First First John Edwards, and now the Clinton campaign, are jumping on a statement Barack Obama made to the editorial board of the Reno Gazette that lauded Ronald Reagan. You've probably read it elsewhere, but just to reiterate, here are the comments:
I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. ... 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. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, 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.
On a Clinton campaign conference call today with journalists, Rep. Barney Frank portrayed Obama's comments not as a cleverly progressive re-appropriation of Reagan's sunny optimist appeal (that's how Ezra and others have interpreted the statement), but as an actual endorsement of Reagan's government-killing ideology. "If Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee I will be an enthusiastic supporter," Frank began. "But this notion that style in the presidency trumps substance is a terrible error. Government is the problem, he said? How can anyone go back to that when we have the sub-prime crisis where the lack of government is the problem? ... [Reagan] was opposed to the rights of women, the rights of gay people. ... It's baffling to me that Obama would speak so favorably about President Reagan."
I asked Frank if Obama's words could be interpreted simply as a nod to Reagan's rhetorical power and ability to unite the country around something "new," even if that something had been nefarious. Frank replied that when Obama adopts "excesses of government" rhetoric, he plays right into conservative talking-points that programs like Medicaid and Medicare should not be expanded, but cut.
This whole tactic of blowing up Obama's Reagan statement strikes me as a little unfair; Obama supports none of Reagan's policy legacies. In fact, he actively wants to overturn almost all of them. And yet, there's something discomfiting about Obama's remarks. It's a feeling, once again, that Obama lost control of a moment in which, instead of idly talking about "change" and "newness," he could have affirmatively articulated a progressive ideology.
--Dana Goldstein
