This Sunday will be Super Bowl Sunday, and the upcoming clash between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers will be getting most of the media's attention the closer we get to it.
But this Sunday will also be the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. So far, it hasn't been causing the kind of fuss that Abe Lincoln's 200th birthday produced a couple of years ago. That may be because Reagan has only been dead for a few years. His memory is still somewhat fresh for many Americans.
So it is with me.
I remember Reagan quite well. I was a critic of most of Reagan's policies, as I have written here frequently. I often felt as if I belonged to a minority in those days — and, in fact, I did. Most people liked Reagan when he was president, even if they disagreed with him on issues.
That was something I never really understood at the time because I didn't like him. I thought he was, at heart, an actor, insincere, unfeeling. To be candid, I often thought he was a hypocrite.
Even today, I think I still feel that way — to an extent. But I don't feel that way as intensely as I did. Perhaps I have mellowed.
It is from that perspective, therefore, that I have been reading — with interest — Ryan Cole's article, "Everybody Loves Reagan," in The American Spectator.
"Death, the hindsight of history, a sympathetic public, and a handful of dedicated historians and opportunistic politicians," he writes, "have turned this once divisive and controversial leader into a bipartisan reminder of our better angels."
Cole makes a valid point when he observes that other presidents have been given the same kind of treatment, and it really shouldn't be surprising that this kind of makeover is in the works for Reagan. During his presidency, he often went to great pains to assure certain groups of people that he was really on their side — even while his policies were giving those groups a quick kick in the stomach or a roundhouse to the chops.
Nevertheless, as Cole writes, "The growing consensus on Reagan's greatness ... is warranted. And his apotheosis ... should be welcomed."
And clearly it is. As Cole points out, prominent Democrats, including the president, have been speaking fondly of Reagan's memory in recent years.
The "new, warm and cuddly (and generally non–idelogical) Reagan," he writes, is "a hero and a great president, but the emphasis is on his pragmatism, diplomacy, and generally unconservative behavior. It's increasingly difficult to find the conservative who generated histrionic levels of disgust from Democrats."
But that conservative is still there.
Reagan was more skillful than most when it came to spoken language, and he was no dummy. He knew about code language and how to use it to his advantage.
He could, for example, use an incendiary phrase like "states' rights" in a place like Philadelphia, Miss., where racial hatred and violence made a mockery of the "city of brotherly love" meaning of the name that is found in its native Greek — and get away with it.
Reagan's assertion was still a source of controversy more than a quarter of a century after he made it.
He spoke of the urgency of spending money on defense but rarely, if ever, spoke of spending money on things that improve and enrich lives. In the interest of saving a few dollars, he could play games with school nutrition, suggesting that ketchup was a vegetable. He could ignore the growing AIDS crisis until a friend like Rock Hudson was afflicted with it and died, then he grudgingly approved limited funding for research.
But medical research struggled for years to regain the ground it had lost while Reagan buried his head in the sand.
I always got the feeling that Reagan saw America in monochromatic terms. He spoke of "bold colors, not pale pastels," but that was not in the context of the things in life that government can promote that will lift people up and give beauty and deeper meaning to their existence.
Without that, I always wondered what kind of America Reagan wanted to preserve, and I was never really sure I wanted to be part of it, whatever it was.
It has been more than 20 years since Reagan left the White House, and now we are getting an idea of the kind of America he built. The results have not been anything like what his admirers would have you believe.
Nevertheless, there are some things Barack Obama, who seems increasingly eager to wrap himself in Reagan's banner, can learn from his predecessor.
One is that, no matter what you would like to achieve as president, there are some things that simply must wait for another time. A president must set priorities, and Reagan did that part of the job quite well.
Another is that, as Cole observes, a president must be willing to "compromise in pursuit of his objectives." Reagn did that after a midterm setback. So, too, did Bill Clinton. And they were rewarded with second terms.
But Reagan and Clinton also projected optimistic attitudes, and that goes a long way with voters.
Circumstances may be bad. They were horrific in 1933 when Franklin D. Roosevelt told Americans that they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Southerners were worried about what the future held when the Civil War was ending, but Lincoln assured them that no one would be treated maliciously and all would be treated charitably.
Presidents who speak in generous terms, whether they are sincere or not, tend to be successful. Presidents who come across as sour and pessimistic, even if they are telling people the truth, typically do not remain president for long, and that is something that I think Obama needs to work on. As president, he has had a tendency to lecture people when they really needed a pep talk.
He showed signs of getting away from that in his State of the Union speech last week. But he has to do more than talk the talk on a single occasion.
He must walk the walk every day.
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