All the fuss about Barack Obama’s comments on Ronald Reagan appears to have gotten under the candidate’s skin. At the Democratic candidates’ debate in South Carolina, Hillary Clinton attacked Obama’s comments on the GOP being the party of ideas during the Clinton presidency by thoroughly mischaracterizing what he said. Obama defended himself by thoroughly mischaracterizing what he had said on a slightly different topic during the same session with the editors of the Reno Gazette-Journal.
Clinton accused Obama of saying that he liked the Republican ideas of the past 10-15 years, which isn’t true—he said, with a dollop of mild criticism, that Republicans had been the party of ideas during the Clinton presidency. Obama responded to a different criticism—one that I among many others made, which was that his remarks on Reagan in the Gazette-Journal interview lent credibility to the Reagan Revolution—by distorting his own comments as thoroughly as Clinton did, but in the opposite direction.
Here’s what Obama said about Republicans being the party of ideas.
And the Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they’re being debated among the presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. Well, we know, we’ve done that; we’ve tried it. That’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.
Here’s what Clinton accused him of saying in the debate.
The facts are that he has said in the last week that he really liked the ideas of the Republicans over the last 10 to 15 years, and we can give you the exact quote.
Here’s how Obama responded.
What I said—and I will provide you with a quote—what I said was is that Ronald Reagan was a transformative political figure because he was able to get Democrats to vote against their economic interests to form a majority to push through their agenda, an agenda that I objected to.
And here’s what Obama actually said about Reagan.
I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, 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, you know, with all the excesses of the ’60s and the ’70s, you know government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating, and I think people just tapped into – he tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and, and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing.I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times. I think we’re in one of those times right now, where people feels like things as they are going right now aren’t working, that we’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having, and they’re not useful.
Nothing there about Reagan having succeeded in getting Democrats to vote against their own economic interests—and of course it wasn’t just Democrats and it wasn’t only an economic agenda, and arguments are surely useful if one actually makes and wins them—or about Obama having objected to the Reagan agenda. It’s refreshing that he’s doing so now, however belatedly or calculatingly.
On another front, Obama has either walked back or clarified, depending on one’s frame of reference, his stance on separation of church and state, which is the issue that first alienated me from him. I still have no comfort level with someone who feels compelled to make a political presentation of himself as a “committed Christian,” but I’m somewhat reassured that if he does win the nomination and the general election, he’ll depart from the nakedly theocratic bent of the Bush administration’s approach to religion in government.
That said, the fact that Obama had to get thoroughly reamed over his Reagan comments in order to realize that pandering or reaching out, depending on one’s frame of reference, to the right is not necessarily the best way to win support from the center and left suggests a lack of clarity about and commitment to progressive ideas that leaves me cold.
