I found this really well-written blog post about Ronald Reagan's rise from B-movie stardom to the Republican President Idol he became.

Ronald Reagan Plays the President

The blog basically contends that Ronald Reagan mastered the art of looking sympathetic while simultaneously screwing over the people he was supposed to represent while he was SAG president. I gotta say, she makes her case pretty well. I can't believe the amount of actors he fucked over- no residuals for films that actors made before 1960? Damn, that's horrible.

Here's my favorite passage about from the blog:

I obviously love stars, and what stars can mean to different swaths of people. But what draws me and other scholars to study them isn't their glamour but their tremendous ideological potency — a potency that can be wielded, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, for good or for evil, for justice or for exploitation. Oftentimes, the star him- or herself has very little to do with what their image is made to represent, which, as so many of these columns have pointed out, can also be stardom's tragedy. Reagan was obviously manipulated by others, but he did not hesitate to manipulate in turn. What he did to the members of the Screen Actors Guild, he did again, only on a larger scale, to the people of the United States. And because he was a star, because his image of compassionate American goodness was so strong, it was easy to see what he appeared to represent instead of what he was actually doing.

I don't remember the Reagan presidency, but I do think it's interesting how he seems to be one of the most polarizing presidents I've come across. People either idolize him to mythological proportions, or they hate everything he represented about America in the 1980's. (This AIDS documentary called We Were Here particularly crucifies him for his lack of action in the wake of the AIDS crisis.)

The Reagan that this author tries to paint basically comes off as a middling actor with not much to commend him but a pretty face, who at middle-age and realizing his screen idol sell-by date had come to pass, made deals that made him insanely wealthy while simultaneously stabbing his fellow actors in the back. But because his deals had made him a mainstay on American television, the American public grew to like his wholesome, likeable image, which combined with said wealth would eventually help him ride his way into the White House.

So not a nice guy, not quite a devil...but someone who looked out for himself, got rich doing it, and convinced people that he was a swell guy by looking pretty while saying the right lines written by other people along the way. As a result, Reagan grew more and more powerful, until he literally became the most powerful man in the Western Hempisphere for 8 years.

What I find interesting about Reagan is that he represents the culmination of "star power" and "political power"...that was true of JFK to some extent, but it really gelled with him. Do you guys think that Reagan took his star power and yielded it to eventually screw over not just actors but the entire country, or was there some good that came out of his presidency?