Obama follows in Reagan’s footsteps. By E. J. Dionne, Jr. Washington Post, January 23, 2013.
In Their Own Words: Obama on Reagan. New York Times.
Obama Talks of Reagan and Republicans. Video. YouTube, February 3, 2008.
Dionne:
To
understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don’t look to
Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama’s role model is Ronald Reagan —
just as Obama told us before he was first elected.
Like
Reagan, Obama hopes to usher in a long-term electoral realignment — in Obama’s
case toward the moderate left, thereby reversing the 40th president’s political
legacy. The Reagan metaphor helps explain the tone of Obama’s inaugural
address, built not on a contrived call to an impossible bipartisanship but on a
philosophical argument for a progressive vision of the country rooted in our
history.
Reagan
used his first inaugural to make an unabashed case for conservatism.
Conservatives who loved that Reagan speech are now criticizing Obama for
emulating their hero and his bold defense of first principles.
And
like Reagan, Obama seeks to enact his program not by getting the opposition
party’s leaders to support him but by winning over a minority of the less
doctrinaire Republicans — especially representatives from the Northeast, West
Coast and parts of the Midwest who sense where the political winds in their
regions are blowing.
. . . . . . . . . .
“I
think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard
Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said. “He put us
on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. . . . He
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.”
“I
think we are in one of those times right now,” Obama went on, “where people
feel like things as they are going aren’t working, that we’re bogged down in
the same arguments that we’ve been having and they’re not useful. And the
Republican approach, I think, has played itself out.”
