D'Souza's Enthusiastic but Perhaps One-Sided defense of Ronal Reagan - Book Report/Review Example

Dinesh D’Souza’s work Ronald Reagan: How and Ordinary man Became and Extraordinary Leader fits into this polarizing dialogue, acting as a full-throated defense of the president’s record. That being said, however, D’Souza does make a strong case for many of his arguments, and backs them up with facts when appropriate – the only issue emerges when he ignores facts that are contrary to his chosen argument. D’Souza makes a largely persuasive case about the Reagan’s success as a president, though occasionally ignoring the downside of his economic qualities, used his position as an insider to provide insight into some of Reagan’s decisions, and offers a fair critique of Reagan’s robust use of presidential power.

D’Souza’s arguments about the success of Reagan’s presidency are most compelling when they deal with his foreign policy accomplishments. The fact is, the United States had especially deft foreign policy during much of Reagan’s tenure, and a president will always be given credit for things that happen on his watch. In the case of Reagan’s foreign policy, this is probably fair. . ng to disappear”1, but Reagan pursued policies aimed at pushing the USSR to the brink, including his famous demand that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin wall.

In this, and many other cases of foreign policy aplomb, D’Souza successfully argues that Reagan was a successful president. When D’Souza cites Reagan’s presidency as a foreign policy success, his arguments are usually quite sound and quite well rounded. When he attempts to trumpet Reagan’s economic success, however, he gets into more difficult times. D’Souza, in Chapter 5, credits Reagan with pulling America out of the recession that he inherited from Carter – this may or may not be fair.

Certainly the economy did recover – but economies tend to do that, and many of the outside oppressive forces that caused the economy to go into a recession in the first place (such as OPEC’s refusal to deal with America) went away during his term. Furthermore, D’Souza trumpets Reagan’s willingness to “cut taxes,” but ignores the tremendous downside of Reagan’s tax cuts – that they generated one of the largest deficits America had ever seen to that time. D’Souza argues that calling the deficit “a jumble of big, meaningless numbers” is essentially a “fairly accurate appraisal of the significance of the issue”2 – something that may have seemed true in the booming economy of 1999 when he wrote this book, but anyone in 2012 knows to be a hopelessly optimistic view.

So, while D’Souza’s advocating that Reagan was a successful President in terms of foreign policy remains robust, it seems that his defense of Reagan’s economic policy chose only to focus on the positives, while disregarding some of the negatives. Despite this slight tunnel vision in regards to economic policy, D’Souza still