Reagan is being elevated into the pantheon of leaders who transcended partisan politics. | AP Photo GOP frets over Reagan mythmaking

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — On the eve of what would have been his 100th birthday, Ronald Reagan is entering the final stages of a civic canonization that leaves even some of his most fervent admirers uneasy.

The longstanding conservative icon, lampooned in life by the left, is being elevated into the pantheon of American leaders who transcended partisan politics.


What worries the right about this is that by being sculpted in marble, Reagan may be stripped of the traits that made him so revered among conservatives and despised by liberals. In other words, if the 40th president is all things to all people, he means nothing to anyone.

“To only look at the imagery of Reagan is to see only half the picture of the man because he was a very strong advocate for conservatism,” said Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general and the keeper of the conservative flame for his old boss.

Republicans are partly to blame for their predicament. After assessing the honor accorded to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., they decided that their own icon should get his due and made a concerted effort to plaster Reagan’s name on schools, streets and even the airport of the capital city he made a career out of running against.

And here in California, where centennial festivities are being held this weekend at his newly renovated presidential library, there is a carefully crafted effort to present Reagan as the man who restored America’s confidence in itself — not as the great evangelist for modern conservatism.

“Let history say of us, ‘These were golden years — when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, when America reached for her best,” Reagan is captured saying in a video montage at the close of the tour as images of the Lincoln Memorial, the Statute of Liberty, little children saying the Pledge of Allegiance and aging veterans marching in a parade are shown on screen.



The library itself and the events commemorating Reagan’s birth were pure Americana — history set to a Lee Greenwood soundtrack. (And the patriotic country crooner himself is scheduled to perform this weekend).

But Democrats are collaborators, too, in the redefinition of Reagan. They’ve effectively given up the fight over defining the most conservative president of modern times. And, in some cases, they’re even embracing what the right argues is a sanitized version of the man. Even before he was elected, then-Sen. Barack Obama caused a stir in his own party by making the case for how consequential the two-term president was in a 2008 campaign trail interview.

“He tapped in to what people were already feeling, which is, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want, you know, a return to that sense of dynamism and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing,” Obama said at the time.

Now the president is taking to USA Today to praise Reagan’s “faith in the American promise,” toting around Lou Cannon’s seminal biography of the Gipper and even appears on the cover of TIME magazine super-imposed next to his conservative predecessor.

And after his sunny State of the Union speech, Obama was hailed for what many called his Reagan-like optimism.

“Reaganism is not a slur anymore,” cracked Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, reading from a disparaging 1986 opinion column by Michael Kinsley, also pointed out on the Senate floor that Reagan used to have far fewer fans.

“You could almost say we are all Reaganites now,” McConnell said.

That’s not just wishful Republican thinking. Democrats are also holding up the Gipper to lure the GOP to the negotiating table.

“In this centennial year of his birth, it would be a fitting tribute to President Reagan if Democrats and Republicans could work together to solve our challenges in the same spirit of patriotic pragmatism that President Reagan and others brought to protecting Social Security a generation ago,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during an extended tribute to Reagan on the Senate floor Thursday.

The effort by Democrats to use Reagan for their own purposes chafes many on the right.

The day of the State of the Union speech last month, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh cited Obama’s own books.

“He despised Reagan’s ideas,” Limbaugh thundered. “There is not an ounce of honesty in the Democrat Party or in the leftist movement in this country, not an ounce of it.”

Martin Anderson, a Reagan confidant and policy adviser, recalled the famous quote from Democratic establishmentarian Clark Clifford, who called Reagan an “amiable dunce.”

“Nobody says it anymore,” Anderson said with a chuckle.

And, he added: “Time magazine! Did you ever expect Time magazine would do that!? So it’s starting to go. We’ll see in the next couple of months … now nobody is attacking Reagan. Period. They stay away.”

Anderson predicted that this was just the beginning of Reagan’s image remake, saying that more Democratic and mainstream media figures would venerate him in coming years.

That’s precisely what bothers some in the conservative ranks, including Craig Shirley, a GOP public relations executive who has penned two books on Reagan.

Citing the same concerns that have been expressed about King on the left, Shirley said: “If you make these men so iconic, they lose their individuality, their essence.”

In a Washington Times op-ed Friday, Shirley wrote that “myths can blind one to the facts about a man.”

“Worse, they can be perpetuated to achieve a purpose in the name of some hidden agenda,” he continued, taking exception to what he called “the pernicious myth” that Reagan and former Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill had been friends.

“They worked together a couple of times, and O’Neill was gracious at the time of the assassination attempt, but O’Neill also wrote in his autobiography that it was “sinful” that Reagan had been elected and that he was the “worst” president in O’Neill’s lifetime.

And, Shirley noted, Reagan had once described an O’Neill fundraising letter as “the most vicious pack of lies I’ve ever seen.”

Another conservative Reagan biographer, Steven Hayward, said liberals have spent the last few years focused on separating Reagan from his conservative ideology.

“There’s some risk of that,” he fretted in an interview. “The problem here is that liberal admirers of Reagan are trying to divorce his style from his substance, and that does not work in the long run.”

Heyward has a cover story in the current issue of National Review pushing back strongly on what he wrote was the left’s “subtle revisionism.”

He warned that “the Liberal Revised Standard Version of Reagan will be used against the tea party and congressional Republicans in the months and years to come.”

Democrats, Heyward said, have stopped making Reagan jokes or challenging his legacy because they see how his standing has been solidified with the general public. Indeed, a Gallup poll released last December found that 74 percent of Americans now approve of Reagan’s job performance, trailing only Kennedy among presidents from the last half century.

“I think most Democrats, if they were honest, would certainly concede his significance,” said longtime Democratic consultant and former Ted Kennedy speechwriter Bob Shrum.

Shrum argued that Reagan revisionism isn’t just taking place on the left.

“Some who profess to be his followers don’t want to admit it today, but he was pragmatic,” the Democrat said, citing his willingness to raise taxes and achieve peace, not just through strength, but also with diplomacy and negotiation.

Rep. Vic Fazio, who was a Democratic staffer in the California Legislature when Reagan was governor and then served in the U.S. House during his presidency, added: “He was a lot more of a consensus builder than conservatives would like to remember.”

But he also could be a hard-nosed partisan and battle fiercely with Democrats.

What’s happening to Reagan now is, in many respects, what happened to his own political hero FDR. After pushing deeply controversial policies in their day, both ultimately became accepted as political giants by their former tormentors.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited and published Reagan’s diaries in 2007, linked the Reagan and Roosevelt experiences.

“People really used to loathe FDR, and now everybody considers him a great president,” said Brinkley, adding: “We in America like winners. FDR won World War II. And Ronald Reagan, it is thought, won the Cold War. That’s hard to overcome. It transcends politics.”

There’s another figure who provided fuel for the re-branding of Reagan — Reagan himself.

Bently Elliott, Reagan’s top speechwriter in his first term, recalled an interview his old boss gave at the end of his time in the White House.

“He didn’t say he wanted to be remembered as the president who turned around the economy or the president who brought down the Evil Empire,” Elliott recalled. “He said he wanted to be remembered as ‘the president who made the American people believe in themselves again.’”