Make-Believe Reagan : Rolling Stone, by Matt Taibbi

It’s only after you run into this lobotomy act ten or eleven times that you start to see the dark essence of Fred Thompson. He is hard to dislike on a personal level: Unlike the overconfident district attorney he plays on Law and Order, the real-life Thompson comes off as a halting, humble, accidental celebrity who’s really just dern glad to be here. And his personality seems consistent with his Goldwater-era ideology: A believer in limited government, he seeks to achieve his ends by getting his frankly limited self elected to the White House.

His politics, though, are another matter. As a political animal, Thompson embodies the twisted core of the Sean Hannity/Rush Limbaugh era: He looks you right in the eye with that aw-shucks face of his and tells you shit that just isn’t true about who we are as a country. In his first few days on the campaign trail, he paces back and forth in front of crowds of Iowans and assures them without blinking that “we have the best health-care system in the world” — and you sit there wondering how the hell he can get away with saying that when America’s infant mortality rate is behind fricking Slovenia’s.

But by then Thompson is talking about how France and England are desperate to copy our market-based system of health care. And then he’s on to Iraq, where we “went in for the right reasons” because Saddam was planning a “nuclearized Middle East” that “would have defeated all of us,” assertions that leave the bad-news-weary crowd dewy-eyed with approval. Thompson represents the essential bullshit at the heart of modern conservatism: The fantasy that we are the benevolent envy of the world must be believed at all costs, no matter how much waste or mayhem or loss of young lives is suffered in deference to it.

That’s what Thompson is selling: a double dose of Middle American delusion. He’s a Grade A nice feller who isn’t running for president, even though he is, in a country that doesn’t launch unilateral and unwarranted invasions, even though it does. …

Standing on a riser in front of his bus, Thompson lays his Goldwater rap on the Decent Folk who have come to the park, telling them that the best thing government can do for the poor is to help them help themselves. “A government big and powerful enough to give you everything,” he declares, “is also powerful enough to take away anything.” The crowd cheers. [mjh: This is a direct quote from Raygun. Does his audience know or care?] …

What Thompson offers is a chance to drag the presidency itself into that bubble, leaving ugly reality behind. His campaign is basically a referendum on what America wants out of its president. Do we want an executive who solves problems and tackles issues, making decisions that are grounded in reality? Or do we want a lead actor to star in a television show about a fantasy America of our own creation, an America where poverty and war and insecurity can be solved simply by keeping them off camera?

That is a heavy, heavy question, a theme straight out of dystopian fiction, and those of us who would vote for reality should be chilled by Thompson because we know that even if America votes for the fantasy, someone is still going to be running the reality.

In the case of Thompson, that someone would be a slick frontman who might play the part of a Goldwater small-government Republican but in reality has made his living as an extravagantly paid pimp for government welfare. As a professional lobbyist in the 1980s, Thompson worked on behalf of Westinghouse, which was seeking billions in federal subsidies for nuclear power plants. (He conveniently leaves that part of his past out when, in his campaign speeches, he mentions nuclear power as one of the “other fuels” that “have to be part of the solution.”) He also lobbied for the deregulation of the savings-and-loan business — a Reagan-era move that helped lead to the infamous collapse of the industry. And between 2004 and 2006 he earned $760,000 lobbying to cut the asbestos liability of Lloyd’s of London.

Thompson is frequently compared to Ronald Reagan, with plenty of justice. Like Thompson, Reagan projected for voters a fantasy America, one that didn’t need to feel bad about Watergate and could still kick ass, despite having just been whipped by 2 million pajama-clad Vietnamese. But underneath Reagan’s goofy cowboy act was a raging ideologue, a deadly serious political force that also pitched to voters grandiose dreams of endless riches and world conquest. The dream America bought from Reagan was wrongheaded and stupid, but it was at least a big dream, a dream commensurate with the breadth and power of the American empire. The people who bought it were mean and overconfident, but they were at least still living on planet Earth.

What Thompson is selling is escapism, pure and simple. He’s selling America not as a vast adventure epic but as a timid, forty-seven-minute made-for-cable movie about a folksy small-town dad — a fantasy that makes no sense at all in the context of a massive militarized oligarchy currently occupying half the world’s deserts on borrowed money.

The people who are buying this fantasy are buying out of fear, because they can’t bear to look anymore. They’ve simply given up trying to deal. If Thompson wins — and he very well might — that’s what it’ll be: total surrender. The lowest we’ve ever sunk.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16546031/makebelieve_reagan/print