By William KleinknechtKleinknecht shares Will Bunch' s opinion of Ronald Reagan' s current image (see Tear Down This Myth, 2009) but doesn' t credit Reagan, as Bunch does, for failing to match action to rhetoric. Of course, Kleinknecht doesn' t mention foreign policy, in which Reagan did some good. His focus is domestic, and in 11 cogent chapters, he reveals further falseness in the Reagan myth and the devastating effects of Reaganism on America per se. Reagan pretended to represent small-town, small-enterprise America as embodied by his hometown, which, after leaving for Hollywood, he seldom visited and only for personal publicity' s sake, and whose livelihoods of family farming and small industry his favoritism for high-rolling wheeler-dealers has nearly extinguished. To explain Reagan s duplicity, Kleinknecht contrasts Reagan s developed politics of the self with the traditional community politics of his practical opponent during his administration, Democratic Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. While O'Neill was inextricable from his community, Reagan made himself a man from nowhere, untrammeled by personal connections, who ignored all damage done in the pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Contemporary America' s decimated manufacturing, fraudulent banking and finance, criminalized poor and minorities, inaccessible health care, venal politics, all this and more, according to Kleinknecht, constitute the real and living Reagan legacy.
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