Triple Crisis blogger Jeff Madrick published the following opinion article on New Deal 2.0 on the mischaracterization of President Reagan’s successes and failures in the media coverage of his centennial.
As the nation celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birthday, the mischaracterization of his tenure as president is a national tragedy in itself. The media’s need to gloss over its glaring failures — failures that live on for all of us — is now so common that it hardly draws notice. If the media sometimes deigns to note that Reagan blundered in the Iran-Contra scandal — and almost surely violated the law, not to mention the much-adored U.S. Constitution — it is quick to repeat the stale, dreary myth that he was a “transformative” president. President Obama has apparently bought in.
He was transformative. He taught America to hate government and in the process created an economy that utterly failed to restore itself or the nation’s standard of living. He taught Americans not to be citizens who cared about each other but to ask what government did for them. And when asked, he distorted the answers. Does Obama truly not know this?