  For the last eight days, my beloved news channels have been held hostage by a dead man. Granted, it was not just any dead man, but a former President who served two terms and, for whatever reason, makes a lot of people very emotional. Was it just me, or was the coverage a bit excessive? Not only was it overkill, it was, in my opinion, more one-sided than it needed to be.
Chris Hitchins stood tall, but couldn’t Fox News have dug up an American without a British accent to make the eminently defensible case that Reagan was not such a great President, not a Hero, not a Saint? Where were Reagan’s foes from the 80s, the Congressional leaders like George Mitchell and whoever was running the House in those days? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I would have even liked to see Jesse Jackson once or twice. (And with that, hell has officially frozen over…) I have of late developed an appreciation for Reagan. I read Peggy Noonan’s book about him (or one of her books about Reagan, the more biographical one – she wrote speeches for Reagan for like a year an a half and somehow managed to write about seven books about her time with him), which is about as objective as a book about Michael Jordan by Ahmad Rashad would be.
I even visited Reagan’s hometown once. I didn’t mean to, but I got off the highway (I-80, I think) in Dixon, I saw some signs, and I figured what the hell, I’ll look around. It was an interesting moment, actually. Looking at the houses there, which were significantly less nice than the house I grew up in, it hit me that in this country, it really doesn’t matter where you come from. Anyone can pretty much do anything. Reagan was president from the time I was three years old to when I was 11. At some point during that time, I decided that I would be President someday. I wrote Reagan a letter. I don’t think he wrote back, but he sent me a nice little booklet about the White House, which I thought was pretty cool.
I never had a strong opinion of Reagan, either for against, when he was President (neither did most eight year-olds, I suppose), and I still don’t. There were certainly some good things about him. His positions were clear, and he stuck to them. He fought for tax reform and lower federal income tax rates for everyone, which means a lot to those of us crazy people who think taxes should be lower as opposed to higher. The Tax Reform Bill of 1986 is, in my opinion, one of the most important and worthwhile pieces of legislation passed in my lifetime, and Reagan had a lot to do with it.
He showed moral clarity and courageous leadership in fighting Communism, although conservatives give him way too much credit for “winning the Cold War.” He had a principled belief in limited government. I think he thought the Federal Government generally screws everything up, so we might as well not give them much to do, which is more or less what I think.
He was at times an eloquent speaker. He was funny and charming. He made people proud to be Americans, in a way that no President since has. At the same time, he was a rather strange man. Noonan openly acknowledges in her book that Reagan had exactly one friend (Noonan explains that he had many other friends, but they all happened to be dead) and was generally a lousy father. He had limitations as a President. Much like Clinton, I think he was an effective President in his first term, but got bogged down in scandal in his second, to the point where the country would have been better off with someone else in charge. Like many historical figures, his moment in the spotlight came too late in his life. He might have been a great President in the 1970s, when he was younger, more idealistic and energetic (and, I suspect, did not take a three-hour nap every day – not that I’m against napping!).
I think Reagan himself sensed this, and that’s why he ran for President in 1976. He was also, in a way, too idealistic. He had grown up in a small town in the 1920s and 30s. I think it was hard to convince him to care about things like racial injustice (did you notice that the people on TV last week participating in the Reagan love-fests were all, what’s the word, WHITE? ), the environment, or poverty. They were not part of his experience at all. And with that, I think we should all go on with our lives now. 
