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Reagan has become a fascinating phenomenon of American leadership and psychology. He enjoys an easy and sometimes mysterious communion with the American people. He has become a ceremonial presence. "America is back," he told us, as if announcing the return of a loved one from years in a POW camp. He gives America heroes--heroes in the gallery when he delivers a State of the Union address, heroes from the Olympics, heroes from old movies, John Wayne and Gary Cooper quotations in the middle of political speeches. His amiable being--the sheer niceness and normality of the man--seems to transcend his policies, to immunize him from the poisonous implications of some of his own opinions. Americans respond to the strength and clarity of his character, the predictability of his resolve.
The mission that Reagan has embarked upon has nothing to do with his personal charm. He has set out to reverse the course of American government that was charted by Franklin Roosevelt. If F.D.R. explored the upper limits of what government could do for the individual, Reagan is testing the lower limits. Reagan's opinions and policies would be enough in another time to have protesters marching in the streets, or worse. And yet something about Reagan soothes and unites--even though the effects of his programs may repel. He softens the meaner edges of conservatism with populist effusions, reaching outside the rigid framework of ideologies to the pool of shared American experience, to our dreamy nostalgias. Two landslides and six years on, the Gallup poll gives Reagan a 68% approval rating, the best he has done since May 1981, after he was shot and responded gallantly to the ordeal. Pollsters say Reagan has consistently higher ratings over a longer period than any other second-term President since polling began.
Reagan possesses a sort of genius for the styles of American memory, for the layerings of the American past. Wright Morris once wrote of Norman Rockwell that his "special triumph is in the conviction his countrymen share that the mythical world he evokes actually exists . . . He understands the hunger, and he supplies the nourishment. The hunger is for the Good Old Days --the black-eyed tomboy, the hopeless, lovable pup, the freckle-faced young swain . . . sensations which we no longer have but still seem to want; dreams of innocence before it went corrupt." Reagan also understands the hunger. He does not delve cynically into the layers of American memory. He is not as mythically cute as Rockwell. He is simply saturated in the American identity, as, say, an utterly different leader, Charles de Gaulle, was saturated in the French.
Reagan's predecessors were just as profoundly and regionally American, of course: Johnson the Texan, Nixon from Whittier, Calif., Carter from south Georgia. But their pasts were all shadowed, in different ways, by an obscure sense of biographical hurt. Reagan's father was an improvident alcoholic in Dixon, Ill., and yet Reagan's mythic hometown America is a glorious place. Reagan communicates a bright and triumphant American past.