The War of the Presidents: Reagan Battles Obama in 2010
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Now it begins.
The iconic election contest of the new century: Barack Obama
versus…Ronald Reagan.
In one corner of the ring: progressivism/statism/liberalism as
championed by Obama. In the other: Reagan conservatism/individual
liberty and freedom. It will be a knock down, no-holds barred
fight, with Obama progressives already on the ropes, the
consequences and costs of but one year of Obama in power with an
Obama-controlled Congress having been driven home to startled
Americans.
Neither Obama nor the late President Reagan will have his name on
a ballot anywhere this election year. President Obama does not
face the voters for another two years, and former President
Reagan, of course, passed from the scene in 2004.
Yet in a high-speed culture in which politics is conducted in the
short-hand of sound-bites, the 2010 election can be easily
summarized by the last names of the two presidents immutably
identified with their respective governing philosophies, making
the first national election of the 21st century’s second decade a
virtual War of the Presidents. It will beget one simple question.
Are you Reagan or Obama?
There is a reason that the Obama White House repeatedly attempts
to drag George W. Bush back into the arena beyond Bush’s
unpopularity with the electorate. The reason? It’s one thing to
take on the unpopular and very much alive Bush, who left office
with a 22% approval rating in a final CBS News/New York
Times poll. It’s another thing entirely to take on the
revered Reagan. Gallup polls in 2001 and 2007 — one each three
years before his death and three years afterwards — had
Americans ranking Reagan as either America’s greatest president
or number two — right behind Lincoln.
Yet one has to hand it to Obama’s advisers. In the guise of
fixing this, that or another alleged “mess” that has been, as
Obama likes to say, “inherited” from Bush, it is now abundantly
clear that the Obama White House game is to use Bush as the
excuse to instigate what former Vice President Cheney recently
called “what seems to be the goal of his presidency: social
transformation, the restructuring of American society.”
But the social transformation and restructuring of American
society from…what?
Answer: the American society and structure that Ronald Reagan set
in motion from the moment his own
hand came off the inaugural bible 29 years ago this month. A
society in which, between 1981 and 2008, almost 45 million jobs
were created and the Cold War was not only won outright but the
Soviet Union vanished atop what Reagan once called the ash heap
of history.
Americans, tired of Bush in 2008 and soothed by the perception of
Obama’s moderate tone, have spent the last year moving from
expectation to uncertainty to concern to alarm and finally
furious anger over the approach of the Obama administration.
Shocked recognition has set in that whether the subject was the
stimulus bill, the state of American car companies, banks and
financial institutions, the incessant trips abroad to apologize
for America, the hesitation on winning the war in Afghanistan,
the effective seizure of the private health care system or
bringing the 9/11 terrorists to New York for trial instead of
treating them as military combatants, not to mention the piling
up of untold trillions in debt — no matter the subject, invoking
Bush was and is a cover for the real game.
The real game?
For Obama to remake America from the bottom up into a statist
utopia as long envisioned by American and European
“progressives.” To fundamentally change — forever — the role of
government in everyday American life. To remove as much
individual liberty and freedom as they can get away with and
replace it with government control, on the old theory that only
economic and political elites can correctly order the affairs of
the average man and woman. Making of America a quasi-socialist
state on the model favored by leftists of one stripe or another
for all or parts of three centuries. If the Obama progressives
could manage it, the idea would be to drop the “quasi”
altogether.
The dog that doesn’t bark in this scenario?
The same relentless attacks on Reagan that have been directed at
the unpopular Bush and Cheney. There are none. Why?
“Perhaps the most cogent exposition of the conservative political
philosophy….was made by a professional actor, Ronald Reagan,”
wrote Arthur Krock, the curmudgeonly dean of the New York
Times after Reagan’s famous speech
for Barry Goldwater in 1964, more prescient than he could know.
Both in his lifetime and since, it is Reagan alone who has been
the most successful spokesman for the opposition to the left-wing
“progressive” philosophy Obama is out to impose on the country.
And in one form or another, on one issue or another, it is Reagan
that Obama has been trying to overturn — not George W. Bush.
Hence, the strategy: attack the unpopular Bush always, the
legendarily popular Reagan never. Blame Bush — while repealing
Reagan.
THE REAGAN-OBAMA POLITICAL WAR of 2010 goes far, far beyond the
mere coin of personal popularity.
The fact, of course, is these opposing political philosophies
belong to neither Obama nor Reagan. They are merely the
embodiment of competing ideas of governance that have evolved
over centuries. Reagan’s is to be found in the writing and
thinking of the likes of Adam Smith, John Locke, Edmund Burke,
and his contemporaries like William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry
Goldwater. Obama turns to Rousseau, Marx, Bismarck, John Dewey,
Saul Alinsky, and like-minded contemporaries exemplified by the
likes of now-resigned Obama White House aide Van Jones.
Yet it is Reagan and Obama who are, in 2010, the very public
faces of these arguments.
The differences between the two presidents can be summed up in
pithy fashion by each:
Reagan, on February 5, 1981: “Our aim
is to increase national wealth so all will have more, not just
redistribute what we already have, which is just a sharing of
scarcity.”
Obama, on September 6, 2001: “But the
Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of
wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic
justice in this society…. And one of the I think the tragedies
of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights
movement became so court focused I think that there was a
tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing
and activities on the ground that are able to put together the
actual coalitions of power through which you bring about
redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from
that.”
Each man as president was true to his word and his respective
beliefs, actively pursuing them as president.
But the outcomes show a huge difference, not for the first time
in contrasting the results obtained by these philosophies whether
in America or in other nations around the globe.
Reagan’s philosophy did increase national wealth. The results
speak for themselves. According to the National Bureau of
Economic Research, the economy expanded for a record-setting 212
months between the time Reagan’s economic program took hold in
November of 1982 and March of 2001. The only downturn — and it
was brief — occurred during the nine months from July of 1990 to
March of 1991. The U.S. Labor Department records that during the
same time period 41.6 million jobs were created, the total rising
to 44.6 million by the time George W. Bush left office.
In stark contrast, the first year of Obama has resulted in a loss
of 4 million jobs, in spite of the massive $787 billion stimulus
package Obama insisted would both create jobs and keep
unemployment at 8%. Unemployment is now at 10%. Obama has now
produced the worst one-year record of job creation by a
presidential program since the end of World War II — which is to
say in 70 years.
These results are not accidents. They are not bad luck. They are
not twists of fate. They are the results of the application of
two very different governing philosophies: Reagan’s, which
insists that low taxes, limited government and freedom for the
individual will produce good jobs and increase prosperity for
all. And Obama’s, which insists that high taxes, massive
government and more government control will produce good jobs by
policies that forcibly, in Obama’s words to Joe the Plumber,
“spread the wealth around.”
The key difference in 2010 is that both philosophies in the
conservative versus progressive standoff have had decades if not
centuries to show their stuff. Neither is perfect, yet without
doubt the evidence is in — and the progressive ideal that more
government control of American life, replete with even larger
bureaucracies and less freedom and liberty for the individual, is
losing. Big Time.
This Reagan-Obama battle will produce political results because
of this — indeed in 2009 it already produced Reaganite governors
of New Jersey and Virginia — as more and more Americans look
back at Reagan’s accomplishments and understand them in relation
to Obama’s results.
Again, the polls show exactly why the Obama White House clings to
attacks on George W. Bush. Gallup tells us that the generic
ballot split for Republicans and Democrats leading up to the 2006
elections, when Bush was heading towards his last two years and
his unpopularity was rising, had an eleven point difference, with
Democrats leading 51% to 40%. After barely one year of an Obama
presidency, with conservatives from talk radio to Fox to bloggers
to potential presidential, congressional and gubernatorial
candidates picking up on the Reagan theme in reaction to Obama’s
aggressive progressives, Gallup reported in November the GOP has
closed to a 2-point deficit in the generic congressional ballot,
46% to 44%.
The Reagan-Obama divide is also apparent in the media, with
seemingly unconnected stories delivering the news of what happens
when Obama’s “progressive” view of the world holds sway over
Reagan’s conservative view. Here are two stories from Sunday,
neither of which mention Obama or Reagan — yet illustrate
clearly the effect of each philosophy.
• New York Post, January
3, 2010: “Economy dooms top vintage
shops”
reports the paper in a tale that never mentions Obama once.
It doesn’t have to. The results of the progressive tax ideal
speaks for itself, impacting vintage-clothing shops in
Manhattan’s East Village. How? The owner of one shop, which has
catered to the tastes of Madonna and Paul McCartney, blames high
taxes and is picking up and moving — to Hoboken, New Jersey. The
shop’s customers in New York “don’t have the money.”
And what’s going on in New Jersey these days? Republican Chris
Christie is taking office after winning an upset in the
governor’s race promising a Reaganesque cut in taxes. The
results? Christie won because of the return of the “Reagan
Democrat” and Independents to the GOP fold — stunning New Jersey
political observers by carrying counties like Gloucester and
Middlesex — both home to huge numbers of blue-collar voters.
• New York Times, January
3, 2010: “And Now to Our Left: More Relics of
the Bust” is a particularly telling revelation of the
Obama/progressive mindset. Again, Obama is not mentioned. In an
extensive story on the front page of the Business section,
reporter Peter S. Goodman tells of the foreclosure epidemic in a
bus tour of Cape Coral, Florida. What is the result of this
economic catastrophe in the eyes of the (presumably)
progressive-minded reporter for the famously left-wing
Times? Why, nothing less than the “undermining of
the American dream.” And how is that dream undermined
specifically? “Unemployment was soaring, and tax revenue was
plunging, forcing cuts in government services and intensifying
anxiety.”
Got that? The American Dream, wonderfully and succinctly stated
in the progressive mindset, is not about opportunity, freedom and
individual liberty. No, the American Dream is about “government
services.” And just how could such a wonderful thing as
government services be threatened? After thousands of words there
is only a brief passing reference in this Times
story to what was in fact a major cause of this economic
devastation. Referring to the real estate agent who is the focal
point of the story, the reporter says (emphasis mine): “He deals
primarily in houses owned by Fannie Mae, the
government-backed financier.” Which is to say,
the lust for government services (Fannie Mae) has threatened the
American Dream of…government services.
And what’s the hot political news out of Florida these days? The
rise of young Reaganite House Speaker Marco Rubio in his U.S.
Senate race against Republican Governor Charlie Crist — who made
a point of embracing both Obama (on a trip to Florida) and the
philosophy behind the Obamanomics stimulus, the very ideal of
what got Cape Coral and the rest of the country into trouble in
the first place.
In two completely unrelated new stories in two different New York
newspapers, a quick if unintentional glimpse is seen of the
Reagan/Obama divide in New York, New Jersey and Florida.
The Reagan worldview says high taxes costs jobs, the Obama world
view believes that a solution of high taxes to support more
bureaucracy will “spread the wealth.”
But the real life effect of progressive economics as applied in
the first story has the store-owner fleeing New York City for
tax-friendlier New Jersey, spreading the wealth elsewhere
because, in the owner’s words, “people don’t have the money” in
progressively minded high-tax New York. Why? Because in New York,
as with the reporter in Cape Coral, Florida, the progressive view
of the world is that the American Dream is “government services.”
And what was the cause, in considerable measure, of the housing
crisis? The “government service” that is Fannie Mae. And what did
we just learn about the “government service” that is Fannie Mae?
That the Obama Treasury Department has abruptly lifted the $400
billion cap on potential losses for Fannie Mae (and Freddie Mac),
raising the limits on what these twin failed gems of progressive
thinking can borrow.
Somewhere Ronald Reagan is shaking his head — with a smile.
Why not? Six years after his death he’s in another furious
political fight with yet another progressive president. And
Barack Obama is doing the best Jimmy Carter imitation since,
well, Jimmy Carter.
Buckle in.
The War of the Presidents has just begun.
And Reagan is winning.
