On the first count, liberals are mostly right. Reagan usually got the facts wrong when he railed against high taxes, Big Government, unnecessary regulations, welfare cheats, liberal hostility to religion, the communist threat, liberal softness on crime and defense--and all of his other ideological bugaboos. Sometimes he got confused. Sometimes he made stuff up.

But below the surface, he was often on to something important. Although some Americans voted for Reagan out of naked self-interest (people with six-figure incomes, for example) and others voted for him out of right-wing nuttiness or foolish patriotic euphoria, there aren't enough of these people to pull off a 49-state landslide. Reagan's message must have had some broader appeal.

Unfortunately, the liberal response to Reagan's message usually went something like this. Reagan says, "There's a useless layer of bureaucracy up on top of HEW [the Department of Health, Education and Welfare]. And it costs HEW three dollars in overhead to deliver one dollar to a needy person."

Liberals smugly retort that it actually costs 12 cents. Then they are satisfied that there really isn't a problem of useless bureaucracy. But Joe and Wanda Voter know better.

Reading through Reagan's speeches, from "The California Years" to "Farewell Address to the Nation," you have to wade through a lot of bullshit. But hidden beneath the hyperbole and right-wing paranoia is an important message for liberals. Although Reagan really is clueless and mendacious, he levels some criticisms at contemporary liberalism that liberals are foolish to ignore.

The federal welfare bureaucracy is inefficient. Liberals do fail to deal rationally with issues of national security and violent crime. A lot of government paperwork is unnecessary and counterproductive. Congress does waste a lot of money.

Reagan may have gotten the specific facts wrong, but he was on to something important. It wasn't the solutions he offered, but the problems he identified that won him such wide support. His speeches reveal that his true flair was tapping public discontent with the status quo, not selling his policy proposals.

Liberals consistently offered a blanket defense of a status quo that was clearly inadequate, simply because they thought Reagan's alternatives were worse. When liberals should have been honestly assessing the shortcomings of their programs and seeking to correct them, they were using Reagan's inarticulate criticisms as evidence that no problem existed.

It is no exaggeration to say that liberals' distaste for critical self-examination gave the country eight destructive years of Reaganism. Unless liberals abandon mindless defense of obvious failures, we can only look forward to many more.

If liberals want to find the issues that win presidential elections, they should pick up a copy of Speaking My Mind. And then offer a liberal version.