| The debate swirling around the blogosphere today over Obama's comments about Reagan is tiresome and predictable. Happily, there are any number of solid responses that allow me to sit this one out: Matt Yglesias argues that it's pretty obvious that Obama admires Reagan's ability to deliver sweeping change, and that actually that's the kind of claim that we should expect our candidates to be making. Ezra Klein makes a similar point about how Obama admires Reagan for having managed to shift the center of American politics. But then he goes on to make a more compelling and original point about the value of this revising of the meaning of the Reagan legacy can be effective in politics: He's reconstructing it as accountability in government rather than smallness of government, clarity of purpose rather than conservatism of purpose, dynamism and entrepreneurship rather than backlash and upward redistribution. So what's going on here is twofold. First, Obama is suggesting he has a fairly grandly ideological view of the president's role, and that it includes harnessing the ideological forces of the moment to push the country in a new direction. Second, he's sanitizing and subtly reworking Reagan's legacy, and more than Reagan's legacy, the lessons of the 80s, so they fit with a liberal worldview, rather than undermine it. Oftentimes, I think Obama's unifying rhetoric is a little naive and soft, but this actually seems like a fairly loud dog whistle mixed with a fairly smart attempt to revise history. Fonsia makes perhaps the most eloquent case, in her first ever DailyKos diary: "Obama Comes to Bury Reagan, Not to Praise Him." |
