Separating Reagan’s Virtues from the ‘Republican Myths’

This entry was posted by owl and bear staff on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 1:07 pm.

The key quality any army officer needs, Napoleon always said, is luck. Without luck mere ability is not enough. As in war, so in politics. Few American presidents in the modern era have been quite so fortunate as Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Hindsight tempts one to assume that victories are pre-destined and that there’s little the defeated side could have done to make voters reconsider their verdict. Perhaps so, but there’s little doubt that Reagan owed much of his success to the fact that he faced Jimmy Carter and then, four years later, Walter Mondale. The contrast between Reagan’s sunny, even giddy, optimism and this pair of lugubrious hand-wringing liberals could scarcely have been more pronounced.

[DoubleThink Online]