[lbo-talk] Re: Ronnie's very timely death

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Jun 11 12:57:37 PDT 2004


Chuck Grimes wrote:


>Somehow, he apparently managed to personify something the populace was
>yearning for.... I've never figured it out, but if anyone could pin it
>down, it would certainly give us a great deal of insight into the
>American psyche... Jon Johanning
>
>-------------
>
>Somebody started to mention it when they noted Ford and Carter.

A friend just told me that the Air America folks have been saying that the Ronnie coverage is getting very low ratings. If that's true, then we should stop thinking of him as so popular. Yeah, a bunch of his fans lined up for four hours to walk by his box at the Capitol, but those are his fans, not representatives of mass opinion.

In life his popularity ratings were almost identical to Clinton's and well below Eisenhower's. So can we please put this in perspective? It's what Alex Cockburn once called an electronic Nuremberg rally. It's not a spontaneous popular outpouring.

Doug



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