After the surprise showing by Sen. Barack Obama in the fundraising stakes, Sean Higgins is ready to call him the “black Ronald Reagan.” That’s because:
Of all the candidates running, only Obama truly exemplifies one of Reagan’s most popular characteristics: his sunny optimism.
But after plowing through Obama’s first major foreign policy speech, Dean Barnett feels that he
has a strange gift for using several pretty-sounding paragraphs to say virtually nothing.
Actually, there is a better model for Barack Obama. He is not like Ronald Reagan. Not at all. He is the latest model of third way politicians Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. They both came to office brimming with optimism. Everyone loved them. The media went into a swoon.
But what did they do? Nothing.
And the reason is simple. There was nothing they could do without stepping on the oxygen supply of the left-of-center electorate which lives in the demi-mode of government employment, government pension, or government subsidy.
And that, of course, was out of the question. You do not run for office in order to suffocate your supporters.
You can be sunny and optimistic all you want. But politics is about dealing, in the end, with the cold hard world.
That was the difference with Ronald Reagan. His sunny optimism was a means to an end. He had spent years thinking and reading and writing before he came to the presidency. (Of course, nobody knew it at the time. Everyone, even conservatives, thought he was a bit of a lightweight.)
And Ronald Reagan led a party that was ready for change.
He won the cold war, stopped inflation, and restarted the US economy. That, as the saying goes, is some kind of a legacy.
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