Ronald Reagan had many detractors, who
directed sneers at the movie actor turned presi-
dent, the ‘great communicator’ who failed to
grasp the essential details of issues, the hands-off
president. When he did stumble into trouble,
as in the Iran–Contra affair, he did not appear to
realise precisely what or who had gone wrong. Yet
he retained his personal popularity throughout
his two administrations, as troubles just seemed
to slide off him, earning him the nickname the
‘Teflon President’. Was Reagan just lucky to
be in the White House during a decade most
of which brought increasing prosperity to the
Western world, in contrast to the difficult 1970s?
Was he merely fortunate that the Soviet Union
had gained a new leader in the mid-1980s who
saw the futility of the Cold War and was deter-
mined to end it? Or was there more to it? Perhaps
the judgement should be that Reagan spotted
opportunities and responded positively to them.
He was a likeable, kindly president and he had the
skill to project his warmth. The American people
were in tune with his optimism; they wanted to
put Vietnam behind them. They responded to his
upbeat projections of a bright future and rejected
Carter’s gloomy ‘crisis of confidence’ diagnosis of
what was wrong with America.
Reagan was carried forward across the nation,
not just in California, by a revival of the conser-
vative tradition that had already made itself felt in
the 1970s. It was a scepticism about the ‘nanny
state’, about government’s ability to find solu-
tions to all the country’s ills, including the
growing and predominantly black underclass, the
drug-use, the gun culture and the increasing
number of one-parent families. The American
people would have to accept their responsibilities.
Welfare meant taxation. In California in 1978,
the state had to obey the results of a referendum
called Proposition 13, which cut property taxes
and so left the state budget with insufficient funds
for all its welfare and social programmes. Reagan
recognised that the California tax revolt was not
just a local but a national issue. The diagnosis was
that taxation fell too heavily on the creators of
wealth. There was too much regulation stifling
America’s natural enterprise. In his inaugural
address he coined the slogan, ‘Government is not
the solution to our problem – government is the
problem.’ The US needed government, but it
should work with the people, not sit on their
backs. The US, he declared with some exaggera-
tion, was the ‘last and greatest bastion of
freedom’.
But how was America to be restored to great-
ness and prosperity? An answer was seemingly
found. Reagan had been converted before the
elections to the theory of supply-side economics,
or more precisely to the scientific truth of the
‘Laffer curve’, the discovery of Professor Arthur
Laffer. If Carter was a born-again Christian,
Reagan was a born-again economist. On the face
of it, supply-side economics was a miracle: it held
that if you lowered taxes you actually collectedChapter 70
THE UNITED STATES, GLOBAL POWER
REAGAN, BUSH AND CLINTON