One Election Does Not "Change" the Country
Barack Obama has taken some grief, particularly among liberal Democrats, for making the observation (and repeating it) that Ronald Reagan's two terms in the White House fundamentally "changed the trajectory" of the country in ways that Bill Clinton's two terms, for example, did not.
Candidate Obama got into one of those pointless (but totally consuming, made for the media) debates with Hillary Clinton last year when he said that Reagan, "put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it." Clinton charged Obama with "admiring Reagan" and wondered how any self respecting Democrat could possibly say something even halfway flattering about the GOP's favorite icon.
Obama's obviously accurate analysis - Reagan did change the country - reminds me of the old line that in Washington, D.C. the definition of a gaffe is when a politician speaks the truth.
Writer and historian Matthew Dallek (a former Dick Gephardt speech writer and son of presidential historian Robert Dallek) has a great take at Politico on Obama's own challenge in "changing the trajectory" of the country and rolling back "the culture of Reaganism" that he sees as "a remarkably resilient political force in late 2009."
Matthew Dallek is a perceptive and not uncritical student of Reagan. He has written a fine book about Reagan's first election victory - the California governorship in 1966.
There has long been - and remains - a healthy skepticism in America about government and about the whole notion of "change." Even the great presidents, widely admired as agents of change - Lincoln, Jackson, FDR, to name three - didn't find the job to be easy and all encountered tremendous resistence. So it goes with the current occupant of the White House.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Mistrusting the Government
One Election Does Not "Change" the Country
Barack Obama has taken some grief, particularly among liberal Democrats, for making the observation (and repeating it) that Ronald Reagan's two terms in the White House fundamentally "changed the trajectory" of the country in ways that Bill Clinton's two terms, for example, did not.
Candidate Obama got into one of those pointless (but totally consuming, made for the media) debates with Hillary Clinton last year when he said that Reagan, "put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it." Clinton charged Obama with "admiring Reagan" and wondered how any self respecting Democrat could possibly say something even halfway flattering about the GOP's favorite icon.
Obama's obviously accurate analysis - Reagan did change the country - reminds me of the old line that in Washington, D.C. the definition of a gaffe is when a politician speaks the truth.
Writer and historian Matthew Dallek (a former Dick Gephardt speech writer and son of presidential historian Robert Dallek) has a great take at Politico on Obama's own challenge in "changing the trajectory" of the country and rolling back "the culture of Reaganism" that he sees as "a remarkably resilient political force in late 2009."
Matthew Dallek is a perceptive and not uncritical student of Reagan. He has written a fine book about Reagan's first election victory - the California governorship in 1966.
There has long been - and remains - a healthy skepticism in America about government and about the whole notion of "change." Even the great presidents, widely admired as agents of change - Lincoln, Jackson, FDR, to name three - didn't find the job to be easy and all encountered tremendous resistence. So it goes with the current occupant of the White House.
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