As governor, Ronald Reagan's image overpowered reality

Oakland Tribune, Jun 10, 2004

RONALD Reagan is being honored this week as a conservative icon, but he governed California as a centrist whose reputation as a right- winger was kept intact only with the help of an unwritten conspiracy among his friends and foes.

While his supporters loved to think of Reagan as a principled man of steel, he governed here as a compromiser who flip-flopped with aplomb. He said one thing and did another. Yet he never seemed to pay a political price. The strength of his rhetoric, and his exceptional ability to communicate a vision, overpowered the reality of his record.

Reagan railed against "welfare queens" but signed the law guaranteeing recipients an annual cost-of-living raise, a provision later blamed by other Republicans -- without crediting its source -- for turning California into a magnet for the poor.

He talked about the evils of high taxes and then signed the largest tax increase in state history, a $1 billion hike that hit hardest on business and the wealthy.

He pledged to cut, squeeze and trim government, but during his eight years in office, state spending as a share of personal income grew by more than half. The man who said government was the problem and not the solution presided over two terms during which the number of employees on the public payroll soared at twice the rate of population growth.

Reagan was opposed to abortion, but he signed a law that legalized it, all but on demand.

And while as president he was derided as an enemy of the environment, as governor Reagan protected wild rivers and, with the state of Nevada, created an entirely new government agency to watch over Lake Tahoe.

He was, in deed if not words, a moderate.

"There was a lot of rhetoric, and it wasn't close to reality," said William Hauck, a former legislative aide who became a Reagan admirer. "He was pragmatic. I think he stayed with that approach to governing when he became president. But he certainly honed it here."

Why didn't his pragmatism penetrate the conservative image? In a sense, Reagan was a symbol that both ends of the spectrum needed to preserve for their own ends. Liberals never gave him much credit for compromising because they wanted to run against his more extreme persona. And most conservatives also looked the other way at Reagan's deal-cutting because he was their great hope for capturing the White House and they did not want to admit that their hero was more pragmatic than his reputation.

Former Gov. Pete Wilson, who was elected to the Assembly the same day in 1966 that Reagan won his first term as governor, told me years ago that Reagan had strong core values but realized he had to adjust to get anywhere with a Legislature controlled by Democrats.

"He had a clear idea of what he wanted to accomplish in office, and he stuck pretty close to the things he campaigned on," Wilson said. "And while he made some compromises, he was basically what he professed to be, a conservative."

Still, Wilson said Reagan's easy-going nature allowed him to smile his way through some delicate political spots.

"He was such a charming guy that he probably got away with certain things that other people could not," said Wilson, who once took a thrashing from fellow Republicans for raising taxes just as Reagan had before him.

Reagan's turnabouts were not subtle. He once famously declared that his feet were set "in concrete" on the issue of withholding taxes from workers' wages. He opposed the idea, Reagan said, because taxes should hurt. Taking a little bit out of every paycheck softened the blow.

Confronted with those words later when he began to waver on the issue, Reagan merely smiled and said that "the sound you hear is the sound of concrete cracking around my feet."

Another time, shortly after ordering a 10 percent, across-the- board cut in every state program, Reagan was confronted with a bill passed by the Legislature that would let hemophiliacs be served by the state's crippled children's program.

His legislative secretary at the time, George Steffes, recalled that Reagan's advisers recommended unanimously that he veto the bill. To sign it, they said, risked sending a message that the governor wasn't serious about the budget cuts he was ordering. But sign it he did.

"He said, 'How can you have a program for crippled children and say these kids can't be in it?'" Steffes told me. "Reagan was certainly a conservative. But if he was confronted with issues, he made decisions on an individual basis. He had an open mind."

A conservative with an open mind? Nothing wrong with that. The oddity is that Reagan, and those who loved and hated him, were loathe to advertise what might have been his most endearing quality.

That gap between image and reality should serve as a cautionary tale just as perception has become the most important thing in politics and sometimes the only thing. Watch what they do, not what they say. Or even what others say about them.

Daniel Weintraub writes for the Sacramento Bee.