Seriously, you didn't think the myth of Ronald Reagan would be wiped away in one election cycle, did you? Over the last decade and especially in last few years, we've the living proof that the distorted legacy of the 40th president - which has morphed with the help of right-wing activists like Grover Norquist into a dangerous philosophy that I call Reaganism - is hurting America on every front. We've seen a government that Reagan called "the problem" fail to protect its citizens from the floods of Hurricane Katrina, from a bridge collapse in Minneapolis or from the scams of Bernie Madoff or the Wall Street greed that crashed a global economy. We've also misinterpreted the Gipper's foreign policy - using a phony "Evil empire" bravado to justify badly conceived policies in the Middle East - and still believe in the magic of his "voodoo economics" that turned America into the world's' greatest debtor.

In fact, there were moments when I was working on my new book - "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future," published this month by Simon & Schuster's Free Press - when I wondered whether a Barack Obama victory and a Democratic Congress would mean a sea change in our politics that would slay the dominance of Reaganism forever. I didn't need to worry about that. An obstructionist-minded GOP minority with a lingering ability to block or influence legislation in the Senate and a Beltway Gang of 500 that thinks that "Glory Days" and 1980s means more than just a Springsteen song are keeping the flame of the Reagan myth alive. And that may well threaten the very measures - a massive government role in job creation, a possible temporary nationalization of insolvent money-center banks - that are needed to keep America and the world out of Great Depression II.

In a nation about to hurdle right past $10 trillion in debt, with a gap between the rich and poor that resembles the robber-baron era of the late 19th Century, and with a collapsing infrastructure, Republicans continue to push an economic agenda with three elements: Tax cuts, tax cuts and more tax cuts, preferably tilted toward corporations or toward levies that tend to impact the wealthy, such as capital gains or the inheritance tax

The epitome of this approach was a 2003 plan backed by Reagan disciple George W. Bush and the then-GOP majority in Congress that cut taxes during wartime for the first time in American history; the House Budget Committee chairman at that time, Republican Jim Nussle of Iowa, explained that Reagan authored "the basic playbook" for the modern GOP, and "that is the playbook that I follow today." In the current debate over President Obama's economic stimulus bill, this is how South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint responded: "It's incredible that he said that. It's clear that whether it's John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or when Bush did this in 2001 and 2003, the economy came out of recession." But the evidence for that argument just isn't there.

Yet the Reagan myth is hard to topple - some of the credit, or blame, belongs to Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, which was created in 1997 and has been amazingly successful in renaming roads, post offices, medical centers and airports for the Gipper across both red and blue America, etching his now-iconic image into the political wiring of a generation of voters that was watching the Smurfs when the real Reagan doddered through the Iran-Contra scandal.

So my question for America - and for some of the great minds planning to show up for this discussion this week - is quite simply this: How do we ever get back to the reality-based Ronald Reagan, so that we can focus more clearly on today's problems that are quite often rooted in the warped Reaganism of Bush, Norquist, Dick "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" Cheney, and others? How do we impress on our political leaders that Reagan's best qualities as a leader weren't "tear down this wall" rigidity but his willingness finally to talk with our adversaries in the Kremlin in pursuit of peace. And how do we convince our chattering classes that Reagan's tax cuts didn't save the American economy, and that our greatest boom times came from undoing Reaganomics over the course of the 1990s. This is how - to quote from the title of the book - the Reagan legacy "haunts our future." No one should ever re-write history. But right now, America's view of modern reality needs a massive correction.