had to go to the people. To get a big idea through Congress now, you go outside. Reagan understood that."

So great was Reagan's victory in making his preoccupations into enduring themes of the national conversation that it may not matter that his record didn't always match his rhetoric. He insisted, for instance, that a balanced budget was one of his priorities. But by the time Reagan left office, a combination of lower tax revenues and sharply higher spending for defense had sent the deficit through the roof. But as Dick Cheney is reported to have said, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." In his recent memoir, former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill quotes the Vice President using those words to shut down an internal White House debate over the budgetary impact of Bush's tax cuts. And at least with respect to the political costs, he was right. Reagan demonstrated that among voters, the easily understood appeal of tax cuts neutralized the abstract peril of big deficits. It's a trick that the current Administration is hoping can still be managed.

Yet if Reagan never balanced the budget, he changed the conversation about government. He made nonmilitary federal spending seem like an indulgence. Because of his two electoral landslides, a badly humbled Democratic Party had to think, really think, about reinventing government, trying free-market approaches to problems like public housing and health care that they once saw chiefly as targets for tax dollars. Four years after Reagan left office, the enduring popularity of his ideas obliged Clinton to back away from his 1993 stimulus spending package in favor of a budget more agreeable to the bond markets. When Clinton's proposed health plan started looking like a return to Big Government, voters rose up to produce the '94 Republican sweep of Congress. By May of that year, only 2% of Americans were telling pollsters they had "a lot" of confidence that the Federal Government could tackle a problem and solve it. Two percent.

That 1994 sweep was itself a delayed tremor of the Reagan upheaval. Newt Gingrich's Contract with America drew heavily from Reagan's legacy. But there was another lesson of Reaganism that Gingrich and the Republican class of '94 grasped too late: keep smiling. Even when his views were most intransigent—when he wondered out loud whether Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist or failed for nearly all of his presidency to speak the word aids even once—Reagan gave Reaganism a human face. "He made us sunny optimists," says Bush political adviser Karl Rove. "His was a conservatism of laughter and openness and community."

The White House may return to the Democrats some day. Even Congress may go back their way. But the federal courts will be Reagan's for years to come. He named 83 appeals-court judges and 292 district-court judges, slightly more than half the federal judiciary. That's more federal judges named than by any other President in history.

Reagan's impact on the judiciary has been profound. Federal courts today are far more willing to question racial and ethnic preferences. Mandatory busing for school desegregation is now a museum piece. Court rulings in criminal cases are far more likely to favor law enforcement. Laws once prohibited even moments of silence in classrooms and remedial education for the underprivileged in sectarian schools. Now school vouchers for use in private schools, both secular and sectarian, hold up in courts.

The real Reagan years, the years of red suspenders and corporate takeovers, of Bonfire of the Vanities and big hair, were shorter than they seem in memory. They began around the middle of his first term, after the 1981 recession gave way to the boom years, and ended midway through his second, when Iran-contra broke and so in some ways did Reagan's spell. But however briefly they lasted, those years habituated us to a giddy, swaggering, saw-toothed capitalism that seemed a bit appalling then. It feels much more familiar now. Because the country had lived through the '80s, through all those poison pills and hostile takeovers and Donald Trump, the unapologetic materialism of the '90s—the stock options and ipos, the $21 soup courses and 22-year-old millionaires (and Donald Trump!)— seemed more like business as usual in the most literal sense of the words.

But it won't do to end by emphasizing a Reagan legacy of unintended consequences. The consequences he wanted—an America that is stronger militarily, more dedicated to free enterprise, more mindful of the virtues of self-reliance and more confident in its own powers—were the ones he got as well, and the ones he passed on firmly to America. Ronald Reagan may be gone, but will it ever be accurate to call this nation "post-Reagan"?

—from TIME, June 14, 2004

Questions

1. How did Ronald Reagan change the political landscape in America? Cite at least two aspects of Reagan's legacy.

2. The writers state that Reagan's "record didn't always match his rhetoric." What evidence can you find in the article to support this point?