Tipnronnie and Tweety Too
by digby
Historian David Greenberg's review of Chris Matthews' unctuous ode to "Tipnronnie" is just delicious. It's short, so read the whole thing. But this is too important for me not to memorialize it here on the blog:
The 1980 elections made Ronald Reagan the most conservative American president since before the New Deal and gave the Republicans control of the Senate for the first time since the ’50s. Protecting Social Security, the progressive tax code and other fixtures of the postwar economy fell above all to O’Neill, a corpulent, old-style, steaks-and-cigars Boston Irish pol. The conceit of “Tip and the Gipper” is that for all their ideological differences, Reagan and O’Neill liked each other enough to put politics aside at 6 o’clock — a line Matthews repeats throughout the book — and strike deals in everyone’s interest.
It’s a nice idea for a book, if only it were true.
[...]
Matthews also misreads Reagan in retailing the tired Washington canard that his success lay in his affability. Many insiders did indeed swoon over the president’s ready charm, but his election depended just as crucially on his very public meanness, his zest for the punitive — the vows to crack down on domestic spending, “welfare queens” and the Evil Empire. An account of Reagan’s triumph that locates the key in his Hollywood smile cannot explain the victories that the conservative movement continued to enjoy after his exit.
Most important, Matthews provides no evidence to suggest that whatever personal amicability O’Neill and Reagan maintained mattered. In one or two cases, the Democrats cut good deals with Reagan, such as when they revised the Social Security program. But on the key legislative issue of Reagan’s presidency — the 1981 fight over his budget, which slashed taxes on the rich — O’Neill simply got rolled. Spooked by the president’s popularity, which surged after he was shot by John Hinckley in March of that year, O’Neill failed to compete with Reagan in the new age of media politics. Worse, he also came up short in his supposed strong suit — riding herd on his caucus — as scores of Democrats, fearing the tax-cutting bandwagon, defected to back the Reagan bill. The consequences — skyrocketing budget deficits and debilitating inequality — have plagued us ever since.
Villager nostalgia for a time that never existed has blinded Americans to the reality of their politics. There was no bipartisan comity that brought everyone together: there was confidence and chutzpah on one side and cowardice and corruption on the other. I'll let you decide which was which.
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