Reagan Was About More Than Optimism

By Lorie Byrd ~ June 7th, 2004 @ 9:30 am

If all I knew about Ronald Reagan was what I got from the soundbites of the media elites this weekend, I would know that he was an optimistic man. Yep, he was all for optimism.

I loved Ronald Reagan. I really did. I loved his love of and belief in America and his strength and his wit and his humor and I loved his optimism, too. But I am old enough to remember that most in the media did not see those characteristics in Reagan and they did not love him. They regularly portrayed him as a dim-witted war-mongering cowboy who saw the world in way too simplistic terms and was unyielding in his fight against communism. You might even say they thought he “overexaggerated” the threat of communism to the free world. Sound familiar? A dim-witted, war-loving cowboy painting the world in terms of black and white, good and evil, fighting an -ism he believed could destroy the free world and cutting taxes and government regulation to unleash the power of a free society to grow and flourish. Did I mention that he was very optimistic, too?

Those are familiar themes, to be sure, but Reagan was the great communicator that Bush is not. If Bush were as great a communicator as Reagan, he would probably be enjoying higher approval ratings with the public right now, but the media would still think of him the way they did Reagan 20 years ago. Only the passing of time and the fall of the Soviet Union has proved to the media that Reagan was right about communism. It still has not convinced many that Reagan was right about tax cuts, although his tax cuts resulted in increased revenues to the Treasury and record economic expansion.

To celebrate the memory of Ronald Reagan, I repeat my suggestion from earlier this weekend to read from some of the many great books written about Reagan and share them with those too young to remember him. There are links to some wonderful articles, along with information about arrangements for the funeral, and links to transcripts of some of Reagan’s greatest speeches at RealClear Politics. Right Wing News has a great tribute to Reagan, and for those too young to remember how the media regarded Reagan while he was President, read Mark Steyn today. While you celebrate the life of Reagan, take heart that his spirit lives on in many who fight the good fight today. While the mainstream media gets to write the short term history of events, the longer view of history will be written many years from now, and those writing it will not be able to spin facts that, by then, will be irrefutable.