Remembering Reagan

Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States, died on Saturday at age 93 after a 10-year struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. Reagan, often called "the great communicator," led the country through the height of the Cold War, dramatically reshaping U.S.-Soviet relations.

Grover Norquist, chairman of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, took your questions and comments on Reagan's life.

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

________________________________________________

Grover Norquist: Ronald Reagan changed the Republican Party from being a regional party of the north to being a national party open to people of all religions and regions based on the principle of limited government. He than changed the country, moving towards one focused on limited government and individual liberty moving from a 70 year trend of greater state-ism. And lastly he changed the world. He broke the back of the Soviet Union, he ended the most significant threat to the US and around the world today leaders are following Reagan's path of lower tax rates, less regulation and freer trade.

_______________________

New York, N.Y.: How did Ronald Reagan manage to deal with all the different strands of the conservative movement -- traditionalists, libertarians and foreign policy hawks?

Grover Norquist: Reagan was perhaps the first national Republican leader to understand the nature of the modern center-Right conservative movement. He understood that each part of the conservative movement was active in politics because on the issue that brought them to politics what they wanted from the government was to be left alone. Gun owners just want their second amendment rights protected, tax payers don't want their taxes increased, property owners want their property rights protected, home schoolers do not go around knocking on doors telling others they have to home school and all communities of faith -- conservative Catholics, evangelical protestants, Mormons, Muslims, Jews -- all want to raise their children in their faith. They are not asking for Episcopalian stamps or for a law making everyone a Baptist and by recognizing that the very parts of the Right were not in conflict in their primary issue he was able to forge and strengthen the conservative movement and bind it to the Republican Party.

_______________________

Arlington, Va.: What do you think were Reagan's five greatest accomplishments and five greatest failures? Thank you.

Grover Norquist: Greatest accomplishments:
Defunding the Soviet Union by reducing foreign loans, hard currency imports and closing down the natural gas pipeline to Europe which would have given the Soviet Union a lot of hard currency

Ending inflation by stopping the excessive printing of dollars and his recognition that inflation is caused by the US government printing money and not by Arabs and oil or businessmen charging too much money

Reducing marginal tax rates from the top rate of 70 percent to the top rate of 28 percent, which greatly increased the incentives to work, save and invest

Maintaining the US on a path toward greater trade liberalization and creating NAFTA

Focusing on the true cost of government which is total regulation and total spending.

Failures:
Spending continued to grow during his presidency largely because of the need to have military spending growing in the wake of Jimmy Carter's unilateral disarmament

Compromises while trying to maintain a free trade regime that limited imports from Japan and other countries that hurt American consumers

He failed to win the House of Representatives for the Republicans which made spending restraint difficult.

While he succeeded in teaching most of the Republican Party the central importance of not raising taxes and protecting the second amendment, property rights and deregulation, he failed to successfully explain any of this to his Vice President, George Herbert Walker Bush.

I will put a thinking cap on for others, but I am interested in what other conservatives view as among his top failures.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Where do you think Reagan ranks on the list of great Presidents?

Grover Norquist: Reagan is the greatest president this century. It is difficult to compare him with the three or four men who started the country, or Lincoln who waged the Civil War, but I would put him in the top five.

_______________________

Harrisburg, Pa.: One of the legacies of the Reagan Administration was the devolution of government responsibilities from the Federal government to the state and local governments. How would you rate devolution: did it reduce government overall and save us money, or did it increase mismanagement at the lower levels of government and make government more difficult to administer?

Grover Norquist: Reagan wanted to restore greater federalism to American government. This differs from George Wallace's understanding of state's rights. States rights per Wallace means I am allowed to beat up anyone in my state and you can't interfere. Federalism is that 50 states competing with each other to provide the best government at the lowest cost will promote good ideas and expose bad ideas as public failures. Reagan's greatest success was that his ideas for welfare reform were enacted in 1996 when the Republicans had won control of the House and the Senate passing the welfare reform that Reagan had initially recommended in 1971, 25 years earlier when Reagan first put it forward, not a single other guy was willing to support him.

_______________________

Deming, N.M.: Ronald Reagan was definitely an admirable President. I recall then being concerned about the national debt and its burdens on future generations, which includes us now who continue to see the debt growing. What are your thoughts on the national debt left behind by the Reagan Presidency: was it the price we had to pay for his accomplishments, or should it be counted as a failure of his Presidency?

Grover Norquist: Much of the commentary about Reagan's economic policy have focused on the federal deficit. The federal deficit today and during the Reagan presidency is an unimportant and uninteresting number that is the difference between two and very interesting and important numbers -- how much money the government takes in taxes and how much money the government spends. The cost of government to the American people is not measured by the size of the deficit it is measured by the total level of government spending plus the cost of regulations imposed by the government. Reagan always pushed in the right directions on government spending by the presidential veto is a weak weapon against overspending where Congress is ultimately in greater control.

_______________________

Tallahassee, Fla.: I cannot help but notice the similarities between Reagan and Bush. Both believe that empowerment is the best kind of welfare, both believe people spend their own money better than the government and both believe that peace can only be achieved through strength. The media reviled(s) both of them as "dumb" and "cowboys." Reagan helped bring about the defeat of communism and Bush is helping to bring about the defeat of terrorism. Economic policies of both led to an explosion of growth. Do you think the American people and, most importantly, the media have any sense of this similarity and common history?

Grover Norquist: George W Bush is a Reagan Republican. He contrasts with Bob Dole and with his own Father George H.W. Bush who are Nixon Republicans. Both Bush Sr. and Dole learned how politics worked before Reagan was president. The modern era of the Republican Party and the conservative movement is made up of Reagan Republicans and over time the transformation of the Republican Party of being the Party of Nixon and Dewey and Eisenhower to being the Party of Reagan is near complete. So the similarities between Reagan and Bush are repeated in the similarities between Reagan and most Republican governors, Senators and Congressmen today.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: Ronald Reagan was the first president to propose free market solutions to environmental problems, using property rights, markets and prices. Yet the nation still follows the failed command-and-control paradigm. We are still mired in Soviet style environmentalism. Do you see any hope that the GOP will ever turn to free market environmentalism and a true respect for and use of property rights?

Grover Norquist: Excellent point. America will make its greatest progress against pollution when it relies more on property rights and less on socialism. The problem with much of the modern so-called environmentalist movement is that it doesn't have any leaders in it that care about the environment. Their real goal is government control of your land, your car, your house, and most recently your toilet. It is self-evident that privately owned land is kept better than communally or state-owned or controlled land. Bill Clinton and his "environmentalist administration" regularly let the national parks burn to the ground. This is not the way owners of the property keep their own property. Note the difference between the cleanliness of the environment of the bathroom of your house and compare it to any public restroom that is "owned by all of us" like the national parks or national forest. A better environment flows from private property not less. The Soviet empire was filled with state owned land and property and very heavily polluted.

_______________________

15th and L, Washington, D.C.: Hey, Groves. Your erstwhile neighbor Weingarten here. The old 'hood is a less interesting place without you. I very much miss the well-dressed, eager young plutocrats with cellphones on your lawn.

Listen, I don't want to throw a wet blanket over the Reagan weepfest, and I acknowledge the man left many indelible marks, many of them worthy. But what about having inaugurated an era in which unbridled greed was celebrated by the commander-in-chief, where the give-of-yourself idealism of the Kennedy years was finally supplanted by the politics of naked self-interest, greed-is-good, I-got-mine, screw-the-desenfranchised, let-em-die-of-AIDS, kleptocratic mindset that, one might argue, led to the Enron mentality? What of the zillion-dollar deficits? What of the DARK SIDE of the Reagan sunnysmile optimism?

Just wondering.

Hey, how come you are always in the company of hot chix?

Grover Norquist: Hi Gene. Great to hear from you. I did in fact move four blocks due north from the street we used to share. We miss you terribly.

Your first point that the Reagan years were periods of unbridled greed and periods of democratic presidencies are ones of self sacrifice and civic mindedness is a cliched cliche about the Left. I have never quite understood the reasoning behind the idea that when Republicans cut marginal tax rates, reduce the regulatory burden and make an effort to reduce government spending that results in the creation of millions of jobs for people who by definition didn't have jobs before, it's somehow a function of greed. This seems to me an effort by men and women on the Left to talk about the economy without mentioning words like rising standard of living, rising standard incomes, higher productivity, all of which would lead to the unpleasant realization that Reagan was right. Periods of inflation and unemployment like those under Jimmy Carter were not ennobling. They sucked. Greed is a constant in human nature. In a free society during a Republican period of economic growth such as the Reagan years or the 94-2000 control of the legislature by a Republican congress, desire by a citizen to have more can only be accomplished by creating goods or services that other people freely pay for. If you want more money you have to build a better mousetrap and sell it to somebody who is willing to pay for it. Greed in a period of increasing government power can be sated by having the government steal more money from people and giving it to Democratic precinct workers. Therefore in a free society in a voluntary economy -- i.e. during a successful Republican administration -- people's desires for more result in hard work, productivity, inventiveness, and marketing genius. The same incentives in the hands of the Left led to the expropriation of property, stealing money from people who earned it and giving it to people who didn't, creating billionaire trial lawyers who float around in multimillion dollar yachts while interfering with freedom to contract, and this is a bad thing.

You mention Enron, a scandal that came about during the Clinton years and exposed during the Bush years not by some nanny state bureaucracy but actual investors looking out for their own interest. Your screed is a caricature of the Left's silly attacks on Reagan. I am old enough to remember when my college buddies at Harvard were singing the praises of the Soviet Union, the innocents of the Rosenbergs, the virtue of Alger Hiss and the movement of the ill to rural health clinics outside of the capital of Cambodia which was referred to in other places as death marches. It is embarrassing to the Left but they were wrong about almost everything. In fact my favorite headline in the whole world comes from Reason Magazine when Jane Fonda announced her support for censorship of pornography on feminist grounds. The headline read "It's Official: She's Wrong on Everything." Gene, there is great virtue in the consistency even of the very wrong.

As to "the company of hot chix," it flows directly from my being a loyal Reaganite. We each get three. I don't know if that is supposed to be a secret, but that is why our numbers have been increasing.

_______________________

Washington, D.C.: RIP, Ronnie.

However, I think trying to get Reagan's face on the dime does a disservice to history: Roosevelt was a far greater leader than Reagan -- and the greatest president we've had since Lincoln. Let it go.

Grover Norquist: It is a good idea to compare Reagan and Roosevelt. Who was a greater leader? You might want to ask somebody from Poland or Lithuania or Bulgaria, Romania, Hungaria, East Germany, Russia, Ukraine, all nations left enslaved by decisions of Roosevelt. Ronald Reagan broke the back of the Soviet Empire and directly led to the liberation of all those nations and more. Today we are trying to reform the social security system put into place by Roosevelt that provides a negative rate of return for younger Americans. Millions of Americans have to fork over $500 or more on average to labor unions for the right to have jobs. Also a "gift" to labor unions by Roosevelt at the expense of working men and women. Reagan did a better job with the economy, with foreign policy and he did so at much less cost. On the other hand Roosevelt was elected promising to maintain the gold standard and to reduce federal spending by 25 percent, so his campaign promises were pretty good.

We are advocating putting Reagan on half the dimes and leaving Roosevelt on the other half, which is an effort to be magnanimous and bipartisan.

_______________________

Montpelier, Vt.: Please settle the question. Richard Cheney said that Ronald Reagan proved that 'deficits don't matter'. Did the massive deficit of the Reagan Administration matter? Do the massive Bush Administration deficits matter?

Grover Norquist: Cheney said that Reagan proved that defects don't matter. That is partly true. Spending matters. Total government spending is the important measure of the cost of government. If the government spends a $100 it makes no difference at all if it takes $90 in forced taxation and borrows the other $10. or if it loots through your bank accounts and takes all $100. the cost of government is $100. Deficits do not matter -- total spending matters. Deficits are sometimes a big hint that government spending is outpacing the politician's willingness and capacity to loot the citizenry.

_______________________

Kensington, Md.: I will always remember Reagan as the man who slept through most of his cabinet meetings, when the details of foreign policy and running the country were being hammered out. Do you think conservatives see that aspect of the presidency as less important -- or do they just feel that his inspirational skills lent themselves better to being behind a microphone, rather than in the less glamorous role of "bureaucratic delegator"? I guess I'm wondering how they reconcile these two very disparate sides of him.

Grover Norquist: The idea that Reagan was a passive president would surprise the former dictators of Eastern Europe who are, despite their best efforts, out of jobs or dead. A number of books have been written which details Reagan's strategy begun immediately in Reagan's' presidency to destroy the Soviet Union by

Actually my father has written a wonderful 10 page summery of all the literature on this field and this article is available at www.reaganlegacy.org/main.htm.

The article points out that Ronald Reagan had a foreign policy strategy that he implemented step by step and that was extremely successful. The result is a freer and more prosperous world.

_______________________

Grover Norquist: I would encourage all citizens to communicate with their congressmen and senators and urge them to place Ronald Reagan on the $10 as well as on half of dimes. I would also encourage citizens to communicate with their state legislators so that this year we name something significant after President Reagan in all 50 states and each of the 3000 plus counties in America.

_______________________