Subject: (Editorial): Reagan's Secret
Date: Published: 8/19/92 (79 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial):
    Reagan's Secret

    By nearly all measures, Ronald Reagan's speech to the convention
 Monday night was a large success.  As one non-admiring network
 reporter was heard to say to a colleague on the floor afterward,
 "He's done it again."  Yes, but how does he do it?  Is it the bobbing
 head?  The voice?  The amiable countenance of an Irish cop?  Is it the
 shoes?  No, as Michael Jordan had to remind Spike Lee, "No, Mars,
 it's not the shoes."
    It's this:  "I live for the future."  Perhaps as much as anything,
 this line marks the divide between Ronald Reagan and his critics.
 He's an optimist.  They, most of the time, are Spenglerian brooders.
    Ronald Reagan sees a country of opportunity, possibility and
 individual achievement -- the "shining city on a hill."  They see the
 homeless, people with AIDS, single mothers -- a country of
 unfulfilled ideals.
    With his vision, Ronald Reagan won two presidential elections and
 left a legacy that won a third election.  They, his critics, kept
 losing.
    His critics diminish democracy by arguing that Mr. Reagan somehow
 fooled the country for eight years.  Millions and millions of people
 vote in our presidential elections, and we believe that in its
 collective wisdom, the electorate knows what it is doing.
    Mr. Reagan's convention speech did indeed "do it again," and a
 close parsing of it would suggest to a disinterested person the
 secrets of the Reagan appeal.
    Like most Americans, I live for the future.  The Reagan speech was
 suffused with the expressions of a politician almost solely
 preoccupied with forward movement, driven by the country's
 intellectual, technical and economic skills.  He pushed his politics
 and his people toward the cutting edge.  He is a relentless apostle
 of progress.
    We believe that no power of government is as formidable a force
 for good as the creativity and entrepreneurial drive of the American
 people.
    When Mr. Reagan talks about "ideals," they are ideals that
 "invented revolutionary technologies."  His America has "a powerful
 sense of energy."  The world is being transformed and "while no
 transition is without its problems," it will leave America more
 "dynamic."  (Set in this context, what exactly is the meaning of
 "conservative"?)
    The speech returns repeatedly to variations on this theme of
 striving and future accomplishment.  Emerson was right.  We are the
 country of tomorrow.  Our revolution did not end at Yorktown.  Again,
 to his critics it is all hopelessly Pollyannish, this "morning in
 America" stuff.  But his critics, mostly writers, are the sort of
 people who've always tended toward brooding about details left
 undone and life's sorrows.  And they're sure that this sense of
 life's melancholy gives them a more complete sense of the human
 condition.  Maybe so, but Ronald Reagan, with the mind-set of an
 engineer or builder, offered a vision of the human condition, a
 prospect really, that had a greater political appeal.
    Most likely, Ronald Reagan's critics don't care to learn anything
 about politics from him.  But his party should.
    It's impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan talking in the way Pat
 Buchanan does about keeping foreign people and foreign products out
 of the U. S.  Nor would he ever give the impression that his political
 actions drew their energy from reservoirs of bitterness and
 antipathy.  Certainly politics gets rough at times, but during the
 years of the Reagan presidency his and the party's personality were
 defined in terms of tomorrow's potential, not today's problems.
    Today's voters may be too fixated on the present dark mood to
 find appeals to future progress attractive.  But the mood in 1980 was
 dark, too.  Optimism, at any time, resides somewhere inside nearly
 every voter.  We doubt there's a politician who more masterfully and
 completely explored the potential of this powerful human need than
 Ronald Reagan.  He offered a textbook lesson in his technique Monday
 night.  Read the speech.
    (See related letter:  "Letters to the Editor:  The Heart of Texas"
 -- WSJ Sept. 14, 1992)

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