Reagan Hagiography

I gathered my information from salon.com which had a Reagan Hagiography week and focused on many different areas and also attempts to find correlations between Reagan and Obama. The article "Why is it so hard for pundits to admit that Reagan was just as unpopular in 1982 as Obama is in 2010?" shows parallels between Reagan's standing when the 1982 mid terms approached and the similar position in which Obama found himself in. 

"I swear, I want to stop writing about the nearly-identical political trajectories (at least so far) of the Reagan and Obama presidencies. But too many pundits just can’t seem to get it through their heads that Reagan, as president, was not some magical political super-being who was immune to sagging public confidence, poor midterm election prospects, and intraparty dissent and second-guessing that Obama is now faced with"

In this article the author Steve Kornacki looks at two pundits points of views and arguments about Reagans terms in office. One of the pundits states that Reagan has a "deep and true" bond with the American people and Kornacki goes onto dismiss this. He does this by highlighting factors such as "when double-digit unemployment prompted voters to toss 26 of Reagan’s Republican allies out of Congress and to hand seven new governorships to Democrats and 11 state legislative chambers to the Democrats", "in 1986, when a pre-Iran-Contra Reagan pleaded with Americans — the Americans with whom he supposedly shared a mutually affectionate relationship — to preserve his party’s control of the Senate, only to watch as voters handed Democrats an eight-seat gain and their first Senate majority since 1980" and also " just 24 percent of Americans said their country was better off because of the Reagan years, while 40 percent said it was worse off — and that more Americans (48 percent) viewed Reagan unfavorable than favorably (46 percent)".

Kornacki shows Reagan in a more realistic light instead of that of a "magical being" in which he is being presented as by the other pundit, only highlighting the flaws in his presidency because he wants to show a true account and not forget about the bad and just remember the good.