Learning From Ronnie
by digby
Long time readers will recall that I took issue with Obama when he said during presidential campaign that he admired Reagan and Rick Perlstein in turn took me to task saying that if Obama wanted to use Reagan to advance his own cause there was a perfectly legitimate, liberal way to do it --- the same way Reagan had used FDR. Here's a piece of that exchange:
I'm saying that he advanced the Reagan Myth, which was based upon conservative propaganda devised for the specific purpose of keeping the conservative movement viable even when it is out of power and restricting any possibility of advancing progressive programs. That's the whole point of the Reagan myth. I tried to point out that Democrats have been doing this, to their own disadvantage, for years now. Accepting the view that Reagan responded to the people's belief that liberal excess and big government were ruining the country is a grave misreading. Reagan, and the conservative movement that nurtured him, created that view and its hellspawn have advanced it ever since.
But I was wrong is saying you should never evoke Reagan at all. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Rick Perlstein, who as far as I know has taken absolutely no public position in this primary and has no dog in the fight, explained it elegantly in an email this morning:
Reagan didn't praise FDR. He stole from him. As in, "This generation has a rendez vous with destiny." We should steal from Reagan too. As in: "There is no left and right. Only up or down." He would then use that intro to frame some outrageously right-wing notion as "common sense." We should do the same for left-wing ideas.
Also, use Reagan to mess with righties' heads. As in: I agree we need a Reaganite foreign policy. When Reagan realized we were caught in the crossfire of a religious civil war in Lebanon, he got the hell out. He would have done the same thing in Iraq. The rule isn't "never say anything nice about Reagan." It's "use Reagan for progressive ends."
Obama failed that test.
Since the inauguration, I've been fairly sure that Obama and Co were running the Reagan playbook, namely that they would grin and bear the bad economy during the first two years and then prepare for Morning in America. The question was always whether the policies he enacted actually resulted in Morning in America and whether the Republicans in congress would cooperate as Reagan's Democrats did. The jury is still out on the first and I think we know that the answer to the second is a resounding no. But one thing is clear --- on a political/rhetorical level, Obama has taken a very different tack than Reagan did.
Perlstein again explains, in this article in this week's Newsweek:
Ronald Reagan scored a comfortable victory in 1980, promising a new day in Washington and the nation. Then Reaganomics ran into brick wall. Unemployment—7.4 percent at the beginning of his term—was heading toward 10 percent by the summer of 1982. The gross domestic product declined 1.8 percent. On Election Day, voters punished him by taking 27 House seats from his Republican Party, including most of the ones gained in 1980. That gave the Democrats a 269–166 seat advantage—far greater than the 51-seat advantage Republicans enjoy today.
The day after that woeful election, Reagan’s aides sent him into a press conference with defensive talking points. He tore them up. “We’re very pleased with the results,” he said, claiming that the GOP had “beat the odds” for off-year elections (he went back to 1928 to make the claim). “Wasn’t he in worse shape for 1984?” he was asked. “I don’t think so at all,” he replied. Hadn’t it been a historically uncivil campaign? He agreed—because of all the opposition did to “frighten voters.”
Barack Obama gave a press conference the day after his “shellacking” too. The contrast to Reagan couldn’t have been more stark. Ignoring the fact that the electorate had pretty much been switching their party preference every two years since 1992, he conceded the loss as an epochal sea change. “I did some talking,” he said of his meeting with Republican leaders the night before, “but mostly I did a lot of listening.” When asked about jobs, he talked about the deficit. He then boasted that when it came to what was essential to recovery, he really didn’t have essential principles at all: the answers were not to be “found in any one particular philosophy or ideology.”
Can you see the difference?
Perlstein points out that Reagan was in much worse shape politically than Obama was due to his bad economy when he made those comments:
But then came the remarkable economic recovery. Inflation, which had been 11 percent upon his inauguration, fell to 2 percent. Unemployment fell from a very familiar 9.6 percent to 7.5 percent. Economic growth began charting a remarkable 7.2 percent rate of annual growth.
That’s just the sort of thing that Obama is praying for; the state of the economy, experts agree, is the most reliable indicator of whether a president gets reelected. But it wasn’t the mere fact of recovery that let Reagan take 49 states and cement the sense, as historian Sean Wilentz put it, that we are living in the Age of Reagan. It was that Reagan had been laying the groundwork to take the credit for the recovery since before he was inaugurated. He did it by laying all blame on his political adversaries.
I think Obama has done something quite different. He hasn't effectively pushed the blame game, perhaps out of temperament or perhaps because he just really doesn't believe the Republicans did anything particularly wrong. And he is allowing the Republicans to take credit for the recovery:
Already, Republicans are claiming credit for modest gains since the election; they attribute it to the very act of impaneling a Republican Congress. It increased “business confidence”—one of their bumper-sticker slogans.
There’s nothing intrinsically right wing about explaining complex economic processes in easily digestible ways; FDR—Reagan’s rhetorical role model—did it all the time. Reagan’s story was very simple: “Our government is too big, and it spends too much.” So he would reverse everything Carter had done (except when Congress wouldn’t let him—and then the problems were Congress’s fault, weren’t they?). Then, lo and behold, the economy recovered. As the historian Wilentz put it: “The slogan ‘stay the course,’ which had once sounded like whistling in the dark, now reverberated like an irresistible battle cry.”
I agree that the "stay the course" slogan was hugely important. I certainly remembered it. Instead of doing a "mid course correction" that everyone in Washington always demands, he insisted that he was sticking to principles. And in the end, when the economy recovered, those principles appeared to be hugely validated and ushered in 30 years of conservative dominance. Sure, he compromised like crazy, but he always framed it in terms of his beliefs not pragmatism. It's a very different approach.
And this, I think is key to why Reagan was truly transformational:
Despite his skill at vividly conjuring his enemies, Reagan somehow managed to be seen by a large majority of the public as a unifying figure—then and now. “This belief that Reagan had ‘brought the country’ back together was a recurrent refrain in voter interviews during the campaign … and in election-day exit polls,” Lou Cannon writes—even among voters who said they didn’t like his policies.
Staking out firm ideological ground, and being perceived as a uniter, not a divider, are not incommensurate tasks. Ronald Reagan proved they can be strongly reinforcing. It is an alchemical task—one of consummate leadership. How did he do it? By projecting strength—a strength that blinded the public to the contradictions at hand.
FDR had that ability as well. Indeed, projecting strength and gaining enough confidence from the people to allow them to govern successfully without sacrificing the party's ability to come back and fight another day, may be the key to being a transformational president.
Read Rick's whole piece. It puts it all together much better than I have here. The president and his men seem to have been following certain aspects of the Reagan playbook without fully understanding how he did it so I'm not sure he's going to be rewarded in the same way. We shall see.
Update: The first batch of advance excerpts of Obama's speech indicates that he's going to talk about investments in terms of national pride. (I guess he's going with the JFK model which isn't a bad idea.) The problem is that the "Sputnik Moment" of our time is climate change, which he doesn't seem to connect up to this.
He doesn't put social security explicitly on the menu, so that's good. But he doesn't explicitly take it off, either (no "save social security first"...) So it's back to reading tea leaves on that.
Update II: Howard Fineman sez:
The speech is a tight-shot focus on the president in his role as a leader, inspirer, explainer, lightning rod, antagonist and storyteller. It's clear from the leaks and the briefs that President Barack Obama thinks the American people -- still worried about their jobs, their mortgages and keeping their heads above water -- want to hear reasons why, against evidence, they should be optimistic. Think of this speech as Hope 2.0 -- at least, President Obama hopes you do.
The president will argue that budget cuts are necessary, but that only new investments in research, education and infrastructure will guarantee the nation's long-term economic future. Republicans will argue that only a drastic reduction in the size of government -- we'll see if they are willing to be specific -- will guarantee that prosperity. Last year, the word "jobs" was the most-mentioned term. This year, it's going to be "future"
Chuck Henry on CNN framed the "Sputnik moment" this way:
At 9.4% unemployment, this president realizes that a lot of Americans are not feeling that bounce right now. You mentioned that five year budget freeze, the president is going to say that, look, these are tough choices and it's this generation's "Sputnik Moment," John
So I guess it's been decided that deficit reduction is the key to getting jobs back and the president is challenging this generation (which generation?) to make tough choices, which is sort of like the space program? Huh?
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