Ronald Reagan, the anti-Reaganite

An excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times about Ronald Reagan and how he would not fit into the modern GOP.

Is the Reagan who's being touted as a paragon of conservative rectitude the Reagan of reality? Was Reagan an unflinching, true-blue conservative, perfect in every way? Or was he, in fact, something else — a pragmatic realist in both foreign and domestic policy and a leader, like most presidents, who committed mistakes and errors in judgment that can't be wished away?

Certainly Reagan faithfully adhered to GOP liturgy by bashing big government and spending. "A government bureau," he once declared, " is the nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth." When it came to foreign affairs, he took the hardest of hard lines in a 1983 speech that dubbed the Soviet Union an "evil empire."

But in assessing any president, it's more illuminating to focus on what he did rather than the bombast delivered to the rubber-chicken-and-mashed-potato circuit. Early in his political career, as governor of California, Reagan displayed his pragmatic side, signing an abortion bill and agreeing to a $1-billion state tax hike. Similarly, as president, he paid lip service to ending abortion but never did anything about it, and he worked with congressional Democrats on a massive tax hike in 1982, thereby averting the worst effects of the supply-side deficit spending he had endorsed when he entered office the year before.

Moreover, Reagan, the putative foe of big government, accumulated hundreds of billions in debt by the end of his second term. It was Democrat Bill Clinton who cleaned up the mess, leaving a budget surplus behind in 2000.

Nor did the Great Communicator display great fidelity to hard-line conservative principles when it came to foreign policy, especially in dealing with the Soviet Union. Instead, it was his conciliatory side that came to the fore. Even in his "evil empire" speech, for example, he crossed out typed text and inserted by hand, "This does not mean we should isolate ourselves and refuse to seek an understanding with them. I intend to do everything I can to persuade them of our peaceful intent."