Monday, June 07, 2004

Left: Nancy Reagan, daughter Patti Davis and son Ron Reagan (from left to right) are among those gathered at former Republican President Ronald Reagan's casket at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif., today. (Reuters photo) Right: Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry bows his head during a moment of silence for Reagan yesterday in Toledo, Ohio. (Associated Press photo)  Kerry's campaign suspension probably a mistake I'm not certain what John Kerry's motivation is for suspending his campaign for a week because Ronald Reagan died on Saturday. Probably Kerry is being respectful -- Kerry has class -- but he is probably misguided in paying his respects by putting his campaign on ice for a week when less than five months remain before the November presidential election. Perhaps Kerry has suspended his campaign for mostly political reasons -- perhaps he and/or his strategists figure that to continue to campaign this week would be perceived by the majority of American voters as disrespectful and thus would harm the campaign. Whatever the reason or reasons, the suspension of the campaign probably is a mistake. Kerry is running against George W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan. Kerry's decision to suspend his campaign for a week because Reagan died contributes to the false idea that George W. Bush is anything like Reagan was and, worse, contributes to the wrongheaded lionization of Reagan, a man who stood for the interests of the rich and for the intimidation of the militarily weaker nations of the world through the abuse of U.S. military power (in those respects, George W. Bush indeed is just like Reagan). The Reagan regime's many militaristic ventures were not about anyone's liberation, but were about smacking down those nations that dared to oppose stupid white American male capitalists' exploitation of them (again, in this regard Gee Dubya and his zombified supporters can compare Gee Dubya to Reagan). Anyway, Kerry's politically obligatory I'm-sorry-he's-dead statement probably was enough. Kerry probably should have decided to continue to campaign. He probably should have decided to lay off Bush for a week but to continue to campaign, talking about his plans for cleaning up Bush's many messes without even mentioning Bush. I and millions of others haven't contributed considerable sums to Kerry's campaign only to see him suspend it for a week. We Kerry campaign contributors are stockholders of a sort, and Kerry has let us down. P.S. to Democratic Party hacks: I support John Kerry for president, but I support no one blindly, and even though I have given his campaign hundreds of dollars and done a lot of work for his campaign, I will continue to be an independent thinker. (I did, after all, vote for Ralph Nader in 2000.) Kerry's decision to suspend his campaign for a week probably will harm it more than it will help it. To wit, this is from today's New York Times:   Postponing a pair of million-dollar fund-raising concerts, Senator John Kerry said [yesterday] that he would cease active campaigning until [former] President Ronald Reagan is buried at week's end. "We're going to suspend any sort of overtly political rallies," Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, told reporters after attending Mass at St. Anthony Shrine in Boston's financial district. The fund-raisers in Los Angeles and New York City -- featuring Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Jon Bon Jovi, John Mellencamp and James Taylor, among others -- had been expected to yield several million dollars for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Tickets for the events, at the 2,000-seat Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Radio City Music Hall in Midtown Manhattan, which holds nearly 6,000, began at $250; aides refused to say how many had been sold. Reuniting the performers and rebooking those locations will be difficult. Besides the postponed fund-raisers, Mr. Kerry canceled trips to Arizona, Pennsylvania and back to Ohio, all expected to be important states in the November election, as well as a visit to Colorado, typically Republican turf he is hoping to contest in the fall. He does plan to travel to Los Angeles for the Wednesday graduation of his daughter Alexandra from the American Film Institute, which will probably prevent him from attending Mr. Reagan's state funeral at the Capitol on Wednesday evening. He plans to spend the balance of the week in private meetings in Washington. "I have a lot to do, don't worry,'' Mr. Kerry told reporters traveling with him. His aides said the campaign would keep its television advertisements running as normal. The canceled schedule comes in a week that already posed a challenge for Mr. Kerry, who would have had to compete first with President Bush's trip to Europe in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion, and then his convening of the G-8 summit meeting in Sea Island, Ga. Campaign aides had previously said that Mr. Kerry would talk about the economic squeeze on the middle class, trying not to interfere with the president's focus on foreign policy. Now, he will have to struggle not to disappear from public view altogether. 2:16:48 PM    Comments []

The "cuddly" Ronald Reagan in a 1953 Hollywood photo. The same "cuddly" Reagan, in his role as U.S. president, ignored the poor and ignored the AIDS epidemic, which he didn't even publicly mention until 1987. Quote unquote "It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater. "Nowadays, as we grapple with the malevolence of President Bush, it's Reagan we remember as the sensible one.... "As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan... But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter." -- Rick Perlstein, author and observer of the right wing, in Salon.com  Ronald Reagan shown in November 1983 with Donald Rumsfeld, Reagan's newly named envoy to the Middle East. (Associated Press photo) 11:40:16 AM    Comments []

No, that's not a young George W. Bush with Ronald Reagan in the photo on the left. That's Reagan's co-star of the film "Bedtime for Bonzo." On the right, Reagan plays the role of president of the United States during the 1980s. I'm glad that he's dead! You'd expect me to say that, so I won't. (Oops...) Ronald Reagan died while I was on a weekend trip to California's central coast, specifically, to Monterey, Salinas and Carmel. (Monterey and Salinas are pretty cool, but Carmel is saturated with icky Republican [that's redundant] energy. [I wonder why Clint Eastwood, who was mayor of Carmel back in the '80s, stopped his political career there when perhaps he could have been the next Ronald Reagan. Oh, well; now we have Ahhhnuld...] I highly recommend the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, and if you're into John Steinbeck, like I am, the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas is worth a visit -- but resist the temptation to buy any more than one or two of Steinbeck's books at the center's gift shop and instead order them through amazon.com, where you can get them much more cheaply.) Anyway, Reagan has been out of the public eye for what -- a decade now? -- and he was 93 -- ninety-three -- so I think his death wasn't exactly surprising and demonstrates, once again, like Sen. Strom Thurmond and Sen. Paul Wellstone did, that only the good die young, while mean-spirited people make the Energizer Bunny jealous. The way that we Americans lionize just about everyone in death is sickening (and probably reflects our own deep fears of death). Reagan was all image, all show, all rhetoric. He never stopped being an actor. While Americans perhaps most like to credit Reagan with singlehandedly changing the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War, that was an event years in the making by scores of people, and the most we can say about Reagan's relatively small role in it is that he played a relatively small role in it. And, ironically, which nation is the "evil empire" now? (If you answered Iraq, Iran or North Korea, you would be incorrect because none of those "evil" nations are empires. However, you were close, because those nations do form the "axis of evil." )  I will end this by taking Bambi's mother's advice and find a few nice things to say about Ronald Reagan: As far as we know, he actually won the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984. He could speak in public without embarrassing us Americans at home and abroad by making glaring errors in simple matters of pronunication and grammar. (Although that one time when Nancy was caught on microphone telling him what to say like he was a ventriloquist dummy was a bit embarrassing.) Uh... OK, I could only come up with two things, but for me that's pretty good, for me, where praising a Republican is concerned. P.S. I can't really say that I'm glad that Reagan is dead because, as I said, he's been out of commission for at least a decade now, was in a state where he could no longer cause any further harm. However, I'd be lying if I said I even thought about shedding a tear when I heard the news of his overdue death. This was, after all, a rich and powerful man who apparently was oblivious to the needs and problems of the less wealthy and less powerful (or, much worse, he knew of their needs and problems but just didn't give a flying fuck). Reagan's unconscionable inaction during the AIDS epidemic alone is reason enough to exclude him from The Pantheon of Great Presidents. (Reagan didn't even mention the AIDS epidemic publicly until 1987.) Those who believe that Reagan was a great president either don't remember or don't know their history and/or already drank the Republicans' Kool-Aid.   9:46:34 AM    Comments []