It should be framed in gilt. The decade of the 80s begat the RR tax-cut and job-export policies (the notorious "twin deficits" of trade and federal budgeting) that flipped the US abruptly to net debtor nation status.

This was the natural outcome of "less is more" tax optimism ideology.

The roaring 80s was the first modern time when the country wasn't at war that the U.S. turned to finance the economy by giving foreigners ownership of more assets of ours than we had a stake in theirs.

While it was Reagan's presidential predecessor Carter who de-regulated the airline industry, this was a page taken from the playbook of the suave former actor with the well-modulated voice.  Reagan declared that it was time to "get the government off people's backs" and let it be known that this was a major goal of his administration.  Neither friend nor foe would deny that this goal was steadily accomplished.

Carter did no more than get the motor running with airline de-regulation.  Reagan, operating in a manner that brought broad smiles to the face of his economic guru Milton Friedman, believed that all we needed to make America the "city on the hill" of his dreams was to remove the dreaded shackles of big government and let the free market take over.

Friedman, a controversial Nobel Prize winner in economics who had been an adviser to the presidential regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, was the economic world's most ebullient advocate of privatization, extending all the way to police and fire protection.

In 2 terms as president,  Ronald Reagan launched a government-deficit, tax-cut, soaring dollar policy which shifted the economy sharply to buying more and more the goods manufactured in other countries instead of made onshore, and also selling US assets and bonds (rather than goods) to foreigners, thus turning the US into a net debtor nation, quite abruptly.

The chart below appeared in an article in Fortune magazine in 2003 by Warren Buffett and Carol Loomis (graph viewable also here (pdf) or here.)

For the first time in modern times when the nation was not at war, the U.S. turned to financing the economy by giving foreigners ownership of more of our assets than we had a financial stake in assets of theirs abroad.

James Belushi, playing the sidekick to James Woods, who seeks to resuscitate his career as an international political reporter amid the dangers of war torn El Salvador, asked Woods an important question of what it says about America's and the world's future when the U.S. was preparing to elect "a guy who played straight man to a chimp."

The scene occurred on Election Day 1980.  Belushi and Woods were attending a party given by the American Embassy in San Salvador to view U.S. election results.  

As those who followed Reagan's movie career know, he played in the 1951 comedy "Bedtime for Bonzo" in which he was cast opposite a chimp.  Those critical of his fitness for political office, beginning with governor of California and eventually the presidency, have used the film and Reagan's role in it to underscore what they deem to be the futility of a B movie leading man undertaking such awesome responsibilities.

Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush, or Bush the Elder, sought the Republican nomination in 1980 at a time when the eastern Republican Party establishment was on its last legs.

This was not the same Bush we saw eight years later exploiting through communications mudmeister Lee Atwater bogus issues like Willie Horton and the pledge of allegiance while solidly touting his membership in the National Rifle Association.

The George Bush of 1988 positioned himself in many ways like his son 12 years later as a grand Texas cowboy, a good old gun touting American buttressed by God, Mom, apple pie and the flag.

Skepticism on the part of many progressives that the movement is nothing more than the same old right wing Gingrich, Norquist, Rove, Armey, DeLay crowd dressed up in a phony label to make it sound refreshingly new and patriotic have been vindicated.

How nauseating it is to listen to those earnest pronouncements that this is a grassroots populist movement historically extending from Boston Tea Party resistance.  These are supposedly individuals concerned about the impact debt is generating on American society.  They are determined to do something about it, and so this line of argument proceeds.

Recent national polling strips more bark from the fallacious Tea Party tree.  There appear to be two active levels of the Tea Party.  The first group is comprised of a mentality akin to Storm Troopers that got rough on Berlin's streets when they had superior numbers and passed out literature in the period before Hitler's securing of power.  

As a trained actor Ronald Reagan was accustomed to doing as directors told him.  He was easily manageable for the Kitchen Cabinet of millionaires that launched him into politics in sixties' California for his first run for governor along with his political strategy guiding hand, seasoned professional Stuart Spencer.

Spencer in concert with other handlers Reagan obtained when moving from state to national politics in a successful run for the presidency, resulting in two terms served, sought to turn a potential negative into a positive.  

When skepticism was voiced over Reagan's experience deficiencies in the political realm Spencer's spin control campaign was to turn him into a  "citizen politician" able to rise above partisan political considerations.

The tragedy of the heavy swing toward the high tech television era is that the kind of comprehensive analysis needed of issues becomes lost in a world of half minute sound bites.  The tragedy is all the graver when major federal, state, and local elections are decided on this pattern.

The arrival of Scott Brown on the Massachusetts scene, taking advantage of a political opponent devoid of new era campaign skills, harkens back to an image of a telegenic candidate whose political career reeked ultimate economic disaster from which America has never recovered.

Scott Brown is a telegenic candidate and so was Ronald Reagan.  The movie and television actor was 55 when he was elected governor of California in 1966.  Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts at the age of 50.  

Is this a Ronald Reagan re-run, a brilliant orator but failing miserably when assuming the follow through with constitutional observance?  Shall we get precise about habeas corpus, an English institution for centuries?  

It means the right to a fair trial.  The Nazis had thrown people in prison without trials.

The U.S. is doing a copy cat routine, throwing Afghanistan terrorist suspects in prisons in with no trials.

His warning that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself was taken to heart by Americans, who courageously fought and won World War Two.

But tragically, fear overcame faith in America's strength and democratic system when fear of all Asia succumbing to Communism if Vietnam became a Communist nation resulted in almost 60,000 U.S. service deaths and some 2.5 million fatalities in Vietnam and Cambodia.  

Fear of Communism overthrew faith in democracy.  Those who died paid the price.  The U.S. was split down the middle over Vietnam and to a large extent still is.

While many authors of sundry nuances have analyzed Reagan's political years and record, what invests Bunch's "Tear Down This Myth" with tour de force originality is that he goes beyond this point and demonstrates the level to which the mythological, augmented by astute political consulting skills, held such wide influence long after Reagan left the political scene.

Having grown up in Southern California and cut my teeth in local and California state politics, a spark of familiarity arose as I read Bunch's account of Reagan's political career and influence.

In the early pages Bunch skillfully documents the facts so that even someone who studied Reagan's meteoric rise to the California governorship sees that period in fuller perspective.  

While Jindal revealed an upbeat side that so many growling, curmudgeonly figures of the Republican right have not been displaying, when the former Rhodes Scholar and boy wonder of Louisiana politics was asked to discuss what the future holds for his party, he segued into the same rationale as earlier delivered in his response to Obama.

In Jindal's speech the governor who was in office when the Katrina disaster occurred delivered the same scolding reference to the federal government as an enemy so prevalent among right wing Republicans, albeit with the kind of sunny tone associated with another major Republican figure.

Many pundits questioned Jindal's comment in view of the fact that federal government funds kept many Katrina victims alive.  

To political strategists such as David Axelrod as well as economic gurus like Paul Krugman, this effort marks a necessary paradigm shift connected to a symbol in Reagan.  

This represented in itself a bold new transition away from old ideas labeled "tax and spend" into a new era of individual initiative and responsibility led by a "citizen politician" in Reagan.

From the time that Reagan, following long rehearsal and preparation, announced his candidacy for governor of California in 1966, Golden State public relations expert Stuart Spencer along with partner Bill Roberts recognized that the key to marketing the former actor and host of television programs such as Death Valley Days and General Electric Theater was timing combined with astute use of corporate contributions.

When?  When he was at the Berlin Wall, he dramatically declared with all the perfect emphasis his acting career had taught him, "Tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev."

Not since the Biblical account of the walls that came tumbling down at Jericho was there such world-wide rejoicing when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.  Some fragments of the demolished Berlin Wall were sold as souvenirs, the symbol of the push for freedom contained in a fragment of history.

But the famous Ronald Reagan slogan, the delightful dream come true for every capitalist in the U.S.A. business brigade was, "Get the government off our backs!"