I found this fairly humorous while going back through some of CNN's coverage of the Ronald Reagan Centennial. Gloria Borger admits that Ronald Reagan's acting skills probably helped a great deal with his "aw shucks" appeal to every day Americans,
February 7, 2011

I found this fairly humorous while going back through some of CNN's coverage of the Ronald Reagan Centennial. Gloria Borger admits that Ronald Reagan's acting skills probably helped a great deal with his "aw shucks" appeal to every day Americans, even though as most of us are more than well aware of his policies were terrible for most working people. But after that admission she does her best to downplay it by saying that he really wasn't that great of an actor.

I guess she expects the rest of us to believe that just because his acting skills weren't all that great, he still wasn't still using them successfully to put a happy face on horrid economic policies.

KING: And Gloria, you know, Jack Kennedy was the first -- Nixon Kennedy was the first televised presidential debate, but the Reagan White House using the skills of Ronald Reagan the actor, the imagery of the presidency, came to a new level and it was the beginning late in the Reagan presidency, the cable age and Ronald Reagan was not around when the internet dominated our politics, but he did master the imagery. Mike Deaver and that team, the imagery of the presidency and again of the Reagan brand.

BORGER: You know, Mike Deaver and Jim Baker, of course, were brilliant. You know, somebody reminded me the other day that actually CNN started, of course in 1981, and the Reagan White House had to sort of start dealing with this notion of a 24/7 presidency and a cable network that would be on the air all the time.

And they understood, I was told by this former staffer, that this was going to change the nature of the American presidency in a way and that they had the perfect man to take advantage of it. You know, people made fun of Ronald Reagan. He's an actor. He's not a real politician, not an intellectual, et cetera, et cetera.

But it's those skills that allowed him to look into the camera, and people said about Ronald Reagan. He's the real deal. We believe him when he talks to us and it wasn't so much that he was a great actor, because he wasn't a fabulous actor.

It was because he had those beliefs, but knew how to talk to the American people. And I think there's some training he had that helped him -- that helped him do that in the dawning of the 24/7 era.

Can you help us out?

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