Reagan On Bush - Ron Reagan, Jr - Interview

Interview, Nov, 2000

FIGHTING TO KEEP AMERICA A DEMOCRACY INSTEAD OF A MONARCHY

INGRID SISCHY: Hi, Ron, how are you?

RONALD REAGAN. JR.: Hey, Ingrid. I'm great.

IS: What are you up to these days?

RR: Well, right now I'm looking for work. [laughs] I've been working in television for the last fifteen years, but I'm not on a show this season. I'm also trying to do a little writing.

IS: You did some pieces for Interview in the past and have a long relationship with the magazine, so you seemed like the perfect person for us to talk to about an election that seems to involve family dynasties so much. Your father Ronald Reagan was the president under whom George Bush senior served. And unlike George W. Bush, you never seemed to act as if you were entitled to the throne because of who your father was. Can you remember your first consciousness of politics?

RR: I was about seven or eight years old when my father was first elected Governor of California [in 1966]. Prior to that, he'd been on television and in movies, so I was used to seeing him in a sort of public mode. Initially, I just saw politics as almost another form of entertainment.

IS: That's not untrue sometimes, sad to say.

RR: [laughs] Exactly. I suppose I began to get an inkling that there was something else involved when people began protesting the Vietnam War. When I was nine or ten years old, while my dad was governor, people drove by our house in Sacramento and threw a firebomb.

IS: So when you got the sense of larger politics, what did that do to you?

RR: As a child, I never really trusted politics or politicians, my father excepted. I didn't really like the people I was seeing who were coming around to the house. I saw them as chain-smoking, unhealthy folks who never really seemed to be discussing ideas so much as strategies. It seems to me politics is supposed to be about making the world a better place for everybody, naive as that sounds, and not about just beating up your opponent in some election.

IS: Which leads us to the current fight for the job. What do you think of this presidential election?

RR: It seems to me you've got two contenders for the presidency, only one of whom is even remotely qualified, that being Al Gore. One of the most enjoyable things about saying that is to watch conservative types get their shorts in a knot over it. Not, I suspect, because they disagree, but because they know it's true. Bush lacks the experience, he lacks the aptitude, and he lacks the temperament for the job.

IS: Can you elaborate?

RR: Take a look at his experience first. About six years ago, he was the part owner of the Texas Rangers. You have to ask yourself, What happened in the intervening years that took him from being the part owner of a baseball team to being the potential leader of the free world, potentially the most powerful human being on the planet? If you look at his record in Texas, it's abysmal: they're first in air and water pollution, first in percentage of poor working parents with no health insurance, first in children with no health insurance, and, of course, first in executions. They're dead last in spending for teachers' salaries; they're almost last, forty-ninth, in spending on the environment. Then you get to Bush's aptitude, which you'd expect to see demonstrated in his own campaign. Well, he can't explain his own tax policy, he's scared to debate, and early in his campaign he got caught calling a New York Times reporter a "major league asshole."

Whatever you think of Bill Clinton--and I don't think highly of him as a president--when he sits down with Ehud Barak and Yassar Arafat, you don't really find yourself wondering whether he can hold up his end of the conversation. I think if you drop George W. into that equation, you suddenly get a lot more nervous. After all, this is a man who thinks Grecian is a noun. You just don't get the feeling that he's got the gravitas or the breadth of knowledge or the expertise to handle what is becoming a very complicated world.

IS: How about his performance at the convention?

RR: I was amused after watching the Republican convention that a few pundits pronounced Bush statesman-like, statesman-like, for having managed to read somebody else's speech off a TelePrompTer, without smirking or sweating.

IS: I remember reading a piece right after the convention about how Bush was flying back from Philadelphia [where the convention had taken place] with a number of reporters, and that instead of taking this opportunity to speak about policy, he chose to talk about his weekend.

RR: Right. [laughs] How he was gonna take a nap. Bush stumbled badly coming out of the convention. After it was done he went on this three day train trip with Dick Cheney that didn't get much press, and then he went back to Austin and took a long nap. And meantime, Gore taps Lieberman as his running mate which gets them both a lot of press, and you had almost two, three weeks before Bush reappeared--and by that time he'd lost his lead in the polls. And Bush doesn't like running from behind. He doesn't like to be pressed. He doesn't like to work for it, basically.