FORGET the $2 million in honoraria for his trip to Japan. The easiest bucks that former President Ronald Reagan will earn in his commercial ex-presidency will be the royalties from Speaking My Mind, a compilation of old ghost-written speeches slapped together and marketed for $24.95 per copy.

Although the book's jacket-hype calls it "a major work of documentary history and the...personal record of a beloved president," most of Speaking My Mind is less a valuable look inside Reagan's mind than a tribute to the rhetorical skills of his speechwriters.

Speaking My Mind: Selected Speeches.

By Ronald Reagan

Simon and Schuster

$24.95, 432 pp.

In the annotation to the text, Reagan repeatedly asserts that the speeches in the book flew forth from his own inspired pen. In some cases, this is evidently true. It is in these speeches that we find the unforgettable gaffes such as "We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night...They were all on a diet."

The ghost-written speeches are equally easy to spot. The word "paradigm" looks impressive in the transcript of a speech, but sounded pretty silly when Reagan pronounced it "paradijem."

IF I had written this review about two years ago, I would have filled the page with more such examples of Reagan's evident intellectual ineptitude and brazen disregard for facts, not to mention his self-serving alibis and revisionism about prominent scandals. Speaking My Mind is a veritable treasure trove of Reagan gaffes and misstatements of the kind that filled up two volumes by Mark Green and Gail MacColl, There He Goes Again and Reagan's Reign of Error.

Two years ago, I would have revelled in smug liberal elitism and written a review that painted Reagan and everyone who voted for him as consummate fools. I would have also missed the most important part of Reagan's book.

Green and MacColl typify liberals' reaction to Reagan's oratory. They treated him as an amiable but vapid dunce who gave verbal expression to his ideological prejudices by fabricating statistics on every topic from Cadillacdriving welfare mothers to the Soviet missile build-up.

Reagan, they said, is not only stupid, but mendacious. His ideas are molded out of right-wing dogma and his facts are usually made up on the spot. Anyone who believes this guy is obviously a dunce, too. Why should we pay attention to anything he says?

This is not a wild caricature of prevailing liberal opinion. Liberal publications took obvious delight in exposing the falsehoods and hyperbole in Reagan's pronouncements. Mother Jones magazine even offered Reagan's Reign of Error as a subscription premium. Liberals assumed that if only people knew the facts, they would reject Reagan's simplistic demagoguery and turn to the enlightened liberal truth.

YET Reagan won two elections by landslides and was replaced by his chosen successor. Is Reagan really as stupid as liberals believe? And more important, are American voters really that stupid?

Although they usually don't phrase it quite so bluntly, most liberals believe that the answer to both of these questions is "yes." Therein lies the cause of their recent electoral misfortunes.