Obama Is Nothing Like Reagan

From the 'well, duh' files

Last week, Mark Leibovich at The Atlantic asked, “Where Is Barack Obama?” suggesting that “the ‘audacity of hope’ presidency has given way to the fierce lethargy of semi-retirement.”

He’s not the only one who’s demanded that Obama take a more prominent role in resisting the current American horror show. However, New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom dismissed this as “total madness.”

“Begging Obama to save us is undignified,” she writes. “It reeks of weakness, and it begets more weakness.”

I don’t think anyone expects Obama to “save us,” like he’s Clark Kent on Smallville. They just think that if we’re receiving fundraising emails about how America is falling into fascism, then Democrats should take an all-hands-on-deck approach.

Predictably with the party these days, this soon became a racial debate: How dare white liberals demand anything more from Barack Obama and Kamala Harris? They’re not your “magic Negros” and besides, Americans just rejected Harris and deserve what they get. First place, Americans are free to ask that even their former elected officials join them on the front lines, especially as our cities are invaded. Most of us don’t get to attend the $10,000-a-plate fundraisers with George Clooney. Also, “you didn’t choose me to lead you so you deserve to die” is literally what Lex Luthor says in the latest Superman trailer. (Watch below)

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Democrats Should Fight Both Trump And The Establishment That Empowers Him

American democracy is not your friend’s wedding, where if you’re not picked as maid of honor, you can just show up and peevishly comment on how poorly planned everything is. The stakes are little bit higher.

I don’t know if Democrats truly understand that the “screw y’all, you didn’t listen to me, so I’m gonna enjoy my fancy life” posture makes it look as if they had no skin in the game. Even in an action movie, when our hero has lost his badge, his partner got murdered, and everyone’s turned against him, he’s brooding in his dark studio apartment, guzzling whisky straight from the bottle. He’s not sulking at his vacation home on Cape Cod.

Cottom goes on to argue that if voters expect more of Obama in this moment, they are imagining an idealized version who never truly existed.

I don’t know which Obama some of my peers remember, but the ex-president was fairly consistent. He governed as a moderate who, at one time, would have been recognizable as a Reaganite. Only in the rightward drift of today’s Overton window does Obama’s presidency seem radically leftist. As the Democratic Party’s leader, he chastised those on the left, threw in the occasional respectability politics about young Black men and sagging pants and gave us an imperfect but critical stop on the road to universal health care. He was a decent president of historical import, but he was still very much a product of his times.

Cottom is shifting the Overton window when she suggests that at any point in time Obama would’ve been considered a “Reaganite.” Reagan was radically far right (even for the time). She minimizes the Affordable Care Act as an “imperfect but critical stop on the road to universal health care,” but it was still objectively progressive legislation that Republicans uniformly derided as an expansive entitlement program.

How The Myth Of Reagan Became The Cult Of Trump

Reagan condemned Medicare in his 1961 hit record, Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine. He argued that Medicare would lead to the destruction of “every area of freedom as we have known it in this country.” During the early 1980s, the Reagan administration slashed Medicaid expenditures by more than 18 percent. The Affordable Care Act expanded Medicare eligibility. So, that’s different.

I think some liberals truly want to believe that Republicans conspired against a young moderate Reaganite Obama solely because he was Black. Obama’s race was certainly weaponized against him but Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan had clear ideological reasons to oppose him. Obama was a mainstream liberal whose administration actively expanded rights for women, minorities, and LGBTQ Americans, rather than steadily rolling them back. Obama’s critics can argue that he was too moderate for a Democrat — although no Democrat elected president while TV existed was significantly more liberal than Obama — but it’s more than a little absurd to compare him to Reagan, who was buddies with Jesse Helms and gave a speech about “states’ rights” in Neshoba County, Mississippi.

Obama admittedly spent way too much time complimenting Reagan in ways that no Republican would ever do about any Democratic president, no matter how popular. He praised him as a change agent and a transformative figure. (Of course, the “change” and “transformation” Reagan produced were resoundingly awful.) However, there’s a difference between appreciating a political opponent’s unique skills and embracing their political ideology.

Reagan and Obama were both effective communicators, but their styles were quite different. Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention brimmed with optimism, while Reagan’s star turn in 1964 — the Time for Choosing speech — was a defiant, almost fire-and-brimstone sermon against modern liberalism. Reagan’s 1964 speech had more in common with Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric than even Democrats are willing to admit. (Watch below.)

That’s why it consistently failed whenever Obama tried to convince Republicans to act normal by invoking Ronald Reagan. The Republican Party’s ever rightward creep is true to Reagan’s legacy.

During a 2012 Univision interview, Obama did say, “The truth of the matter is that my policies are so mainstream that if I had set the same policies that I had back in the 1980s, I would be considered a moderate Republican.” He was trying to downplay the “radical socialist” image. However, Reagan’s far-right revolution mostly eliminated the party’s moderate wing, and the few old-time Rockefeller Republicans were able to keep Reagan from going too far — like reducing Medicaid to a block grant for the states and eliminating any federal right to health care for the poor.

In this same interview, Obama describes positions that are more idealized Aaron Sorkin Republican than any actual creature in nature.

“I mean, what I believe in is a tax system that is fair,” Obama said. “I don’t think government can solve every problem. I think that we should make sure that we’re helping young people go to school. We should make sure that our government is building good roads and bridges and hospitals and airports so that we have a good infrastructure. I do believe that it makes sense that everyone in America, as rich as this country is, shouldn’t go bankrupt because someone gets sick.”

That’s FDR New Deal liberalism. That’s LBJ’s Great Society. It is not Reaganism, which widened the gap between rich and poor Americans.

Political Nihilism Never Helps Anyone But The Bad Guys

Cottom also writes in the Times:

I get the sense that those with O.D.S. [Obama Derangement Syndrome] remember his speeches more than they remember how cautiously he governed. But I think what people are really remembering is a country where an Obama speech mattered.

Hillary Clinton argued during the 2008 primary that there was little more to Obama than just eloquent speeches. Republicans never let go of that narrative, even once he was president. However, Obama did achieve a great deal while in office. His presidency wasn’t perfect but no presidency and no president is (many on the left seemingly struggle with this concept). The Affordable Care Act is a major success, saving millions of lives and forcing Republicans to now publicly support coverage for pre-existing conditions. It’s also important to remember that the ACA doesn’t have a public option because of Joe Lieberman. That wasn’t Obama’s desired outcome.

I’d argue that Obama speeches matter just as much today as they did in 2008, perhaps even more so. We need to still believe in hope and change. The second Trump presidency has perhaps increased the market for political nihilism, but we shouldn’t sell ourselves short, nor should we only expect from our leaders passive observance of a nightmare.