When I was Ronald Reagan

I remember when I was Ronald Reagan. It was October, 1980, the beginning of my senior year in high school. We were staging a mock political debate and election. I was assigned the part of Ronald Reagan; my friend Amy was Jimmy Carter. We each spent a week reviewing press clippings and speeches, trying to get our candidate’s message down, and then we were featured in a special school assembly: a mock presidential debate.

Amy had studied hard. She had familiarized herself with all the complexities of energy policy, the Middle-East peace process, the nature of the new regime in Iran, plans for the emergence of a stronger European Union, and possible reforms in education. I found that I was mostly mastering slogans about smaller government, lower taxes, and the evils of communism.

On the day of the actual debate I spouted my, or rather Reagan’s, slogans, and Amy patiently attempted to engage in a substantive discussion of the issues. The problem was that every time I spouted one of my optimistic slogans, the rowdy crowd of teenagers cheered wildly, while Amy’s more substantive arguments were greeted with either silence or jeers.

I felt sorry Amy, who was, I could clearly see, almost reduced to tears by the other kids’ reaction to her points, and I felt a little guilty at how easily I had won over the crowd. But I could understand my classmates’ feelings. We had grown up watching our planes bomb jungles in Southeast Asia, and our older siblings and cousins throw rocks at police. We had helped our parents push their cars through gasoline lines. Like Amy Carter, we had worried about what seemed like an inevitable nuclear war and unlike the Baby-Boomers, we now knew hiding under our desks in the likely event of a nuclear attack would be useless. We had watched Olympic athletes murdered just because they were Jewish, and another group of athletes denied the right to compete because our politicians wanted to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We had seen our embassy in Tehran fall to what seemed like a group of maniacs . . . and, of course, there was disco, but I digress.

With all this going on, it was hard not to love this grandfatherly candidate, so unlike our worried parents, who promised that he, no, we, could make things better. Of course, I couldn’t vote in the 1980 election, but I could in 1984, and I voted, with enthusiasm, for Ronald Reagan.

But that was the last time I ever felt good when casting a vote for president. In 2000 I voted for Nader, but that was clearly a “who-cares?” vote, and this year I will join the ranks of the “anyone-but” crowd. But in 1980, politics seemed so different. We had two candidates with clear differences, but who were clearly sincere. You got the sense that neither candidate was carefully, we might even say, “cynically,” choosing their words to gain political advantage. Faced with an energy crisis and grave political problems in the Middle-East, President Carter told us to turn our thermostats down and put on a sweater. What could be more sincere than that? And Ronald Reagan’s optimism seemed similarly genuine and heartfelt; he believed in America.

Since 1984 my political views have changed drastically, and typical of many Gen-X-ers, my cynicism toward, and detachment from the political process has grown. But this week, remembering Ronald Reagan, I felt a new sensation: nostalgia. I longed to hear a political message I could believe. I wondered if it’s just me that’s changed, or if somehow the heart has gone completely out of politics. I was nostalgic for an optimistic message that seemed to be genuinely aimed at buoying my spirit rather than just shoring up some politician’s political base. I was even nostalgic for a politician who would dare to tell me that if I’m cold, I should put on sweater before wasting fuel. But I guess I was mostly nostalgic for that grandfatherly voice that could always make me believe that we could, if we only we would, make things better.