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As with all important leaders, Ronald Reagan's legacy is a complex thing. It is a mixture of intended accomplishments and unintended by-products, of actions taken and things left undone. Although partisans push for simple verdicts, the best way of honoring Reagan's memory is to try to offer an honest, well-rounded assessment of his lasting impact on our national political life. I assess the bequest of Reagan's presidency to the future under eight headings of broad public concern: the welfare state, taxation, national security, the presidency, personnel, party politics, political leadership, and the person himself.
Although academia continues to debate Ronald Reagan's place in history, a Reagan legacy industry has been working, with some success, to enshrine the former president's memory in a host of public sites and symbols (Bjerre-Poulsen 2008). The man who fired the nation's air traffic controllers and thundered against the growth of the federal bureaucracy now has Washington's national airport and DCs largest federal office building named in his honor. Recently, conservative activists have borrowed from the evangelical Christian movement and urged each other to be guided by the question "What would Reagan do?" (Heritage Foundation 2008). And even Barack Obama invoked Ronald Reagan in the 2008 presidential campaign as a role model of transformative leadership.
From these and other indications, it would seem that Ronald Reagan is well on his way to becoming an iconographic figure in our politics.
Many academics and liberal groups understandably take a dim view of this development. But the fact of the matter is that ours would be a very dreary political society if citizens did not try to find ways to celebrate their departed heroes. Rather than poohpoohing the idea of honoring important political figures, we would do better to recognize that there are significantly different ways of doing so.
One way of honoring is to memorialize a person. We do that by stamping his or her name on physical things-a street, building, piece of currency, and the like. Thus the Reagan Legacy Project, led by Grover Nordquist and his group, Americans for Tax Reform, aims to erect a Reagan monument in every state and to have something named after the former president in each of the nation's 3,054 counties.
Second, we can bestow...