One won for the Gipper

Like many primal attachments, Robert Glazier’s devotion to the Gipper began at a tender age. “I started out as I guess what you’d call one of the original Reagan Democrats, when I was 10 or 11, and then crossing over when I was 14,” says Glazier, 38, a Sacramento public relations consultant. “I remember as a 14-year-old staying up all night to watch the election results, and I remember getting into fights with my brothers and sister when they wanted to watch their favorite sitcoms.”

Ryan Loskarn’s love for America’s 40th president commenced even earlier -- third grade, to be exact. “I was in school and the Challenger explosion happened,” recalls Loskarn, 25, a Capitol Hill staffer, referring to the January 1986 space shuttle disaster. “I remember coming home that night and watching with everybody else on TV. I just remember kind of a towering figure of authority offering everyone some comfort. I think he had a talent for comforting people and inspiring people in difficult times. And that’s part of the reason why some people love him so much.”

Love him so much, in fact, that 15 years after he exited the Oval Office and rode off into the sunset, Ronald Wilson Reagan still is inspiring legions of fervent followers to defend him against those who would cast aspersions on the Great Communicator and his legacy -- Hollywood liberals, left-leaning academics, friends of Bill and Hillary, and the type of folks who probably are still stewing over those mis-punched Florida electoral ballots. What’s more, some of the former president’s most passionate admirers and defenders are young adults, now in their 20s and 30s, who are barely old enough to remember the Reagan White House.

In Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Angels in America,” a character assails these earnest acolytes as “Reagan’s children” and condemns their supposed selfishness and naivete. But if many liberal baby boomers grew up idolizing John F. Kennedy as if he were the fifth Beatle, a considerable number of post-boomers and Gen-Xers grew up regarding Reagan not only as a principled and inspiring world leader, but also as a genteel, innately decent father or grandfather surrogate -- as several CBS executives recently have discovered, to their chagrin.

As most anyone with access to TV or talk radio knows, in recent weeks the Reagan faithful have been working overtime, incensed by CBS’ plan to air a $10-million biopic, “The Reagans,” which protesters believe unfairly caricatures the former first family. Reagan admirers say the film depicts the then-president as clueless and given to hard-hearted piety toward AIDS sufferers, while Nancy Reagan is portrayed as frosty toward her children and as a backstage manager of her husband’s Oval Office tenure. Last week, the network agreed to pull the miniseries from prime time and run it instead on Showtime, its Viacom pay-cable sister network.

Grass-roots backlash

Some media reports have attributed CBS’ humiliating about-face to a well-coordinated public relations blitz by Republican Party leaders and public scoldings by prominent conservatives. While CBS denies that it caved to outside political pressure, the network seems to have been caught off-guard by the grass-roots backlash of rank-and-file conservatives and other Americans, including a number of Democrats and independents. Apparently, CBS executives badly underestimated the admiration and affection the former president still commands, and not only within the Republican political establishment and the Peggy Noonan-Dinesh D’Souza pundit class that seeks to enshrine him as the founding father of the modern conservative movement.

CBS might’ve spared itself a world of hurt if it had taken note of a 2001 opinion poll in which Americans ranked Reagan the greatest president of all time, slightly ahead of Kennedy (Abraham Lincoln was third). Or if it had considered the number of people who’ve lost loved ones to Alzheimer’s disease, to which the former president is succumbing, and who were repulsed by the idea of attacking a man on his deathbed. Or if it had taken a minute to chat with Michael Paranzino, a lifelong conservative and Reagan fan who hasn’t yet reached middle age.

A 37-year-old part-time political consultant, former congressional aide and stay-at-home dad, Paranzino put together the Internet site www.boycottCBS.com after learning in late October about CBS’ upcoming movie. “I guess ‘furious’ might be a fair way to describe it,” he says of his initial reaction.

Almost immediately, Paranzino says, online visitors started pouring in -- six, eight, 10 per minute. Within a short time, while his 2 1/2-year-old son played in the next room, Paranzino was doing interviews on national talk radio and TV shows, patiently and unassumingly explaining why he’d been moved to take action on Reagan’s behalf. So far, Paranzino says, about 100,000 people have signed on to the boycott. He hopes the continuing outcry will help convince the producers either “to put the makeup back on” actor James Brolin, who plays Reagan, and shoot some new scenes that would “balance out the miniseries,” or shelve it entirely.

The Reagan-esque worldview of Paranzino and other young conservatives was shaped by a blend of the political and the personal. Paranzino grew up in a conservative Roman Catholic family in suburban Philadelphia. His father, he says, was a small businessman whose livelihood suffered during the high-interest-rate years of the Carter administration.

Paranzino remembers the family’s lively dinner-table discussions about politics and world affairs, and the stories of his Uncle Jack, an entrepreneur who’d traveled to China, the former Soviet Union and a number of then-Eastern Bloc communist countries. “He was able to tell stories of what the reality was there and the deprivation and the sadness.”

Later, as a Yale undergraduate, Paranzino says he was “appalled” by a number of courses he took from liberal professors who “were apologists for the Soviet Union,” while Reagan “was routinely criticized in class.”

“I didn’t really argue back. I decided that the battle should be waged later and [there was] no use being a target.” Instead, he wrote a few conservative commentaries in the Yale Herald.

Asked about what he regards as Reagan’s main accomplishments, Paranzino cites his tough stands against communist regimes, his speech urging the tear down of the Berlin Wall and his economic policies. But he also cites Reagan’s patriotism, his good cheer after the 1981 assassination attempt and his absence of malice toward political opponents. “I married a Massachusetts Democrat, so I certainly come from Reagan’s view that you don’t freely question peoples’ motives because they disagree with you.”

As president, Reagan enjoyed an unusually strong following among 18- to 25-year-old voters, says Lou Cannon, a former reporter for the Washington Post and author of several Reagan biographies. “The reason is pretty clear,” says Cannon. “He was a future-oriented president. He spoke to the future even though he used the language of the past.... Until Reagan came along, the Democrats were just killing the Republicans among the youngest voters in every election.”

Not that Reagan today lacks a fan base with the AARP crowd. Roxie Hubbs, 63, a San Bernardino-area resident now spending two years in Chicago with her husband working as Mormon missionaries, says she’s been driving around the Windy City composing irate letters to CBS in her head.

“I just think for one of our major news channels to do this is unconscionable,” says Hubbs, who became enamored of Reagan after hearing him speak in support of the 1964 presidential campaign of then-Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican. Hubbs, who lost both her parents to Alzheimer’s disease, says she thought it was callous of CBS to schedule its film when Reagan “is so unable to defend himself.”

Larger than life

But as an older generation gradually passes into history, Reagan’s reputation will depend less on people like Hubbs than on people like Loskarn, the Capitol Hill staffer. He remembers the commanding paterfamilias who sought to console a grieving nation after seven astronauts lost their lives. He remembers his parents struggling to buy a house in the late 1970s, and how Reagan’s election buoyed their spirits. But what also stirs him is how Reagan embodied his principles “in such a kind, warm, positive way.”

“He was larger than life to most people who were adults during his administration. To those in my age group, he is even more so,” Loskarn says. If you doubt such a warm-and-fuzzy generational assessment, perhaps ask yourself the last time you heard someone refer to Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson as “grandfatherly” or Bill Clinton as “avuncular.”

Lately, Loskarn says, he’s been musing about how the Gipper, if he were his old vigorous self, might’ve reacted to the furor around CBS’ movie. “I think he would’ve grinned and had a one-liner and moved on,” Loskarn says. “And the one-liner probably would’ve put the whole issue to bed....

“At the end of the day, CBS spent a lot of money to remind people how popular Ronald Reagan was.”