Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

They included future U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, who served in President Reagan's first term, and Joseph Coors, the beer baron who plowed mega dollars into rightist think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation.  Coors was also instrumental in helping fund the contras in Nicaragua during Reagan's presidency.

To get Reagan elected as California's governor and later president it was necessary for veteran Golden State public relations guru Stuart Spencer to adopt a two-pronged strategy.  Initially Reagan was coached to fine tune his political message for moderate audiences and deliver it in softly modulated tones with reassuring messages, putting his lifetime experiences as an actor and radio announcer to work.

On the same token, to assure that the necessary funds were present to fuel Reagan's electoral efforts as well as utilizing strongly committed Republican foot soldiers in the field, Reagan would reveal his true nature through events such as launching his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of slayings of civil rights workers.    

To see that the Reagan candidacy played well to conservative southern audiences, Reagan picked up the same "law and order" theme that fellow Californian Richard Nixon had used in his winning 1968 presidential campaign.  

As Lee Atwater would later admit, when Republican candidates used the "law and order" code framing ploy, savvy listeners knew that they were referring to race and restraining civil rights initiatives that were the hallmark of earlier Democratic administrations.

Anybody paying attention who was not snookered by the Reagan political shell game knew that once he entered the White House he would continue to do the bidding of the wealthy rightist interest responsible for launching his political career.  

With Reagan word coding was the name of the game.  If "law and order" was meant to convey a message to certain voters then so was his mantra of "get the government off of people's backs" as well as the popular phrase repeated frequently by party designates and supporters of "let Reagan be Reagan."

Reagan was being Reagan when he delivered two massive tax cuts that top heavily favored the top ten percent of Americans while at the same time sharply increasing defense expenditures in an effort to keep the Soviet Union's "Evil Empire" from invading and conquering America.

The massive income shift, which generated more billionaires but fewer millionaires than had been created per capita during more equitable tax periods under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower and Democratic chief executives John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, found more Americans falling below the poverty line and some into the ranks of the homeless than at any time since the Great Depression.

For all the rhetoric about "law and order", the crime rate during Reagan's eight years in office was higher than had been the case under his earlier mentioned chronological predecessors or Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Clinton also put Reagan to shame in the realm of job creation.  It was noted by then Democratic House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and many others that Reagan's administration was characterized by selective job creation in the most minimal pay sector, known generically as "hamburger flipping jobs."

What happens when one launches a governmental credit card spending spree as Reagan did by on the one hand unrestrainedly throwing money into Pentagon coffers, providing tax cuts for America's wealthiest citizens, while playing Uncle Scrooge with the poorest of Americans and short-shrifting the middle class?

The answer is you run up a massive deficit.  In Reagan's eight years America's national debt was tripled from $1 trillion when he took office to $3 trillion when his tenure ended.  His Republican successor George H.W. Bush added another trillion, meaning that three terms of White House rule had quadrupled the national debt.

We also know what happened under Bush's son, who made even Reagan look like a piker.

While John McCain salutes Reagan as his idol he runs away from Bush the Younger due to his mid-twenties popularity ratings.

Whether the candidate is McCain, Reagan or Bush the Younger the pattern remains the same.  McCain is committed to the same kind of tax cuts combined with deregulation that has brought America to its knees in a way that Reagan's designated "Evil Empire" was unable to accomplish.

That is the way one achieves a nomination in a party taken over by extremists who proclaim love of God and country while turning their backs on the majority of Americans, seeking to hoodwink those they brutally ignore through creating a climate of fear.