Stock Photo How will historians remember the Regean presidency years from now on?

I realize this is an awkward time to criticize Ronald Reagan. The former president is in the cruel throes of Alzheimer’s disease, and reportedly has no memory of his presidency, nor, sadly, of much else.

It is just that I’m worried about our more natural instinct in commemorating Reagan’s 90th birthday this past Tuesday – a reflexive nostalgia for the Reagan years. With a current president who sometimes labors to comp-lete coherent sentences replacing one who is best known for his adultery, it is understandably tempting to fondly look back on a larger-than-life leader, and perhaps try to make room for him on Mount Rushmore.

I think there are two important reasons to curb our nostalgia for Ronald Reagan. There are several more reasons, not the least of which is Reagan’s perplexing economic plan to cut taxes, cut federal programs, flood the military with money, and wait for the deficit to go away. For now I’ll leave that one to the econ-omists. I’m more interested in the larger themes of the Reagan presidency, the ones most likely to catch the attention of future historians.

The first is Reagan’s media manipulation. No one used the medium of television like Reagan did. What began with FDR’s fireside chats and John F. Kennedy’s live press conferences culminated in Reagan, the television president, the Great Communicator.

The television presence of Ronald Reagan was mesmerizing. He furrowed his brow with apparent sincerity, his baritone voice at once grandfatherly and pastoral; his speechwriters gave him just the right words to soothe the country. A former actor, he played the part of commander-in-chief far better than un-telegenic predecessors Carter, Ford, Nixon, and Johnson, or successor Bush Sr. One of my first memories as a child is Reagan’s face and voice on my parents’ black-and-white TV set. I watched in awe; he became one of my childhood superheroes.

The Reagan administration was the first to practically work out of network news trucks, often helping them plan camera angles and backdrops. Carefully crafted clips of Reagan cutting the ribbon of an orphanage or chopping wood on his ranch passed for important presidential communication to the nation. Columnist Meg Greenfield wrote that under Reagan, “seamless visual projections had come to be seen as synonymous with the act of governing itself.”

But while Reagan’s TV presence made him look confident, knowledgeable, unshakeable, and warm, off camera Reagan was described by aides and reporters as aloof, cold, and sometimes confused. He delegated an unprecedented amount of responsibility to his staff. Almost everyone who knew him says he was an enigma; his personality was a mystery no one ever solved. Every time he forgot an aide’s name, returned greetings with a distant stare, or daydreamed through entire meetings, Reagan seemed to be in his own world. CBS reporter Lesley Stahl, who covered the Reagan White House, wrote in her recent memoir, “You cannot look back on the Reagan years and not wonder if the president had Alzheimer’s even then… There were all sorts of signs. We all looked the other way.”

His persona surprisingly detached from his true person, Reagan was in part the progenitor of today’s teleprompter perform-ers passing as politicians. His most recognizable media off-spring was “Slick Willy” himself, Bill Clinton, an avid student of how Reagan used TV, and the only other president in recent memory to match Reagan’s ability to connect with citizens on camera.

Beyond his media manipu-lation, a religious aspect of Reagan should disturb us, and that is what some have called “civic millenarianism” – the belief that America is God’s chosen nation, the new Israel, destined to play a unique role in God’s apocalyptic plan.

Reagan believed this to his core. In one speech he said, “We are a nation under God. I have always believed this blessed land was set apart in a special way, that a divine plan placed this great continent here between the oceans to be found by people from every corner of the earth who have a special love for freedom.”

This outlook on the world, this idolatrous nationalism, would shape how Reagan dealt with the Soviet Union, which he called the “evil empire.” Reagan’s apocaly-ptic beliefs gave him an inspired boldness in the arms race, which, had it not been for the more amiable Mikhail Gorbachev, could have turned from merely frosty to globally devastating.

Over time, sobered by years of his legacy in mass media and civil religion, historians might begin to consider Reagan an above-ave-rage president at best. I wonder how much our praise of today will dissipate; I hope it will.

If not, we risk more mutual alienation between politicians and citizens, as Reagan’s television smoke-and-mirrors act is left unexamined. And we risk sinking deeper into a blend of quasi-religion and politics by embracing Reagan’s civic millenarianism. However tempting it is to glorify Reagan in the age of Clinton and George W., to me Reagan is like the Wizard of Oz, a spectacle whose projection is more impressive than the man behind the curtain.