“If I’d gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward,” writes Ronald Reagan in the first chapter of his autobiography, “I suppose I would never have left Illinois.”
“That night over dinner at Buckingham Palace,” writes Reagan of the first night of the London economic summit, “Pierre [Trudeau] mentioned that he had read someplace that I could recite by heart ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ . . . I’m not sure he really believed I could do it. Maybe he just wanted to put me on the spot and see how I’d handle it. Sitting between Pierre and me was the Queen Mother, and as it turned out she was a great fan of that story and one of its characters, ‘the lady known as Lou.’ So when she heard what Pierre said, she turned to me and said, ‘Oh, do you know “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”?’
“No matter where I went, in San Jose or Modesto, Los Angeles or Newport Beach, after I’d give a speech, people would be waiting and they’d come up to me and say, ‘Why don’t you run for governor?’
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But they, the people, kept after him. They begged, they pleaded. Again and again he said no. “Then I’d go and give another speech and hear the same things again and again. Before long, we were having trouble getting to sleep again; we’d lay in bed [he and Nancy] and say, ‘Will we ever be able to live with ourselves if we turn our backs on this and Pat Brown wins a third term?’”
“People were growing resentful of bureaucrats,” he says, “whose first mission in life seemed to be protecting their own jobs by keeping expensive programs alive long after their usefulness had expired. They were losing respect for politicians who kept voting for open-ended welfare programs riddled with fraud and inefficiency that kept generation after generation of families dependent on the dole. And they were growing mistrustful of the self-appointed intellectual elite back in Washington who claimed to know better than the people of America did how to run their lives, their business and their communities. There was unrest in the country, and it spread across the land like a prairie fire.”
In Reagan’s view, it wasn’t he who changed but the Democratic Party. “The ‘classic liberal,’” he writes, “believed individuals should be masters of their own destiny and the least government is the best government; these are the precepts of freedom and self-reliance that are at the root of the American way and the American spirit. But then came the ‘newfangled liberals’ who rejected these beliefs. They claimed government had a greater wisdom than individuals to determine what was best for the individual and it should engineer our economic and business life according to its goals and values; dictate to states, cities, and towns what their rights and responsibilities were; and take an increasing bite out of the earnings of productive workers and redistribute to those who are not productive. To them, government was the fount of all wisdom–the bigger government was, the better–and they rejected the principles of the Democrats who had gone before them.”
Reagan’s ability to slash domestic-spending programs with such relish, enjoy the support of the Republican right, and continue to praise FDR is a key to his broad appeal among voters. He was himself a typical “swing voter,” a Democrat who voted his pocketbook.
