Ronald reagan

As usual, P.G. Wodehouse put it best. “What is it Shakespeare calls sleep, Jeeves?,” Bertie Wooster inquires of his faithful manservant. “Tired Nature’s sweet restorer sir.” "Exactly. Well there you are, then,” Bertie complacently concurs. Perhaps it was this exchange that President Biden was pondering during the opening speeches at the COP26 when he apparently dozed off. A variety of interpretations of Biden’s behavior are possible. A charitable one is that he was behaving like any rational human being listening to a bunch of self-important gasbags would and simply tuned out. Another one, assiduously touted by his detractors, is that the old duffer simply can’t hack it any longer. Take him out in public for a few hours and it isn’t sleepy but somnolent Joe.

Every president is criticized, sooner or later, for taking too many days off, for lounging around when we’ve hired him to work. Since the media hates Republicans, that criticism is usually directed at them, but even some liberal publications have noticed that — shock! — Democratic presidents play golf, too. That criticism, most recently in Amber Athey’s article in The Spectator, is wrong. It misses the bigger, more important issues — and not just because our country would be well served if most presidents did less, not more. It’s fun to compare the President with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but there are three problems with criticizing presidents for escaping to their beach house in Delaware or their ranch in Texas or California.

After whispering a prayer to St Ronald Reagan, Paul Ryan rose to his feet, solemnly kissed his bible, Atlas Shrugged, and gave a speech at the Gipper's presidential library in Simi Valley about the perils of personality cults. Though the former Republican House speaker did not attack Donald Trump directly on Thursday, it was obvious who was on his mind. 'If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we're not going anywhere,' Ryan said. And if the conservative movement fails, he warned, 'it will be because we gave too much allegiance to one passing political figure, and weren't loyal enough to our principles'. Ryan also called the audience away from the culture war.

Walter Mondale, who has died aged 93, is destined to be a trivia question: 'which die-hard liberal did Reagan beat by a landslide in 1984?’ That’s unfair. He had brains, looks and a presidential temperament. He was just out of time. Here’s my Mondale anecdote. I interviewed him for my PhD in 2005 at his office in Minneapolis. He offered me a coffee; I said yes, and was then stunned when he got up from his desk and made it himself. This is unheard of in US politics. 'I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that a vice president of the United States made me coffee,’ I said. Mondale sighed. 'Nowadays,’ he replied, 'it’s nice just to have something to do.’ He had a great sense of humor; the problem was it was deadpan and it paled in comparison to Reagan’s.

Spectator contributors were asked: Which moment from history seems most significant or interesting? Here is Dominic Cummings’s answer: In the early morning of 26 September 1983, Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Union’s Air Defence Force was on duty, monitoring his country’s satellite system, when the siren sounded. His computer indicated that the US had just launched five nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, and protocol required him to notify superiors immediately. Soviet strategy was to ‘launch on warning’, and many in Moscow believed Ronald Reagan was planning a first strike.  But Petrov had a gut feeling this was a false alarm. Five missiles seemed too few, and the system itself was new.

When Donald Trump took his famous escalator ride, the Republican party was too attached to abstract principles at the expense of the material interests of its own voters. It wasn’t even doing a particularly good job of adhering to its preferred ideological abstractions. Whatever the Democratic party’s ideological failings, its leadership understands the importance of delivering tangible benefits to the electoral coalition that puts them in power (although their newfound suburban voters could be in for a rude awakening if the Democrats ever get too much power). Trump presented an opportunity to change this.

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.

Dolphins returned to the canals of Venice during the COVID-19 lockdown, and neoconservatives are returning to the Democratic party. Bill Kristol and his colleagues at the Bulwark support Joe Biden for president, even though an anti-Trump Republican of sorts briefly jumped into the race. Michigan congressman Justin Amash earned the esteem of the Kristol crew when he collaborated with Democrats to impeach Donald Trump last year. But the Bulwark feared that if Amash was on the ballot as the Libertarian party’s presidential nominee, he’d take votes away from Biden.

Soon enough, Congress will hold hearings to investigate the federal response to the Wuhan virus pandemic. It is almost a guarantee those efforts will find failures, as no government is ever really prepared for 100-year catastrophic events. We’d like to think our government can handle anything, but, as countless Inspector General reports show, the federal government routinely fails to do the ordinary work of government. Expecting flawless execution with the extraordinary is delusional. I should know because 15 years ago I served as a senior-level official at the US Department of Homeland Security. My various roles exposed me to several events that contained valuable lessons I see playing out yet again in America’s response to the Wuhan pandemic.