Frank Rich: First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double

BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" after he brings out the actual Marshall McLuhan to silence a pontificating McLuhan expert with whom he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend life was like that.

George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat Ronald Reagan's 1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy Noonan). It was not the first time that the current president had taken a page from his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the most humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death had pushed the replay of his original oration to center stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is yanked on screen in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque speech atomized into white noise, to the limited extent that it was broadcast at all.

Some would argue that no politician in his right mind would even invite comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the aftermath of Reagan's death, his fans and foes alike remain agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may have brought the Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer. They were a product of training, not accident. He had first performed as a child in church skits put on by his mother. Later came the legendary path through baseball announcing, 52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became known as the Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned politicians, whether George Murphy before him or Arnold Schwarzenegger after, can match this résumé. To see the difference between an acting professional and an aspiring amateur, just look at the one recent president who had show business on the brain, Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's act may be better than any Reagan successor, he nonetheless lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit his mark, not to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.

(snip)

The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil" with the "evil empire."

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http://nytimes.com/2004/06/13/arts/13RICH.html

Reagan was a well honed act! His resume is filled with performance and role playing perfected to capture the American belly button mentality.

Thanks for the Article!

it will take decades for this country to recover from the damage done by these criminals, thanks for the great link.

...this is why Ahnold is waiting in the wings.

"The Reagan phenomenon, in fact, may offer a foretaste of the directions in which capitalist democracy is heading, with the progressive elimination of labor unions, independent media, political associations, and, more generally, forms of popular organization that interfere with domination of the state by concentrated private power....

"...U.S. public opinion seemed to regard (Reagan) as hardly more than a symbol of national unity, something like the flag, or the Queen of England....(T)he public seemed unconcerned over the evidence, difficult to suppress, that President Reagan had only the vaguest conception of the policies enacted in his name....

"It is therefore of some interest that the United States functioned virtually without a chief executive for eight years."

I guess we can add another four years to that eight.

Quotes from Chomsky's Necessary Illusions, "Democracy and the Media."

Young people today have no clue about Reagan, let alone the damage he caused.

Aaaargh! /rant mode