PRESSWATCH: That '80s Show
Taranto, James
That ’80s Show P R e s s W a T c H GOP convention courting black voters: By James Taranto This past fall, the New York Times ended TimesSelect, its experiment in charging for online...
...Associated Press, and other outlets...
...To illustrate the point, the day the report was issued, I searched for the phrase “plight of the homeless” in the Times before Vietnam vets “started showing up among the homeless...
...At Philadelphia, Reagan “spoke mostly about inflation and the economy...
...His “states’ rights” believe in people doing as much as they can at the sources to fund them...
...So hardy is the stereotype of the “homeless vet” that journalists are projecting it into the future...
...America fled Vietnam in 1973, and sure enough, the first mention of “homeless veterans” in the Times’s post-1980 archive is in 1983, almost exactly a decade later...
...Brooks conceded that it was “callous, at least, to use the phrase ‘states’ rights’ in any context in Philadelphia,” and that Reagan failed to do “something wonderful” by mentioning civil rights in his speech there...
...The persistence of anti-Reagan myths and stereotypes, however, shows that however fondly they may remember the man, many in the media still abominate what he stood for...
...The answer turned out to be no on both counts...
...Still,” argued Brooks, “the agitprop version…—that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism—is a distortion”: It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence...
...Afghanistan, attracting coverage from the Times, the N i r e r a e y - 7 2 , r e t t l e h . m a t e i n i t n e m e l o v i d n a q a I f o s n a r e t e v n o t o p e r a e u s i t s he N d ational A r lliance to End Hom e r lessness 2 n 8 re v sults, o f w V hich n all b T ut fiv a e pre date Am p eric o a’ p u d e r u t d i r e p r a e y - 0 3 1 , r e m r f e h T . t n e s e r p ovember saw another ’80s flashback, when are divid ed into o two eras: 1851-1980 a o nd 198 n 1 to th d e s produced 207 results...
...The size of the active-duty military shrank drastically in the ’90s and has not recovered (although the services have partly compensated by calling up National Guardsmen and reservists...
...We’re going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous,” said Daniel Tooth, director of veterans affairs for Lancaster County, Pa...
...Krugman’s blog post, which didn’t mention Brooks by name, was not a rebuttal but an effort to change the subject...
...Or he may have done it in ignorance of the symbol...
...league Bob Herbert scooped him by more than eight years, citing this slur way back on June 20, 1997, and then again on February 10, 2000, May 1, 2000, December 12, 2002, July 18, 2005, October 6, 2005, September 28, 2006, and September 25, 2007...
...He may have done it to court the votes of whites not yet reconciled to the changes in the Southern way of life...
...As of 2000, according to census data, nearly 8.4 million “Vietnam era” (August 1964 through April 1975) veterans were alive...
...The paper’s stable of op-ed columnists, hidden for two years, had a worldwide audience again...
...And who are those people...
...Yet the last pre- Reagan reference to “homeless veterans” in the Times was in 1954, in a review of a novel set in Germany in 1948...
...I to the states and local communities with the tax like education and others should be turned back comment, in context, is utterly benign: “Programs community level and the private level...
...In 2002, Krugman, who had been attacking Enron, ended up with egg on his face when it emerged that he had taken $50,000 from the company years earlier to serve on an advisory board...
...For a man prominent in public life for many years not to know what happened in Philadelphia, Miss., would not be a plus...
...This is from the The AP states that “it took roughly a decade” AP’s coverage: Homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans...
...David Brooks, the paper’s resident conservative, devoted his November 9 column to correcting a “distortion” that “has spread like a weed over the past few months”: An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia [Miss.] to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side...
...But most Vietnam veterans were discharged archives, which, in an unwitting memorial to Reagan, they should have begun showing up in the shelters before 1973...
...Brooks was too discreet to name names, but it was obvious that he had in mind colleague Paul Krugman, who had employed the Reagan-in-Philadelphia trope at least four times: 5 6 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 J a M e s T a R a n T o Miss., a small town whose only claim to fame was the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers...
...What about the “early presence” of Iraq and Afghanistan vets in homeless shelters...
...Why does Reagan’s speech loom so much larger in today’s liberal imagination than it did when Reagan was alive and active in politics...
...John Kerry, who in 1988 described the Reagan years as a period of “moral darkness,” in 2004 praised him for having “shaped one of the greatest victories of freedom...
...workers murdered there a quarter-century ago, it was clear that his campaign appeal would not be to blacks or liberals...
...Because far fewer troops are in Iraq and Afghanistan than were in Vietnam, the current wars will produce far fewer veterans...
...They decided to do the fair first, believing it would send the wrong message to go straight from the Urban League to Philadelphia, Miss...
...This almost certainly is entirely a function of media stereotypes...
...Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable...
...Sept...
...It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy...
...What actually happened is that roughly a decade after America left Vietnam, Reagan became president, and the media noticed the homeless in general and homeless vets in particular, using them to paint the conservative president as heartless...
...5 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 James Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com and a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board...
...The truth,” Brooks noted, is more complicated...
...Who’d have thought the former Enron adviser was a former Reagan aide too...
...But Wicker, whose column appeared Nov...
...Tom Wicker wrote that when the candidate “spoke early in his campaign at Philadelphia, Miss., without mentioning the names of three civil rights There has never been a cause on which the liberal-left turned out to be clearly on the right side...
...It said nothing about the Philadelphia speech, instead listing other Reagan statements and actions that Krugman found objectionable —from criticizing the Voting Rights Act to opposing the Martin Luther King holiday (a position on which the Gipper later reversed himself )—and sarcastically ending every paragraph with “It was all just an innocent mistake...
...18, 1988, was referring not to Reagan but to Michael Dukakis...
...Neither interpretation can commend Reagan to anyone who cares about civil rights...
...It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless...
...24, 2007: “Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered...
...Paul Krugman was 11 when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law...
...Reagan had planned to spend the week after the 1980 But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia.… Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up.… So the decision was made to go to Neshoba.… Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out...
...Krugman has no business browbeating anyone about civil rights, and his badmouthing of Reagan f e b R U a R Y 2 0 0 8 T H e a M e R I c a n s P e c T a T o R 5 7 P R e s s W a T c H is especially rich...
...He was not yet working for the Times, but he did write a puff piece about Enron for Fortune during this period...
...The Reaganites then had an internal debate over whether to do the Urban League speech and then go to the fair, or to do the fair first...
...Reagan’s putative racism was not offensive enough to deter Krugman from taking a job in 1982 as a staff economist for the president’s Council of Economic Advisers...
...If the “roughly a decade” assertion is true, in the middle to late 1970s...
...Almost certainly it was he whom Brooks had in mind...
...Homelessness itself did not become a media cause célèbre until Reagan’s presidency—i.e., “roughly a decade” after America fled Vietnam...
...But whereas even his fellow liberals disdain the dreary Herbert, Krugman, whose insufferable sanctimony is enlivened by a feral rage, is a hero of today’s liberal-left...
...That ’80s Show P R e s s W a T c H GOP convention courting black voters: By James Taranto This past fall, the New York Times ended TimesSelect, its experiment in charging for online content...
...Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.… Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future...
...The Reagan speech seemed to have escaped Wicker’s notice...
...24, 2007: “Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it—at the urging of a young Trent Lott— with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964...
...I believe in states’ rights...
...Sept...
...19, 2005: “And he launched his 1980 campaign with a pro-states’-rights speech in Philadelphia, Krugman is nothing if not unoriginal...
...We are now reading “reports” about a “tsunami” of them that has yet to materialize...
...Lewis was highly critical of Reagan, but unlike Krugman, he was willing to allow that the candidate’s motives might not have been invidious: Now there are two ways of looking at Reagan’s decision to go to Philadelphia, Miss., and speak about states’ rights...
...July 24, 2006: “Don’t forget that in 1980, the sainted Ronald Reagan began his presidential campaign with a speech on states’ rights in Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964...
...Anthony Lewis wrote about the speech once, on September 22, 1980...
...Tony Lewis and Tom Wicker were civil rights advocates when it mattered...
...Because today’s liberals yearn for their elders’ moral authority...
...The speech was a much bigger deal to liberal Times columnists in 2007 than it had been in 1980...
...For someone Krugman’s age, it has never required any courage to be a man of the left, and there has never been a cause on which the liberal-left turned out to be clearly on the right side...
...I wondered if a previous generation of liberal Times columnists had been as preoccupied with the Philadelphia speech, and as uncharitable toward Reagan, as their progeny...
...The figure for the post-Gulf War period (August 1990 through April 2000) was barely 3 million—and this was a younger population, so that a smaller proportion would have died by 2000...
...His colYet another new feature of the Times web is that much of the paper’s archives are now available free...
...Aug...
...To readers, it looked like one of those “Unfrozen Caveman” sketches on Saturday Night Live, as a trio of the paper’s columnists went at each other over a speech delivered more than a quarter-century earlier...
...And it was Krugman who took to his Times blog—another post-TimesSelect innovation— the day after Brooks’s column in opposition to the “campaign to exonerate Ronald Reagan...
...When Reagan died, even many of his former foes were full of praise for him...
...A look at the numbers makes clear that there will be no such tsunami...
Vol. 41 • February 2008 • No. 1
