Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Kerry slows down during Reagan week.

Some pundits are saying that Ronald Reagan's passing helps George W. Bush’s reelection efforts. Here's a different theory finding a similar result.

We live in an intensely partisan age, where every issue and topic is grist for another disagreement between Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives. A cheesy disaster movie attracts a vice-presidential endorsement and warning about Bush's environmental polices. A movie about Christ summons warnings about religious intolerance from the New York Times. The competition on American Idol gives Elton John the opportunity to share his thoughts on racism in America.

Everything from where you shop to the kind of car you drive to the beer you drink are fodder for the Crossfire/Hannity&Colmes/Hardball verbal slugfest that dominates our national conversations. Not only is everything debated, but everything is debated at length. Sometimes it feels like it's impossible to resolve an issue. Democrats will always say taxes are too low, Republicans will always say they're too high. Liberals will never allow a ban on partial-birth abortion to stand, Republicans will never back down and permit its legality. A decade after the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, half of Washington says free trade is disastrous, half says it fuels prosperity.

But not every debate is endless, and it's not always hard to see who's right. Sometimes a side is proven completely right, and a side is proven completely wrong. Ronald Reagan's fight in the Cold War is best modern example of a debate that has been ended, with one side completely vindicated by events.

As Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and others have written, many Democratic opponents of Reagan believed that the United States and its allies could not win the Cold War.

While we look back and prefer to remember an America united against Soviet aggression, that's nonsense. Senator Christopher Dodd called Reagan's anti-Communism "folly, pure and simple" because it proposed "to wage a conflict that cannot be won." Peter Schweizer wrote about how Jimmy Carter saw Reagan as a greater threat than the Soviet Union, and encouraged Moscow to influence American politics for his benefit or for the detriment of his enemies. Dinesh D'Souza has recalled a small army of left-leaning intelligentsia who said the Soviets were unbeatable:

In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability."

This view was seconded that same year by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who observed that "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."

John Kenneth Galbraith, the distinguished Harvard economist, wrote in 1984: "That the Soviet system has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics and from the general urban scene.... One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets...and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops.... Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."

Equally imaginative was the assessment of Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the 1985 edition of his widely used textbook: "What counts is results, and there can be no doubt that the Soviet planning system has been a powerful engine for economic growth.... The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth."

Columnist James Reston of the New York Times in June 1985 revealed his capacity for sophisticated even-handedness when he dismissed the possibility of the collapse of communism on the grounds that Soviet problems were not different from those in the U.S. "It is clear that the ideologies of Communism, socialism, and capitalism are all in trouble."

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, another MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote, "Can economic command significantly... accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can... Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States."

Throughout the 1980s, most of these pundits derisively condemned Mr. Reagan's policies.

Today, we find ourselves in another conflict. And again, there is a side that says that Iraq is unwinnable, that no stable or democratic nation will ever be built there, and that it's time for American forces to withdraw and hand a victory to thugs like al-Sadr. And in the broader war on terror, there are still voices (mostly, but not exclusively) on the left who have insisted since Sept. 11 that Americans will never be free from fear if they use special forces and daisy-cutter bombs against al Qaeda. They advocate cutting our ties to Israel, to apologize for the Crusades, to apologize for our existence, which offends their incoherent, hateful beliefs. There are the outright pacifists, and then there are the "Yes, but" crowd, who sympathize with the victims of terrorism but excuse it as a natural consequence of our policies.

But this debate will not go on forever. The appeasers and the doves were wrong about the Cold War, and they're going to be wrong about the war on terror. There will never be another Ronald Reagan, but this November Americans are going to find themselves in the middle of another great struggle. The choice will be stark: On one side, a cowboy, dismissed by the elites, deemed too conservative by the media, denounced by protesters as a warmonger, called every name in the book by all the "right" people. On the other side, the distilled essence of the Democratic party, educated around the world, fluent in French, rich beyond imagination, with a career spent almost entirely in government. A man who called on Reagan to "reorder his priorities...we don't need expensive and exotic weapons systems, who called Reagan "unilateral and arrogant," who declared that he is "proud that he stood against Ronald Reagan."

No, Ronald Reagan's not on the ballot this fall. But the choice is just as stark as it in 1980 and 1984.