American winner’s passing

“It’s so American,” Margaret Thatcher is said to have remarked, watching from Bill Frist’s Senate office as Ronald Reagan’s casket was brought to the Capitol and 21 jets flew overhead in missing-man formation.

She’s right. Serious nations have serious ritual, but each in its own way. From this last extraordinary week, the memorable images have been spare and simple — the overhead shot of the caisson in the Rotunda — or small and human: Nancy Reagan running her finger along the broad stripes of the flag-draped coffin. Two years ago in London, when Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother died, the memorable images were more elaborate and regal — the Prince of Wales and the three other grandsons standing vigil as thousands silently trooped past to pay their last respects.

When Mrs. Thatcher stood before President Reagan’s coffin, by the way, she curtseyed — which you’re supposed to do only for kings and queens. In America, the king and prime minister are combined in one person, and the politer school of Reagan detractors these past two decades is happy to concede that, putting aside the ghastly policies of his administration, he did a swell job as King Ronnie — the nation’s affable figurehead, the “amiable dunce” (in Clark Clifford’s phrase) who woke up one day to find he had inherited the throne.

If anything is laid to rest with him at the end of this remarkable week, it should be the lazy condescension of the elites. That’s all but indestructible, alas. Last Monday, The Washington Post and many other papers carried an Associated Press story by Adam Geller on Mr. Reagan’s economic legacy that began, “He had almost no schooling in economics.”

Actually, that’s one of the few things he was schooled in: In 1932, he earned a bachelor’s degree in social science and economics from Eureka College. What is an “intelligent” person? As defined by the media, it seems to mean someone who takes the media seriously. Someone wonkish on the nuts and bolts of particular topics of interest to media types, and able to sit around yakking about them till 3 in the morning. Ronald Reagan had a much rarer intelligence — a strategic intelligence. In 1977, he told Richard Allen, “My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose.”

Cute. So few politicians talked like that a quarter-century ago I would have been content if it was just a neat line. But Mr. Reagan figured out a way to make it come true. Within 10 years. That’s strategic thinking.

Those who disparage him say it would have happened anyway. It was obvious to all that the Soviet Union was on the verge of total collapse. After all, as big-time Ivy League history professor Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1982, “Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse” are “wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”

No, hang on, I must be thinking of Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, who in 1984 marveled at “the great material progress” of the Soviet Union. In fairness to Mr. Galbraith, he has almost no schooling in economics, aside from being a Harvard economics professor for several decades.

On CNN the other night, there was a featurette on all the changes in Ronald Reagan’s long life: he was born in 1911, when Buffalo Bill was still alive, etc, etc. Big deal. If you were born in 1980, that world has vanished, too.

The arrogance of every age is the assumption of permanence. It’s unusual to find a leader who thinks beyond that: “Smart” in media politics means someone who can recite by heart every sub-clause of his plan on prescription-drug re-importation from Canada, not someone who looks a decade or two down the road and figures out the lie of the land.

I want a leader who gives some thought to big questions like, say, the increasing Islamification of Europe, and I don’t care if he’s from Eureka College or dropped out in Dixon High.

Ronald Reagan is beyond the Clark Cliffords and Arthur Schlesingers now. When it comes to his reputation as a great president, the people are way ahead. In that respect, if the citizens of this great republic will forgive a monarchical comparison, let me return to the passing of the Queen Mother.

She was 102, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. The BBC and other broadcasters had long ago decided most of the people who cared about the old girl were themselves long dead. So, come the day, they sloughed it off. And then they spent the rest of the week trying to explain why they got it so wrong.

Outside the studios, more than half a million people solemnly filed past her coffin as she lay in state at Westminster Hall, and a million lined the streets for her funeral, including some who had flown in from Canada and other far-flung realms.

Something similar happened last week. Hundreds of thousands waited quietly in line in California and then in Washington to say goodbye to their president.

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