Obama and Reagan – Back like cooked crack
Besides being a muddled primary election, this season’s GOP race, has also been a contest of which candidate can best hijack the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Reagan was the GOP’s last successful president, especially when seen in contrast with the two most recent republican presidential miscarriages. Fiscally conservative, morally completely bankrupt, socially utterly unconscientious; Reagan’s policies (and personality) still serve conservative politicians as a blueprint for their own miserable platforms. George W. Bush himself, crept out of the slime of this hateful ideology, but so did Bill Clinton.
Obama’s recent monologue on Reagan’s presidency, contains a few sentences that could well be understood as praise for the gipper, for this I condemn him! Once my great disappointment for Obama slowly melted into slick cynicism, I revisited his little speech, and found that, despite the sentence that can be read as praise for Reagan, I don’t disagree.
“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.”
Besides skillfully positioning Big Willy next to the equally impeachable Richard Nixon, Obama makes a valid point: Reagan’s presidency, for worse or worse, had much more of a lasting effect on American politics than Clinton’s. For one, Reagan had more of an effect on American politics today than Clinton, because Clinton himself was a continuation of Reagan.
Much in the same way Tony Blair’s policies were an (ever-so-slightly) more socially conscious continuation of Thatcher’s work, Clinton was a continuation of Reagan’s legacy. Clinton’s was a neo-liberal platform, a program of free-trade, deregulation and small government. Clinton submitted welfare, budget and tax bills in the Autumn of his presidency, further completing the Reagan revolution.
What the media have described as Obama’s praise for the gipper, is a most superficial account of Reagan’s presidency and his lasting popularity, “he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.” Obama, of course, doesn’t go into any detail, because this loose definition of Reagan is just general and empty enough for Obama to creep into, like Hannibal Lectar slipping into a disemboweled human carcus. This is cheap, but could be effective in wooing Californian voters, who, for some reason or another, still feel sentimental about the Gipper. At the same time, Obama seeks to destroy the battlefield he can’t win on; he doesn’t want the last successful democratic presidency to serve as an orientation point for democratic candidates and voters in the same way that Reagan’s administration serves for the GOP. Hence, Obama’s awkward differentiation.
The primaries are a game of chess. After Hillary successfully provoked Obama into “playing the race card” (the coverage of these unfortunate events, by the way, are an excellent testament to the state of racism in this country), Obama is trying to make Bill play “angry old man”. Because, every time Bill feels attacked, he becomes red-faced, splotchy and says something unfortunate, further chipping away at his positive legacy. Bill, in his old age, is the true renagade of the Clinton camp, he seems prone to forgetting campaign strategies, instead relying on political instincts – instincts that nowadays seem clouded by senility and temperament.
Besides the validity of Obama’s argument, I hope that in the future he will refrain from participating in such tastless acts of political necrophilia. If Obama feels like comparing someone to Reagan. he should compare Hillary. She has played the race card as skillfully as Reagan in 1980; just overt enough to catch people’s attention, and just minute enough to shrug off.
