The Gipper's Long Shadow

By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

The political implications of Mr. Reagan's death are unclear. President Bush announced that Friday will be a national day of mourning to mark the funeral. The federal government will close down. Both Mr. Bush and Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry will pull political advertising that day. The financial markets will be closed.

Kerry has suspended his campaigning for the entire week. Democrats have canceled fundraising concerts. Mr. Bush has not spoken of his reelection campaign since Saturday, when Mr. Reagan passed away at age 93.

"I think that this week will pose challenges to President Bush and Sen. Kerry," former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said in an interview. "For President Bush it is the challenge of the sheer magnetism of Reagan's communication ability.

"For Sen. Kerry it poses the challenges that virtually everything President Reagan is quoted as saying, it is closer to President Bush than it is to Sen. Kerry," added Gingrich. "Reagan reminds people of modern conservatism, cutting taxes, national strength, in a way which makes President Bush's argument easier."

Mr. Bush is already making the comparison between his war on terror and Mr. Reagan's Cold War. It is a tenuous connection but possibly beneficial to his candidacy.

"I feel wrapping himself in President Reagan's mantle is good election-year politics for President Bush," said Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "President Bush is trying to capitalize on Reagan to capitalize on his own weaknesses. He's seen himself as a Reagan-esque president, but he has gotten himself in a much bigger problem."

The Cold War seems a strangely quaint recollection compared to the ghostly nature of America's enemies in the current war on terror.

Freedom as opposed to tyranny, as the Cold War was portrayed by Mr. Reagan, seems too glib for the war on terror. The war in Iraq, after all, is not the war of words that tore down the wall of communism. Americans are dying daily.

"Reagan won the Cold War. Bush has not had similar success in Iraq. But by arguing that he is the heritage of Reagan, he makes people think maybe he'll win in the long run, too," said Bruce Cain, director of the Institute of Government Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. "The question is if we are beyond the point of the simple association doing any good. Everyday you have the facts of Iraq staring folks in the face. Reagan was able to facilitate the end of the Cold War without losing lives."

Democrats are concerned that Reagan's death will, at the very least, offer President Bush a reprieve from his steadily depreciating poll numbers. There is a rally-round-the-flag tendency in America that could benefit a sitting president.

Reagan was a former Democrat turned ardent Republican. He said government was the problem when Washington did not shudder at the notion of a welfare state. He said the U.S. approach to communism should no longer be one of containment, but rollback.

"Reagan, of course, would have always elevated the campaign [in Iraq] well beyond the WMD issue and put in the context of freedom," Gingrich said.

Americans didn't all love Reagan's policies. Reganomics did not trickle down to the poor. Twenty-five thousand Americans did die of AIDS before Mr. Reagan spoke publicly about the gay plague, as it was then called. But somehow, the dislike for Reagan's policy rarely translated into disdain for the man.

At a time when so many Republicans revile ex-President Bill Clinton and so many Democrats revile current President Bush, it is easy to forget that Mr. Reagan was not hated as a person.

He loved jellybeans. He remained the all-American "gipper" from his younger days in Hollywood. He seemed to bring back an air of aristocracy to the White House, reminiscent of the grandeur during former President John F. Kennedy's brief term in office. Somehow, while doing this, he took the blue collar away from Democrats.

Mr. Reagan's disarming humor earned him the name "the Great Communicator." He was a Hollywood actor made for the modern television age, where likeability and appearance sometimes mattered more than policy. He was a big-picture man, like the current president. He was also tremendously deft in his quips.

Little illustrated this better than his debates with Democratic nominee Walter F. Mondale in the election of 1984. Mondale was a 56 and Mr. Reagan was 73, older than any incumbent who had ever won reelection.

In one debate, Reagan said, "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Mr. Bush is not capable of that. Neither was any other U.S. president that followed Reagan. But President Bush can use Reagan's legacy to reframe the presidential election on the ground he originally hoped, as a strong and morally clear leader in dangerous times.

"George W. Bush is wise to not pretend he is Ronald Reagan; nobody thinks he is Ronald Reagan," Gingrich said. "George W. Bush's challenge is to be a pretty effective George W. Bush. If he is a pretty effective George W. Bush, within the framework of Reagan's legacy, that will do it. That's enough."

By David Paul Kuhn