I fear Matt Stoller misinterprets Obama's stated admiration for Reagan here. What he's saying is that Reagan effectively understood the ideological currents in the country and used that mastery of public opinion to drive popular sentiment. In other words, he admires Reagan for shifting the center. When he says that "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's articulating a fundamentally different idea of the presidency than Clinton is -- more inspirational than managerial, as concerned with the prevailing ideological atmosphere as with the specifics of contemporary legislative initiatives.Additionally, Stoller makes an interpretive move that's probably unnecessary. Obama says, "I think [Americans] 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, [Reagan] 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." Stoller takes this and writes, "Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement...Masking Reagan's true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement, with someone as powerful as Grover Norquist seeking to put Reagan's name on as many monuments as possible and the Republican candidates themselves using Reagan's name instead of George Bush's in GOP debates as a mark of greatness."But what Obama is doing is what Norquist most wants to avoid: He's homogenizing Reagan's political legacy. He's reconstructing it as accountability in government rather than smallness of government, clarity of purpose rather than conservatism of purpose, dynamism and entrepreneurship rather than backlash and upward redistribution. So what's going on here is twofold. First, Obama is suggesting he has a fairly grandly ideological view of the president's role, and that it includes harnessing the ideological forces of the moment to push the country in a new direction. Second, he's sanitizing and subtly reworking Reagan's legacy, and more than Reagan's legacy, the lessons of the 80s, so they fit with a liberal worldview, rather than undermine it. Oftentimes, I think Obama's unifying rhetoric is a little naive and soft, but this actually seems like a fairly loud dog whistle mixed with a fairly smart attempt to revise history.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from user Afroswede.) OBAMA AND REAGAN.
I fear Matt Stoller misinterprets Obama's stated admiration for Reagan here. What he's saying is that Reagan effectively understood the ideological currents in the country and used that mastery of public opinion to drive popular sentiment. In other words, he admires Reagan for shifting the center. When he says that "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's articulating a fundamentally different idea of the presidency than Clinton is -- more inspirational than managerial, as concerned with the prevailing ideological atmosphere as with the specifics of contemporary legislative initiatives.Additionally, Stoller makes an interpretive move that's probably unnecessary. Obama says, "I think [Americans] 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, [Reagan] 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." Stoller takes this and writes, "Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement...Masking Reagan's true political underpinning principles is a central goal of the conservative movement, with someone as powerful as Grover Norquist seeking to put Reagan's name on as many monuments as possible and the Republican candidates themselves using Reagan's name instead of George Bush's in GOP debates as a mark of greatness."But what Obama is doing is what Norquist most wants to avoid: He's homogenizing Reagan's political legacy. He's reconstructing it as accountability in government rather than smallness of government, clarity of purpose rather than conservatism of purpose, dynamism and entrepreneurship rather than backlash and upward redistribution. So what's going on here is twofold. First, Obama is suggesting he has a fairly grandly ideological view of the president's role, and that it includes harnessing the ideological forces of the moment to push the country in a new direction. Second, he's sanitizing and subtly reworking Reagan's legacy, and more than Reagan's legacy, the lessons of the 80s, so they fit with a liberal worldview, rather than undermine it. Oftentimes, I think Obama's unifying rhetoric is a little naive and soft, but this actually seems like a fairly loud dog whistle mixed with a fairly smart attempt to revise history.(Photo used under a Creative Commons license from user Afroswede.) 
