By The Beachwood Barack’s Books Affairs Desk
“The book, a giant best-seller, is called The Audacity of Hope,” Bob Somerby writes at The Daily Howler. “In Obama’s very first chapter (“Republicans and Democrats”), he sketches his feelings about Ronald Reagan – and about Bill Clinton.
“Is something wrong with Obama-on-Reagan? In The Audacity of Hope (chapter 1), the gentleman sketches his thoughts on the subject. Presumably, this work was carefully composed, unlike last week’s offhand comments. For our money, his published account of the 1960s and the 1990s is a bit odd from the Dem perspective; on the other hand, much of what he says about Reagan in this same chapter is not. But if you want to see what Obama said about Reagan – and about Bill Clinton – when he had time to say it carefully, we’ll suggest that you look at his book.”
So that’s just what we’ll do. Here are the relevant excerpts by Obama on Reagan – and Bill Clinton – from The Audacity of Hope.
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[A]s disturbed as I might have been by Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, as unconvinced as I might have been by his John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by anecdote, and his gratuitous assaults on the poor, I understood his appeal.
It was the same appeal that the military bases back in Hawaii had always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper salutes. It was related to the pleasure I still get from watched a well-played basketball game, or my wife gets from watching reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Reagan spoke to America’s longing for order, our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism, and faith.
That Reagan’s message found such a receptive audience spoke not only to his skills as a communicator; it also spoke to the failure of liberal government, during a period of economic stagnation, to give middle-class voters any sense that it was fighting for them. For the fact was that government at every level had become too cavalier about spending taxpayer money. Too often, bureaucracies were oblivious to the cost of their mandates. A lot of liberal rhetoric did seem to value rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities. Reagan may have exaggerated the sins of the welfare state, and certainly liberals were right to complain that his domestic policies titled heavily toward economic elites, with corporate raiders making tidy profits throughout the eighties while unions were busted and income for the average working stiff flatlined.
Nevertheless, by promising to side with those who worked hard, obeyed the law, cared for their families, and loved their country, Reagan offered Americans a sense of a common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster. And the more the critics carped, the more those critics played into the role he’d written for them – a band of out-of-touch, tax-and-spend, blame-America-first, politically correct elites.
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Whatever the explanation, after Reagan the lines between Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, would be drawn in more sharply ideological terms.
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It was Bill Clinton’s singular contribution that he tried to transcend this ideological deadlock, recognizing not only that what had come to be meant by the labels of “conservative” and “liberal” played to Republican advantage, but that the categories were inadequate to address the problems we faced.
At times during his first campaign, his gestures toward disaffected Reagan Democrats could seem clumsy and transparent (what ever happened to Sister Souljah?) or frighteningly coldhearted (allowing the execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate to go forward on the eve of an important primary). In the first two years of his prsidency, he would be forced to abandon some core elements of his platform – universal health care, aggressive investment in education and training – that might have more decisively reversed the long-term trends that were undermining the position of working families in the new economy.
Still, he instructively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people. He saw that government spending and regulation could, if properly designed, serve as vital ingredients and not inhibitors to economic growth, and how markets and fiscal discipline could help promote social justice. He recognized that not only societal responsibility but personal responsibility was needed to combat poverty. In his platform – if not always in his day-to-day politics – Clinton’s Third Way went beyond splitting the difference. It tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological attitude of the majority of Americans.
Indeed, by the end of his presidency, Clinton’s policies – recognizably progressive if modest in their goals – enjoyed broad public support. Politically, he had wrung out of the Democratic Party some of the excesses that had kept it from winning elections. That he failed, despite a booming economy, to translate popular policies into anything resembling a governing coalition said something about the demographic difficulties Democrats were facing (in particular, the shift in population growth to an increasingly solid Republican South) and the structural advantage the Republicans enjoyed in the Senate, where the votes of two Republican senators from Wyoming, population 493,782, equaled the votes of two Democratic senators from California, population 33,871,648.
But that failure also testified to the skill with which Gingrich, Rove, Norquist, and the like were able to consolidate and institutionalize the conservative movement. They tapped the unlimited resources of corporate sponsors and wealthy donors to create a network of think tanks and media outlets. They brought state-of-the-art technology to the task of mobilizing their base, and centralized power in the House of Representatives in order to enhance party discipline.
And they understood the threat Clinton posed to their vision of a long-term conservative majority, which helps explain the vehemence with which they went after him.
It also explains why they invested so much time attacking Clinton’s morality, for if Clinton’s policies were hardly radical, his biography (the draft letter saga, the marijuana puffing, the Ivy League intellectualism, the professional wife who didn’t bake cookies, and most of all the sex) proved perfect grist for the conservative base.
With enough repetition, a looseness with the facts, and the ultimately undeniable evidence of the President’s own personal lapses, Clinton could be made to embody the very traits of sixties liberalism that helped spur the conservative movement in the first place.
Clinton may have fought that movement to a draw, but the movement would come out stronger for it – and in George W. Bush’s first term, that movement would take over the United States government.
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Since the early nineties, when these [economic] trends first began to appear, one wing of the Democratic Party – led by Bill Clinton – has embraced the new economy, promoting free trade, fiscal discipline, and reforms in education and training that will help workers to compete for the high-value, high-wage jobs of the future.
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For the most part, though, the Republican economic agenda under President Bush has been devoted to tax cuts, reduced regulation, the privatization of government services – and more tax cuts. Administration officials call this the Ownership Society, but most of its central tenets have been staples of laissez-faire economics since at least the 1930s.
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Still, the conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan’s central insight – that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the economic pie – contained a good deal of truth.
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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.
After the politically disastrous defeat of his health-care plan and the election of a Republican Congress in 1994, Clinton had to trim his ambitions but was able to put a progressive slant on some of Reagan’s goals. Declaring the era of big government over, Clinton signed welfare reform into law, pushed tax cuts for the middle class and working poor, and worked to reduce bureaucracy and red tape.
And it was Clinton who would accomplish what Reagan never did, putting the nation’s fiscal house in order even while lessening poverty and making modest new investments in education and job training. By the time Clinton left office, it appeared as if some equilibrium had been achieved – a smaller government, but one that retained the social safety net FDR had first put in place.
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As it was, the end of the Cold War made Reagan’s formula seem ill suited to a new world.
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By the time Bill Clinton came into office, conventional wisdom suggested that America’s post-Cold War foreign policy would be more a matter of trade than tanks, protecting American copyrights rather than American lives.
Clinton himself understood that globalization involved not only new economic challenges but also new security challenges. In addition to promoting free trade and bolstering the international financial system, his administration would work to end long-festering conflicts in the Balkans and Northern Ireland and advance democratization in Eastern Europe, Latin American, Africa, and the former Soviet Union.
But in the eyes of the public, at least, foreign policy in the nineties lacked any overarching theme or grand imperatives. U.S. military action in particular seemed entirely a matter of choice, not necessity – the product of our desire to slap down rogue states, perhaps; or a function of humanitarian calculations regarding moral obligations we owed to Somalis, Haitians, Bosnians, or other unlucky souls.
Then came September 11 – and Americans felt their world turned upside down.
Posted on January 23, 2008