I always loved this sketch. Democrat apparatchik Clark Clifford referred to Reagan as an amiable dunce after Reagan was elected four decades ago. Reagan out thought adversary after adversary, foreign and domestic, as President and made it look easy. Got the same sort of vibe from Trump, although he and Reagan were very different men. Being underestimated is force multiplier and smart men and women have understood that, and used it to their advantage, down through the ages.
Ah, back when SNL was still funny.
I miss Phil Hartman too. Him and Reagan both were national treasures of remarkable talent.
The notion that Trump is unintelligent given five decades operating a diversified business concern with 22,000 employees and $9.5 bn in revenue is not the modal viewpoint among our word merchant sector, but it’s common enough and indicative of the crippling vanity of a critical mass of people working in that sector.
The notion that Reagan was unintelligent is easier to credit because he was a performer before he was anything else and because he often made peculiar statements, public and private. You needed to stop and think about it and consider the following: (1) that Reagan made the right judgment calls in foreign relations when people like Alan Cranston (Stanford, ’36), Robert Pastor (MPA and PhD, Kennedy School, Harvard), Ronald Steel (Northwestern, ’53; Harvard, ’55), Anthony Lewis (Harvard ’48), and Hendrik Hertzberg (Harvard ’65) kept making the wrong calls; (2) no president in the last 50 years (at least) has been more capable at assembling and motivating a team of appointees that would pursue his priorities; (3) the possibility (at any rate) that some of his zoned out remarks in private settings were stratagems to close down a discussion he did not wish to continue; (4) the possibility that some of his zoned out remarks in public settings were a case of reporters printing snippets of unedited transcripts – note in this vein John Roche’s observation that pretty much anyone looks like an idiot if you print their off-the-cuff remarks without the junk and filler removed (something Roche had learned the hard way as an aide to Lyndon Johnson); (5) that both Reagan and his brother entered their retirement years as wealthy men, and they didn’t get their money from laundered bribes in the form of ‘speaking fees’; (6) that both Reagan and his brother earned college degrees at a time when only about 6% of each cohort enrolled in 4 year institutions or professional schools; and (7) Reagan and his brother grew up in the class of people for whom a full complement of secondary education would have been optional in 1928.
One other thing (and something Michael Kinsley acknowledged at the time): Reagan was at his desk for 40 hours a week and he got better results than Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson got working medical residents’ hours (or what their PR people claimed was medical residents’ hours).
People used to speculate Reagan had alzheimers during the last year of his presidency. Yet silence for the new US president who is the oldest US president