Remembering Reagan

A few days before the 1988 election between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, I attended a rally on the University of California campus where I was enrolled in my last year of college. Although it was reasonably clear by then that Bush was going to win the election, we still held out hope the Dukakis could somehow make a surprise comeback and bring about the end of the Reagan era. One of the speakers at that rally was the mayor of Santa Cruz, the town where the university was located. The mayor, who was probably about 15-20 years older than most of the students in the room began his comments by saying "You think you're tired of Ronald Reagan?" After pausing for dramatic effect, he continued "Well, Ronald Reagan signed my diploma from UC Santa Cruz."

The students burst into applause as the mayor, a well liked progressive, summarized the feeling of exhaustion and frustration which a generation of progressive Californians felt towards President Reagan. Between 1967, the year I was born, and 1989, a few months before I graduated from college, Ronald Reagan was a constant presence in California. He had been our governor, our president or a candidate for president a generation or more. Reagan's extraordinary ability to put Hollywood polish on the politics of the western version of the far right, made him a uniquely Californian political presence; and by 1988 we were anxious to be rid of him.

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