...and hopefully among the last you read. Those who have picked apart and parsed Obama's recent comments have not only excluded the necessary context of the full statement but also the context of Obama's fundamental character. They have neglected his statements from the past in word and writing, when it is fairly simple to pick up a copy of The Audacity of Hope and observe how little Obama sympathizes with Reagan policy. The notion that Barack Obama has spoken out in "praise" of Ronald Reagan is absurd on its face, given these two men who take the fundamental question "what to do with government that does not work for the people," and receiving two antithetical answers.
- Take it apart.
- Make it work.
Interwoven with his rhetoric, Obama has always referred to the shortcomings of government as an opportunity to build up those neglected segments of society. That is the central theme of his candidacy... to build a popular, progressive majority towards issues which speak to the poor and the middle class.
One may detect a ready example back in his 2004 convention keynote address:
And fellow Americans, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, I say to you tonight: We have more work to do -- more work to do for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico, and now are having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay seven bucks an hour; more to do for the father that I met who was losing his job and choking back the tears, wondering how he would pay 4500 dollars a month for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits that he counted on; more to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her, who has the grades, has the drive, has the will, but doesn’t have the money to go to college.
Now, don’t get me wrong. The people I meet -- in small towns and big cities, in diners and office parks -- they don’t expect government to solve all their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead, and they want to. Go into the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don’t want their tax money wasted, by a welfare agency or by the Pentagon. Go in -- Go into any inner city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach our kids to learn; they know that parents have to teach, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white. They know those things.
People don’t expect -- People don't expect government to solve all their problems. But they sense, deep in their bones, that with just a slight change in priorities, we can make sure that every child in America has a decent shot at life, and that the doors of opportunity remain open to all.
They know we can do better. And they want that choice.
When someone has confidence in government as an important component of the solution to societal problems, that person has little in keeping with the Republican movements of the 80s and 90s, prior to their gross indulgence in George W. Bush and election and 9/11-derived opportunity to corrupt the nation at whim. Obama's recognition of this essential incompatibility is evident through any honest treatment of his writings:
on foreign policy...
Looming perhaps largest of all was Ronald Reagan, whose clarity about communism seemed matched by his blindness regarding other sources of misery in the world. I personally came of age during the Reagan presidency -- I was studying international affairs at Columbia, and later working as a community organizer in Chicago -- and like many Democratsin those days I bemoaned the effect of Reagan's policies toward the Third World: his administration's support for the apartheid regime of South Africa, the funding of El Salvador's death squads, the invasion of tiny, hapless Grenada. The more I studied nuclear arms policy, the more I found Star Wars to be ill conceived; the chasm between Reagan's soaring rhetoric and the tawdry Iran-Contra deal left me speechless.
But at times, in arguments with some of my friends on the left, I would find myself in the curious position of defending aspects of Reagan's worldview. I didn't understand why, for example, progressives should be less concerned about oppression behind the Iron Curtain than they were about brutality in Chile...
...Obama goes on to state that, while disagreeing with the conduct of Reagan's military buildup in the context of the bipolar world, set against the Soviet Union, he did not "quarrel" with the spirit of that opposition, ending with...
when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I had to give the old man his due, even if I never gave him my vote.
Audacity of Hope, pgs 288-289.
Some here may think that small acknowledgment of the success in the U.S.-Soviet rivalry to be itself quite heretical... but then it would be absurd to ignore the scathing tone of the first paragraph cited above concerning the substance of Reagan's foreign policy actions and the conduct of that administration. Obama's other comments (excluding that first paragraph) on Reagan, both here and in the recent press, do not deal with a value judgment of Reagan's policies, but more an intellectual discussion of the conduct of policy and politics. One would think this community would be more sympathetic to such frank discussion of HOW Reagan and the Republican Party managed to accomplish what they did, which is, to this day, motivate a substantial portion of the American public to act against its own self-interest.
In his rhetoric, Reagan tended to exaggerate the degree to which the welfare state had grown over the previous twenty-five years. At its peak, the federal budget as a total share of the U.S. economy remained far below the comparable figures in Europe, even when you factored in the enormous U.S. defense budget.
Obama goes on to point out that Reagan's message had a grain of truth in the incapacity of some government programs and policymakers to function as intended. In light of what Reagan did with this message, it becomes a case of exploitation or that truth than "insight"- a word Obama uses to describe it.
Forced to compromise with a Democrat-controlled Congress, Reagan would never achieve many of his most ambitious plans for reducing government. But he fundamentally changed the terms of the political debate. The middle-class tax revolt became a permanent fixture in national politics and placed a ceiling on how much government could expand. For many Republicans, noninterference with the marketplace became an article of faith.
Of course, many voters continued to look to the government during economic downturns, and Bill Clinton's call for more aggressive government action on the economy helped lift him to the White House.
Audacity of Hope, pgs 156-157.
As I mentioned before, this discussion of Reagan in the context of popular and political trends is an intellectual exercise. Someone who supports environmental regulation on the scale of a 100% carbon auction system, a Democrat with a strong organized labor record at the national and state record, someone looking to make health care available and affordable for anyone who desires it bears no fathomable relationship to the essentials of Reagan administration policy. Obama's notion of how this history changed the political narrative of the past few decades is fundamentally accurate... and he cites the creation of that narrative in order to change it, not to embrace it.