View source for 2004-09 Ronald Reagan's Effort to Prevent the Enactment of Medicare

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<let name=data index=Date>2004-09</let>
<let name=data index=Author>Larry DeWitt</let>
<let name=data index=Source>Larry DeWitt</let>
<let name=data index=Topics>\Ronald Reagan\Medicare\Social Security\1980 US presidential race\Operation Coffeecup\welfare queen</let>
<let name=data index=URL>http://www.larrydewitt.net/Essays/Reagan.htm</let>
<let name=data index=Title>Operation Coffeecup: Ronald Reagan's Effort to Prevent the Enactment of Medicare </let>
<let name=data index=TitlePlain>Ronald Reagan’s Effort to Prevent the Enactment of Medicare </let>
<let name=data index=Text>
<blockquote>[[Ronald Reagan|Reagan]] was notorious for taking a real event and transforming it into a mythical story, which he then repeated over and over, making of it an archetype for some political principle he held. When a welfare recipient in Chicago was publicly exposed in 1977 for having defrauded state welfare programs out of $8,000 by using two identities, Reagan transformed the news report into a story regarding a "[[welfare queen]]" who drove a Cadillac and who collected an annual tax-free income of $150,000 by using "eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and . . . collecting veterans' benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands." Reagan repeated this story of the Chicago welfare queen multiple times over the years, growing it like some kind of political fish-story with each re-telling. In the end, it seems clear that he could not distinguish his own mythical version from the historical one.</blockquote></let>

<let name=data index=TextShort>[[Ronald Reagan]] may have crystallized, in the minds of [[US Republican|Republican]] strategists, the political ability of [[popular myth]] to be more powerful than the [[truth]] &ndash; as exemplified by his well-documented history of working against [[social program]]s ([[Medicare]], [[Social Security]]) while convincingly denying it in debates with [[Jimmy Carter]].</let>
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