It’s been well over a month since I started reading Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth. It’s an important book and I learned a few things from it. But I come at it from the perspective that Presidents are not very important when it comes to the things we give them the most credit for. In the case of both Reagan and Clinton, they get credit for economic booms created by the Federal Reserve. In the case of Reagan, it was Paul Volcker cutting interest rates, after having brought inflation down by more or less destroying the economy. (There was also the aid of international fuel prices going down, which also had nothing to do with Reagan.) In the case of Clinton, it was mostly Alan Greenspan’s heterodox theories (which turned out to be right) that said that 5% unemployment was not full employment. So presidents: meh.

In international affairs, presidents can have a much bigger effect. And actually, Bunch makes an excellent case that Reagan’s openness to deal with Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union on nuclear reductions was a profound and positive legacy. Of course, that’s not what people think about Reagan and the Soviet Union. The myth is that Reagan spent vast sums of money on the military (true) causing the Soviets to keep up (not true) and thus bankrupting them (also not true). Bunch doesn’t talk about it, but people always get the Gorbachev causation backwards. It wasn’t that he liberalized the government; it was that the government decided to liberalize itself, so it elected him.[1]

Bunch spends the end of the book at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. It gave me an idea for a documentary. I could go to all of the presidential libraries and scoff at them. It would not be partisan at all, because I think they are all fakers. Ultimately, that’s a bit of the problem with Tear Down This Myth. The truth is that we mythologize all of our presidents. And I really don’t think the fundamental problem with the Republican Party is that they don’t understand who Reagan really was. Because here’s the thing: all politicians exist in their environment. We all know that Richard Nixon as he existed in 1972 would fit very well in the modern Democratic Party. But we also know that if Nixon were alive in today’s political environment, he would be someone like Scott Walker—or maybe worse: Louie Gohmert.

So who would Reagan be if he were around today? Well, his rhetoric is most like that of Rand Paul if you ask me. He would absolutely be against any increase in taxes. He would absolutely be for gutting the social safety net. He would be (as he was) a clever racist politician. The only real difference I see is that Reagan would be more of an interventionist. But I fully expect Rand Paul to devolve on that issue.

The question that Bunch never grapples with is the effect of Reagan’s rhetoric on today’s Republican Party and I think it is about right. The big problem is not what Reagan means to Republicans. The big problem is what he means to Democrats. From Clinton on, they’ve done nothing but praise him. Reservedly, but clearly. Now is this just good politics because Reagan was so popular? I don’t think so. FDR was hugely popular but you won’t find any Republicans mentioning his name without spitting afterwards. And now Bill Clinton is very popular, but did any of the Republican candidates for president talk about how they wanted to be like Clinton or how they wanted to “end corporate welfare as we know it!”?

Bunch does spend a bit of time on this question. But overall, his message is that modern Republicans don’t understand who Reagan really was. Well, they do. When they talk about how he was a tax cutter, they aren’t talking about how he was a cutter of everyone’s taxes. They don’t care about everyone. I discussed this in some depth last month, Reagan’s Legacy: Tax Cuts for Rich, Tax Hikes for the Rest. He was their man! The modern Republicans understand this and Bunch just doesn’t.

What we need are Democrats running for president who say, “When Reagan became president, this country went way off course. He built up our military to a ridiculous level, even though the Soviet Union was crumbling. He cut aid to the poor. He gave unprecedented amounts of money to the rich. He pretty much destroyed private sector unions. He started a great shift of wealth from the poor to the rich. It is our job to reverse this. It is our job to go back to the days of a strong middle class. Reagan had an idea for this country. It was worth a try. But he was wrong. And now we must fix the problems he created.”

The problem with the Reagan myth is not that Republicans believe it. It is that Democrats believe it.

[1] Years ago, I wouldn’t have used the word “elect.” But the truth is that every country has its Overton Window. Gorbachev was elected. And although it is true that a Soviet Ronald Reagan would not have ever been taken seriously, it’s also true that today, an American Gorbachev would never be taken seriously. Americans greatly overestimate just how much democracy we have.

Jonathan Chait offered up a snarky little article this morning, Chris Matthews Goes Tea Party on Elizabeth Warren. What happened was that Matthews was complaining that Washington wasn’t getting the things done that she things should get done. He said things like, “You’re blaming it on the Republicans, but you control the Senate and you control the White House.” To this, Chait right responded, “Well, right, but the Constitution doesn’t say that if the House, Senate, and president disagree on a bill, then best two out of three wins.”

The reason that Chait refers to this as going all Tea Party is that the main thing that distinguishes the Tea Party from mainstream Republicans is this idea that the former think somehow they can will themselves to power. They may only control the House of Representatives, but if they just hold firm the rest of the government will be forced to follow. This is what happened in the government shutdown. The real problem is that on the right there is a certain kind of delusion that we don’t see on the left. For example, I’m a very practical leftist who is open to pretty much anything that works. But I have no illusions that I’m not far to the left of the country. The Tea Party really does think that their policy preferences are popular, when they are actually a lot less popular than mine!

So I disagree with Chait’s contention that this delusional thinking is now breaking out on the left. This is just yet another case of Chris Matthews being a jerk. And he is hardly a liberal. He pretends to be a liberal because MSNBC is now a liberal network. When MSNBC was a conservative network, Matthews was one of the biggest proponents of war. He was also allegedly the main person pushing for Phil Donahue’s firing. And that should tell you all you need to know about Matthews: it isn’t about ideology. It is all about his power and money. His “brand” is as a straight talking truth teller. And the truth he tells is whatever is convenient at the time. It was once really convenient to be a big booster for the Iraq War.

In this interview, Matthews is just trying to sound serious and like an “every man.” He wants to know how the Democrats are going to bring back the middle class. Elizabeth Warren had good things to say. But Matthews complains that union aren’t doing anything—demonstrably false. He says the president says something different every day and he doesn’t know what is going on. And then he gets into his, “Why does the Republican control of the House constrain you?” Mostly, it just seemed like he needed a nap.

I don’t know why Matthews is on the air anymore. He must be good friends with powerful people. Because he’s an idiot. He’s got to know that Obama has, in fact, called for increased infrastructure spending and it has been blocked by the Republicans in Congress—especially because he called for it. Of course, he’s the guy who wrote the totally stupid book, Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked. All he was doing in this interview was pushing the moderate’s answer to everything, “Why can’t the parties just get along?” Well, when one of them manages to win elections by not getting along, there isn’t much the Democrats can do until the voters wake up.

Fifty years ago tonight, three American civil rights workers with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were murdered in Neshoba County. They were, of course, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. They had just left the Philadelphia, Mississippi city limits when they were pulled over by a Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff. He arrested Chaney for driving 65 in a 35 zone and took the other two into custody for “investigation.” I have little doubt that there was no reason to pull over the car other than the fact that a young black man was driving. Regardless, it was all part of a conspiracy.

The three young men were held in jail until 10:00 that night. As they made their way out of town, they were followed by the very same Deputy Sheriff who originally pulled them over: Cecil Price. At 10:25, he pulled them over just before they were about to cross the county line. He had them get into his squad car and drove them to a deserted area where he handed them over to a group of fellow Klanmen who beat Chaney, I guess because he was black. Eventually, they murdered all three of the young men with gunshots. Ultimately, fifteen men were tried (seven were convicted) for the crime, but the conspiracy was undoubtedly far larger.

But lest you think this just a story about some southern bigots, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover wasn’t interested in the case at all. He hated the civil rights movement. He thought it was just a front for the communists. As I recall, he was the one that got the myth going that Martin Luther King was a communist. President Johnson had to threaten Hoover to get him to do anything. And rather quickly, other KKK victims were found. According to Wikipedia, “Navy divers and FBI agents discovered the bodies of Henry Hezekiah Dee, Charles Eddie Moore, 14-year old Herbert Oarsby, and five other unidentified Mississippi blacks, whose disappearances in the recent past had not attracted attention outside of their local communities.”

This is the very definition of terrorism. But those who were convicted for the crimes got tiny sentences. Deputy Sheriff Price got the maximum: six years but served only four and half. The mastermind of the crime was Edgar Ray Killen, a Southern Baptist minister. His case ended in a hung jury because one of the jurors refused to convict a minister. So he stayed free until 2005, when at the age of 80 years old, he was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter and given 20 years for each count. He’s still alive. He’ll turn 90 next January.

But if Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner wanted to make a difference, they succeeded far better than they ever could have hoped. The case did manage to shine a light not just on their deaths but on the lives (and often deaths) of the African Americans who lived in that part of the country. Things have improved immeasurably. But there are still people like Edgar Ray Killen who want to go back to the days when blacks just stayed out of the way and never voted. And sadly, many of those people are prominent and powerful members of the Republican Party—not bitter old men rotting in prison.

For ten years, this has been bugging me. After the 2004 presidential election, Bush the Younger said, “I earned capital in the political campaign and I intend to spend it.” Now, for years I’ve been arguing that, Political Capital is a Myth. But people talk about it all the time and I don’t get upset. I don’t care. They’re fools. But just what political capital was Bush talking about?

In the 1980 presidential election, Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by almost ten percentage points. He got 489 electoral votes compared to Carter’s 49. I think Reagan was a catastrophe for the United States, but you have to admit that if anyone had earned political capital, it was Reagan. And he did it again in 1984, beating Mondale by 18 percentage points with an electoral college advantage of 525 to 13.

But did Bush earn any political capital in 2004? He beat Kerry by 2.4 percentage points. He got 286 electoral votes compared to Kerry’s 251. What’s more, if less than 60,000 Bush voters had voted for Kerry in the state of Ohio, Kerry would have been elected president. And I still think that the totally unjust way we do our voting where rich people get to vote easily and poor people have to wait in long lines in the rain could well have tipped the balance. Regardless, I admit: Bush won the election is 2004.

What I think Bush meant when he said he had earned capital was as simple as this: he actually won the election. In 2000, he didn’t win the popular vote. If the recount had been allowed to finish, he wouldn’t have won the electoral college. So all he was saying was, “I actually won this election so you can’t complain!” Of course, the implication here is that Bush presided as president during his first four years with the humility one would expect when one effectively stole an election by way of the Supreme Court. But that wasn’t the case. He ruled from the very first day as though he had be elected by 18 percentage points with an electoral college advantage of 525 to 13.

But the statement was very much what we expect from Bush the Younger: the cheerleader from Yale. I’ve never accepted the idea that Bush was stupid. But he has always been a deeply unserious man. Obama, for all this faults, is a very serious man. In 2012, he beat Romney by 1.5 percentage points more than Bush beat Kerry. He beat Romney by 91 more electoral college votes. He never claimed to have a mandate. And I think we all know what the media would have done if he had said he did: there would have been universal derision. But the media just accepted it coming from Bush.

I remember when I was the head of IT at a medium sized investment company. The owner was a big Republican supporter with pictures on the wall with him and Reagan and the two Bushes. After the 2004 election, I was crushed. But one of the agents (who was also a Republican, but not as hardcore), showed me a little comedy bit from The Tonight Show:

I was a good sport about it, but I didn’t find it funny. First, there was the fact that Jay Leno stopped being funny back in the late 1980s. But also, I thought it was more or less an accurate representation of what we got from Bush and another four years of that was so depressing. But the agent showed it to the owner and he seemed to respond the same way that I did. He didn’t like the idea of us having such an unserious man in the White House. But of course, he was glad he was there because Bush had saved him millions of dollars in taxes.

What’s bothersome there is that the reaction of the agent was more or less the reaction of the country. It didn’t matter that we had a president who took winning re-election about as seriously as winning a beauty pageant. He thought he had been given a mandate because that’s the kind of thing that presidents say. Like Reagan before him, he played the part of President of the United States. But oh how much damage was done by both men.

Afterword

And remember what he was going to use his political capital for: privatizing Social Security. This was not an issue in the campaign. Even if he had won by a landslide, he didn’t campaign on privatizing Social Security. He ran on the fact (and I still can’t get my head around this) that he had allowed the 9/11 attacks. It was the ultimate bait and switch, “Vote for me because I’ll keep you safe (and I hate fags), but then I’ll privatize your Social Security which I know you absolutely don’t want me to do.”

People don’t seem to understand that it isn’t 1830 anymore. You can’t just, “Go west, young man!” Thus I find laws that attempt to limit the options of the homeless far beyond heartless (Which they certainly are!) and all the way to brainless. In 1983, the City of Los Angeles passed a law that stated that no one could use their cars as living quarters. Like most laws, it pretty much laid unenforced until some powerful people decided that had a problem that the law could be used for. The “fine” people of Venice got upset because there were so many homeless people living in their cars. So in 2010, the police started using the law to arrest the homeless and impound their cars—cars, I’m sure, that most of them lost because it is expensive to get your car back.

What exactly it meant tht people were using their cars as living quarters was a matter of debate. In some cases, it simply meant that the police saw food in a car. According to Scott Shackford at Reason Magazine, one woman was arrested after being pulled over. That is to say that she was driving through Venice. So the police decided that the law was so expansive that no one who was living in their car anywhere in the world could even drive in Venice where the rich folks might be offended by the sight of a passing car drivin by one of those people.

Another example sounds like it comes from a modernization of a Dickens novel. A homeless man started sleeping on the sidewalk to comply with the law. You see: it is legal to sleep on the sidewalk. But it started to rain, so he sat in his car to stay dry. The police arrested him and impounded his car. Welcome to America: home of the free (if you’re rich). This 1983 law is nothing more than criminalizing poverty.

I have had the experience of being homeless twice. Once was when I was quite rich. It was just about impossible to find an apartment in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com boom. My wife and I had a nice Subaru Outback, but we were still harassed a fair amount. We were never arrested—just told to move along. I’m not at all certain that these instructions were legal, but we’d learned long before that you should not mess with cops. Just as in the case of the 1983 law that was rarely applied until 2010, a cop can always find some excuse to put you in jail and impound your car.

The second time I was homeless, I was very poor. And as a result, I was much more anxious. I moved my car excessively. I never read by flashlight for fear that it would attract attention. And the terrible thing is that there are people (kids mostly) who will terrorize you if they find you living in your car. So you have to worry about everyone. No one is your friend. Eventually, I got a job working in a gas station, so I was able to park there without too much concern. (One of the homeless people in Venice was arrested for living in his car on private property—a church—so you never know.) And then I got a room and within six months I got a high tech job that paid me as much as I’ve ever been paid. I’m a very lucky person because of my background. Most of the people being abused in Venice are not luck; they have no way out.

Despite all of this, the story has a happy ending. A group of homeless plaintiffs took the city to court. A lower court found in favor of the city. Of course! Why not, given that it was just a bunch of homeless people? But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in a unanimous decision (by all Democratically appointed judges) found that the law was unconstitutionally vague. As Shackford put it, “[T]he description of what behavior violates the law is so unclear that it was being used by police to (surprise!) harass homeless people who believed they were actually complying with the law.” (I love the parenthetical “surprise!” That’s my kind of libertarian: the kind who knows that the official power will be used to abuse the powerless. Of course, the powerless would fare even worse in a libertarian utopia. But that hardly matter right now.)

The city has decided not to appeal the case. Instead, they are going to craft new legislation that “respects both the rights and needs of homeless individuals and protects the quality of life in our neighborhoods.” I take this to mean, a constitutionally viable way of abusing the homeless. Notice that they are trying to balance the basic needs and rights of the homeless against the “quality of life” of the rich people. Maybe if the rich people don’t want the homeless parking on their streets, they could do something to help the homeless out. No! That would be un-American!

Afterword

My first novel was “Kamping on Asphalt.” It involved a group of people who lived at and around a KOA. I wrote it back in 1998. That picture at the top of the page kind of sums it up, except the novel is kind of a comedy. It was my attempt to write a modern Cannery Row.