I don't want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what's different are the times. I do think that for example the 1980 was different. 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. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just 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.
http://www.openleft.com/...
Matt Stoller says it for me and he's the one who brought this clip to light. (Hat Tip to Eric)
There are many reason progressives should admire Ronald Reagan, politically speaking. He realigned the country around his vision, he brought into power a new movement that created conservative change, and he was an extremely skilled politician. But that is not why Obama admires Reagan. Obama admires Reagan because he agrees with Reagan's basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of 'excesses' and that government had grown large and unaccountable.
Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these 'excesses'.
Reagan did represent change, but not the change I wanted, many progressives believe that Reagan was the beginning of the end for the middle class in America.
"You Can't Govern if You Don't Believe in Government"
by Thom Hartmann
As incompetent as George W. Bush has been in his response to the disaster in New Orleans, he wasn't the one who began the process that inevitably led to that disaster spiraling out of control.
That would be Ronald Reagan.
It was Reagan who began the deliberate and intentional destruction of the United States of America when he famously cracked (and then incessantly repeated): "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
Reagan, like George W. Bush after him, failed to understand that when people come together into community, and then into nationhood, that they organize themselves to protect themselves from predators, both human and corporate, both domestic and foreign. This form of organization is called government.
http://www.commondreams.org/...
And then there is the issue of race, Reagan openly used dog whistle politics to secure the southern racist vote for the Republican party. Lyndon B. Johnson, in sighing the Civil Rights Act, knew he was giving the Republican party this vote for decades to come. And he could not have signed such an act without the social movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., not possible, but the party made the right moral decision.
Lott, Reagan and Republican Racism
Yet it's with Reagan, who set a standard for exploiting white anger and resentment rarely seen since George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, that the Republican's selective memory about its race-baiting habit really stands out.
Space doesn't permit a complete list of the Gipper's signals to angry white folks that Republicans prefer to ignore, so two incidents in which Lott was deeply involved will have to suffice. As a young congressman, Lott was among those who urged Reagan to deliver his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. It was a ringing declaration of his support for "states' rights" — a code word for resistance to black advances clearly understood by white Southern voters.
http://www.time.com/...
And then last year Paul Krugman addressed the constant reinvention of Reagan's legacy and his tactics to win the south in 1980.
Innocent mistakes
So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that "I believe in states’ rights," he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.
snip
But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.
Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been "humiliating to the South," he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.
In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...
WALTER FIELDS: No tears for Reagan
Ronald Reagan, with the precision of a maniacal surgeon, began to dissect two decades of civil rights gains and set the stage for the rise of a reactionary, and patently racist, politics that still fills the nation’s air with a noticeable stench. While Nixon may have given birth to the "southern strategy", appealing to white anxiety through thinly veiled racist messaging, Reagan perfected the art.
http://www.blackamericatoday.com/...
I think many of you miss the point. Yes, Obama does go on to Praise JFK for his change, but JFK didn't get to where he was by using fear and racism as a means to get there, Reagan did. Ronald Reagan used bad economic times to take advantage of a scared populace and he didn't compromise with Demorcrats and he most certainly didn't reach across the isle.
Obama wants to make change by working with Republicans, by pandering and reaching accross the isle and it's not going to work, I just don't believe it will, but Obama fails to mention that this is how Reagan got change through. Reagan lied, he was intellectually dishonest and he scared the shit out of a lot of Americans. Reagan hated the Government and was not only the beginning of the end for the middle class, but for the great things that FDR did during his presidency.
You may not agree, but in any context I think he's turning his back on many facts in order to pander to the right.