Reagan era nothing to be proud of

JESSE JACKSON

_Last week we paid respect to
Ronald Reagan, saluting his
optimism, his ability to com-
municate and his grandfatherly af-
fability. But Reagan was an ideo-
logical politician. He championed
ideas that helped forge a conserva-
tive era. Reagan was largely on the
wrong side of history and his era is
exhausted, his ideas part of our
problem, not part of our solution.
Consider that if Reagan was
right, then Martin Luther King Jr.
was wrong. Reagan called King a
communist. He wanted to gut the
Voting Rights Act and the civil
rights laws. He pushed to give tax
breaks to colleges that practiced
racial discrimination. He praised
apartheid South Africa as a bas-
tion of democracy and thought
Nelson Mandela should stay in jail.
Behind that smile, Reagan prac-
ticed a vicious brand of race-bait
politics. He opened his 1980 cam-
paign in Philadelphia, Miss., call-
ing for a revival of states' rights.
Now, he had to work to get to
Philadelphia. It isn't an airplane
hub. And it is known for only one
thing: It is the town where three
civil rights workers were brutally
murdered during the 1960s.
Reagan went there to send a
message to whites (and to blacks)
across the South. Then he slurred
the invented ''welfare queen,'' sug-

gesting that poor African-Ameri-
can women were living high on the
dole. He turned the war on poverty
to the war on the poor, slashing
housing subsidies by 80 percent
and creating a dramatic rise of
homelessness in this country.
But Reagan was wrong. King
had it right. This country's diver-
sity is its strength. Congress
spurned Reagan's efforts to over-
turn the civil rights laws. Over
Reagan's veto, Congress imposed
sanctions on South Africa. Man-
dela remains Africa's leading
statesman. Reagan's race-bait poli-
tics did help Republicans consoli-
date their position in the South as
the party of white sanctuary.
Reagan championed tax cuts for
the rich, corporate free trade and
deregulation and privatization.
But tax cuts led to deficits as far as
the eye could see, and even Reagan
__________
Behind that smile, he
practiced a vicious brand
of race-bait politics.

began the process of raising taxes
to pay for them. But he raised
taxes on working and middle-in-
come people, forcing them to pay
for the party that he threw for the
rich. Corporate trade provided in-
centives for companies to move
jobs abroad and put American
workers in direct competition with
slave labor abroad.
The result was the beginning of
record trade deficits, and turning
the United States from the world's
largest creditor to its largest
debtor. Increasingly, our children
will have to pay off creditors in

China, Japan and elsewhere, tax-
ing their own income. Reagan left
us more indebted, more unequal
and more crime-ridden than be-
fore.
And, of course, Reagan was the
champion of big-stick foreign pol-
icy and scorn for international in-
stitutions. Under Reagan, preemp-
tive covert wars led directly to the
debacle in Central America and
the scandals at home that are
known as Iran-contra, where Rea-
gan, unable to win support for the
covert war in the court of public
opinion, decided to trash the law
and the Constitution to pursue his
wars.
Reagan doubled the military
budget in peacetime, wasting liter-
ally hundreds of billions on
weapons systems that we did not
need and never used. He -- and
the CIA -- thought the Soviet
Union was strong and on the
march, when in fact it was rotting
from within. Unlike the neoconser-
vatives who now dominate the
Bush administration, Reagan at
least realized that Gorbachev was
for real and negotiated with him.
And now, Bush's big-stick for-
eign policy and scorn for interna-
tional institutions have left Amer-
ica more isolated, more mistrusted
and less influential across the
world than ever. Those policies
are making America less secure
and more vulnerable. And costing
us thousands of casualties and
over $200 billion in the deserts of
Iraq.
We can admire Reagan's mas-
tery of his performance and re-
member his sense of good humor.
But we should not ignore the fail-
ure of the ideas he championed.
And we should celebrate the pass-
ing of the era he helped to create.