"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant, it's just that they know so much that isn't so." - Ronald Reagan
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the Democratic wunderkind and recent face of her party, recently opined at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, that former President Ronald Reagan was an example of "how the special interests and the powerful have pitted white working-class Americans against brown and black working-class Americans in order to just screw over all working-class Americans."
She went to say that Reagan's use of the illustration of a "welfare queen" really meant his vision was that "black women who were doing nothing were 'sucks' on our country." Such thinking, she said, may not be "explicit racism but [is] still rooted in a racist caricature."
Ocasio-Cortez, 29, was not alive during Reagan's presidency, so anything she learned about the 40th president was likely spoonfed her during her college education at liberal Boston University or told to her by her fellow left-wing Democrats.
What she doesn't know about the former president is a lot.
But it's appropriate for one who shares her political sentiment, Reagan's son, Ron, to help set her aright. The younger Reagan, in his 2011 memoir/biography "My Father at 100," tells of his father's recollection of his father, Jack, railing against the 1915 D.W. Griffith film "Birth of a Nation."
"It deals with the Ku Klux Klan against the colored folks, and I'm damned if anyone in this family will go see it," he said.
Later, Ron Reagan discusses a road trip his father's Eureka College football team took during his senior year. The hotel in Dixon, Illinois - which happened to be Ronald Reagan's hometown - wouldn't allow the team's two black members to stay there.
Then we'll go somewhere else, the coach said. But no other hotel would admit the black players either, he was told.
Such was Ronald Reagan's demeanor about race that he suggested he and the two black players - in the early 1930s - stay at his house, knowing there would be no problem where "Jack's views on race were well known, and good-hearted Nelle (Reagan's mother), as my father wrote, 'was absolutely color blind when it came to racial matters'."
Though that unfortunately excused the bigoted hotel owner, it nevertheless solved the immediate problem.
Reagan, when he took office in 1981, faced double-digit inflation and high unemployment. Government, he frequently said, was not the solution but the problem. So his illustration of the "welfare queen," the subject of which had been documented in The New York Times and The Washington Post, was one example of what he believed were the excesses of a runaway federal government.
That we still hear similar stories of people who abuse the social safety net more than 40 years after the then-candidate first told the story in the mid-1970s is telling, though apparently lost on Ocasio-Cortez.
Reagan, before that, had displayed his colorblind views as governor of California by appointing more blacks to government positions than any previous governor, and, as president, by appointing the first black national security adviser (Colin Powell), by appointing the first Hispanic secretary of education (Lauro Cavazos) and by supporting Puerto Rican statehood.
He also signed legislation (after opposing it for non-race reasons) making a Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday, saying at the signing ceremony, "As a democratic people, we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice (racial discrimination) and took action to correct it." Yet, he also acknowledged, "But traces of bigotry still mar America. So let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the Commandments he believed in and sought to live every day."
Moreover, Reagan believed fully that by improving the economy, all people would prosper - the maxim that "a rising tide lifts all boats."
So, with his administration creating more than 18 million jobs and kicking off a 25-year run of economic growth, that tide did rise. And he left office with the support of 70 percent of the American people, including 41 percent of blacks.
Where Ocasio-Cortez in Austin termed "where we are" in the United States as "10 percent better from garbage," Reagan saw America as a "shining city on a hill," with potential for everyone who seeks to work hard to get ahead.
We not only believe the potential for America is still there and ready for the taking but that spewing words that the country is only "10 percent better from garbage" can only depress people and make them believe nothing is possible.
Optimism, we feel, trumps pessimism every day.