Jack Kelly Sunday

Just a few things from this week's column. Jack does his usual spin though he relies on actual numbers for most of his column. The last few paragraphs, however, simply cry out for clarification:

Reagan's oratorical skills boosted his popularity. But what made it endure was that his policies were successful. Inheriting an economy more troubled than ours is today, his tax cuts triggered an economic boom that was then the longest in American history. When Mr. Reagan took the oath of office, the Soviets were in Afghanistan and mullahs in Iran were holding Americans hostage. The hostages were freed moments later; the Soviet Union was crumbling by the end of his term.

Barack Obama ultimately will be judged by the success of his policies, not by how well he describes them. If they work, the comparisons to Franklin Roosevelt will be validated. If they don't, Jimmy Carter may no longer be viewed as the worst president in modern times.

I'll start at the end and move backward. WHO views Jimmy Carter as the "worst president in modern times"?? Certainly not the historians recently surveyed by C-Span. They ranked Carter as 25th out of 42 - nothing to brag about, certainly.

In fact, Carter was ranked AHEAD of such 20th century presidents as; Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, George W Bush, and of course Warren Harding. In C-Span's ranking, of the 18 presidents since Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901 (assuming that's a good definition of "modern times") five ranked lower than Carter. While, again, not necessarily anything to brag about, Jimmy Carter still sits at the top of only the bottom third.

And if we assume, say, "modern times" to mean everything since WWII, then Carter STILL isn't the worst president on the ranking. That dubious honor, of course, goes to George W. Bush.

Tells us a great deal about Jack to be able to skew things so differently from the 64 professionals C-Span surveyed.

Now on to Reagan, who at 10 ranks ahead of such post-war presidents as Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush but behind John Kennedy, and Harry Truman. Jack seems to sum up the whole of Reagan's two terms with one whole paragraph. But is it, on the whole, true? Or even accurate?

For example, was Reagan all that popular during his presidency? Not so much, according to FAIR:

Averaging 50 percent for his first term, Reagan fared slightly better than Ford at 47 percent and Carter at 47 percent, but with Gallup's 3 percent margin of error even these differences are not statistically significant. On the other band, Reagan's first term average was much lower than those of Presidents Kennedy (1961-63) who averaged a 70 percent approval rating, Eisenhower with a 69 percent average, and Nixon at 56 percent.

In May of the second year of his second term (1986), Reagan's 68 percent approval rating surpassed the mid-sixth year figures for two-term presidents. But after the Iran-Contra scandal broke in the fall of 1986, Reagan's approval rating plummeted to 46 percent, leaving him with an unimpressive average for that year.

Remember the Iran-Contra scandal? The S&L scandal? The HUD scandal? All Reagan scandals. In light of those scandals wonder which of Reagan's policies does Jack think were "successful"?

Reagan gets tons of press for his tax cuts. Jack even mentions how the tax cut "triggered an economic boom that was then the longest in American history." (The longest expansion (so far) occurred during the Clinton Administration, by the way.) But no one ever mentions how Reagan was responsible for one of the greatest post-war tax increases. From Bruce Bartlett in the National Review:

Peter Wallison, who was White House counsel to President Reagan, responded to my analysis in the New York Times on October 26. He pointed to Ronald Reagan's resistance to tax increases in 1982, citing passages from Reagan's diary that were published in his autobiography, An American Life. The gist of Wallison's article is that Ronald Reagan successfully resisted efforts by his staff and many in Congress to raise taxes, thereby ensuring the victory of Reaganomics.

The only problem with this analysis is that it is historically inaccurate. Reagan may have resisted calls for tax increases, but he ultimately supported them. In 1982 alone, he signed into law not one but two major tax increases. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) raised taxes by $37.5 billion per year and the Highway Revenue Act raised the gasoline tax by another $3.3 billion.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, TEFRA alone raised taxes by almost 1 percent of the gross domestic product, making it the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. An increase of similar magnitude today would raise more than $100 billion per year.

So tell me again how Reagan's rhetorical skills "boosted his popularity" or how his "tax increases triggered an economic boom"?