Yup.

I don't know how many times I've tried to explain to Obama supporters that he is both too much like Reagan for my comfort level, yet not enough like Reagan to accomplish the political realignment Democrats are seeking. They give me this blank stare. He's like Reagan? What are you talking about?

Well, he's trying to build an electoral coalition based on hope and optimism, telling people to dream big, invest their hopes in his campaign, and fill in the blanks about what they think he will do.

Yet he is not making any argument against conservatism or the Republican Party, so he is not giving his adoring crowds any reason to identify as Democrats or progressives. Instead, he is building the non-ideological Barack Obama movement.

Roe v. Wade was a "government excess?"

*I'll repeat what I wrote in an earlier diary**:

Obama specifically sites the TIMES which set in motion the presidencies of Reagan and JFK. Of course, the JFK part is conspicuously missing from this diary.

Anyone who wants to watch the full interview, check it out here. It's a good interview and this is why I like Barack.  

http://news.rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl e?AID=/20080115/VIDEO/80115026&oaso= news.rgj.com/breakingnews

Reagan was so partisan that when he was shot, he famously told the doctor that he hoped he was a Republican.

Reagan did not talk and talk and talk about unifying the country.  He simply did it.  He did it by making arguments that, regrettably, enough people bought into.  They were arguments not only for conservative values, but for the Republican Party as the instrument to implement those values.

Obama might be a liberal through and through but he does no persuading.  He talks about bringing the country together to solve problems, period.  Maybe once a month he'll make a case for the Democratic Party.  The notion of a realignment is premised on the notion that all these people will show up to vote for him and they'll just happen to vote for Democrats for every other office cause they're all in the same row, I guess.

What's frustrating is that so few of Obama's supporters seem to even understand this critique.  I guess that's why we keep having to make it.

Isn't it sad that Barack Obama supporters have fallen to the point where they're defending Ronald Reagan in order to decrease their cognitive dissonance?

- "In short, OBAMA still does not get it."

And yet you still support him. Unbelieveable.

Yep I'm just stuck in the'60's and not post partisan enough - but we do not need another candidate trying to be another Ronald Reagan - there are enough of them running for the Republican nomination.   I am just too cynical not to think he feels if he compliments Reagan and slaps Bill Clinton, those independents will just LOVE it.

Maybe in Obama's mind, Reagan announcing his candidacy with a speech on "states rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi was healing the wounds of racial divides.

I am just speechless that Obama and his minions could attack LBJ's contributions to civil rights and then turn around and sing the praises of Ronald Fucking Reagan.

Election night in 1980 was the saddest, most depressing night of politics in my life and I'm sure that many of us still have painful memories of watching those election returns when Reagan bounced a sitting Democratic president out of office. Of course, Obama wouldn't know anything about that. Or how pissed off it makes me feel to hear a Democrat praising Reagan.

Obama's well known diary, Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party, promoted by some guy named Armando*, goes with this hand in glove.

Obama, to his core, believes that the historical tide is right for him to lead a public out powering to overcome divisions.

But Reagan? He was the triumph of movement conservatism, of partisan ideology.

You can barely keep these opposing concepts in your head without exploding. I wonder how Obama overlooks this? It's not like he wasn't on the receiving end of the repetitive pounding of the welfare queen smear and similar attacks.

*BTD and many others were very prescient in that comment thread.

Reagan who went to Philidelphia, Mississippi to give a speech on "state rights" complete with all the winks and nods and code speak you expect from a bigot wanna be President pandering to bigots.   Maybe Obama should talk up "states rights" like his hero Ronni Ray-gun.

Maybe Obama will borrow Ronnie's "welfare queen" bit.

I wonder how smart Obama really is.  Does he even know this stuff about Reagan?   Was he paying attention back then?

Here is what Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake had to say about this repugnant Reagan worship:

No, Ronald Reagan didn't appeal to people's optimism, he appealed to their petty, small minded bigotry and selfishness. Jimmy Carter told people to tighten their energy belts and act for the good of the country; Ronald Reagan told them they could guzzle gas with impunity and do whatever the hell they wanted. He kicked off his 1980 campaign talking about "state's rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi -- the site of the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964's Freedom Summer. He thus put up a welcome sign for "Reagan Democrats," peeling off white voters who were unhappy with the multi-ethnic coalition within the Democratic Party.

One of his first acts was to fire 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 -- one of the most devastating union busting moves of the past century. And his vision of deregulation didn't free the country up for entrepreneurship, it opened it up for the wholesale thievery of the savings & loan crisis. He popularized the notion that all government is bad government and in eight short years put in place the architecture for decades of GOP graft and corruption.  

http://firedoglake.com/2008/01/16/ronald -reagans-slipping-halo/

who will do the things Obama imagines himself doing, becoming the "transformational" President of the new century.  But that person will be able to pull people to the democratic party by making people believe in the need for our party values to prevail in order to help America out of it's present problems.  That person will not embrace post partisanship as the ideal in itself.  Obama doesn't get it at all.  He should have a conversation with Howard Dean who does get it.  The 50 state strategy is part of the transformation we are seeking.  Dean is practical in his approach.  Obama is the opposite of practical.

There will be a president like the one Obama describes, but it won't be him because those people don't set out deciding they are going to be the next great transformational leader.  It happens, it is not engineered.  It only happens when the person is so confident in their beliefs about what is good for America that they bring people to their point of view.  They do NOT try to be all things to all parties.

I think you are the confused one.

Indeed, what Obama is to his minions is anathema to those of us who have lived and breathed Democratic Party ideals all of our lives.

I believe that what Obama supporters have done is to attempt to deconstruct the Democratic Party.

The MSM knew going into 2008 that it would likely be a Democratic year.  These past seven years have been probably the most inept of any White House administration since the dawn of the American Republic.

And it followed the Clinton years, with an indisputably long reign of peace and prosperity.

What Obama argued in his THE AUDACITY OF HOPE was that the Clinton White House and the Bush II White House were equally to blame.  That the ideals of the Baby Boomers had gone astray.

Democratic and Republican ideals were antiquated; he had found a sort of Messianic mission to unite--to castigate Clintons and Bushes equally.

Thus he was immediately endeared to the MSM and much of the blogosphere, who both ferociously fought the Clintons, although for entirely different reasons.

But therein was the ridiculous falsehood on which he based his candidacy.

Bill Clinton failed his country only by way of his personal error.  But Bill Clinton's administration was one of the most extraordinarily successful in all of American history.  

His administration achieved what most other administrations could only dream about: there was a long, concerted, world peace, and at home a fiscal solvency, and ultimately a budget surplus.

Whereas before the United States had been teetering on the bring of imploding deficits.  

And seven years after the Clintons, the United States finds itself in utter shambles.

Thus, Bill Clinton CANNOT be compared with George Walker Bush.

And the Bushes had a dynasty.  The Clintons do not as yet.

And whereas most Americans now acknowledge GWB to be one of, if not THE worst, of United States Presidents, what those "indies," Republicans, and some Democrats who cast their ballots for GWB CANNOT bring themselves to admit to is that they were wrong.  

The Clinton years were indeed far better, and Al Gore, as an extension of those years, would have been also a far better president than GWB.

Seizing upon that inability to admit to their fault by some half of the electorate, Obama's minions, in both the MSM and elsewhere, knew that he would appeal to that "third way."

But of course, whereas the "indies" and "leaners" could be had in nontraditional caucuses and primaries, the traditional ones whose base still adored the Clintons would need to be excoriated.

Thus the "slash-and-burn" approach, which began with those well-paid but thoroughly unrepresentative hordes descending upon Iowa, attempting to lay seige to the Democratic Party, and recently to the race-baiting in South Carolina.

Because Obama, in the end, could only win the Democratic Party nomination by destroying its very core.  

Currently that meant the Clintonites, but in previous manifestations that also meant the lovers of FDR.

Thus, Obama is even more lethal than the self-proclaimed "Roosevelt in Reserve" that was Ronald Reagan--the former second-rate movie star political creation of the MSM--for Obama is attempting to do what Reagan could not: kill the very fabric of the Democratic Party.

To this end the media and its many players launched onto his bandwagon--the billionaire Oprah Winfrey, in her dotering, silly stage, who believes herself now a king-maker; the various anti-Clinton talking heads, and, after Iowa, the pollsters themselves, from bizarre John Zogby (who had Senator Clinton down by 18 on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, and foolishly believes that Clinton and Obama are "virtually tied" now) to the Republican Scott Rasmussen.

The spin reached absurd proportions last night when the 39% who cast ballots for the "uncommited" slate was somehow meant to mean a defeat for Senator Clinton.  

This, in a state in which even exit polling showed her beating handily either Obama or Edwards had their actial names appeared on the ballot.  

And in a state in which Clinton's real margin of victory, with real votes cast, far superseded Mitt Romney's on the Republican side.

Indeed, this 56% of the bedrock Democratic state said yes to Senator Clinton and no to her rivals.  A landslide, by anybody's standards.

But, alas, like the results in New Hampshire, it did not fit into the MSM anti-Clinton narrative.

So the Obama folk are realistically left with only Nevada's strong-arming caucus and a heavily African-American vote in South Carolina to bolster this wholly unprepared neophyte going into Florida and the states beyond.  

Wherein the pollsters and pundits (not the fantasies of Zogby and Rasmussen) know full well Senator Clinton has quite a commanding lead.  

Indeed, a clear majority of half of the Democratic Party in California has already voted for her.  And the Obama folk know this fact only too well.

If the MSM were to succeed with Obama, it would mean, in effect, the death of FDR's Democratic Party.  That is why Obama draws those "indie" crowds, those masses of young, who have no sense of history, much less rhyme or reason, as to how they are being badly exploited.

More tragically, however, with the nation in shambles, there can no longer be an inept Chief Executive.  

Nor can there be a "feel-good, anti-Washington" type.  Now, indeed, competence and experience mean everything.

Which is why, if the Democratic Party, and more importantly still, the nation is to survive, then Obama must lose.
 

I guess a charitable way to view what he is saying is that we will campaign like Reagan on being mr. 'sunshine' in america, and that he will govern like  a Democrat?

The comments on this diary are pretty funny to me. You don't have to be a conservative to acknowledge in retrospect that Ronald Reagan had a profound effect on politics in America, an effect that the progressive left is still trying to recover from. He knocked out a sitting President in a landslide victory and ushered in almost three decades of nearly continuous conservative rule in Washington. 28 years later the entire Republican debate can best be described as "who is most like Ronald Reagan?"

One need only consider the Newt Gingrich takeover of Congress and the last seven years of Bush to conclude that Bill Clinton had no such effect on things. Either on purpose through triangulation, or by accident, however well he might have managed things (and he did manage things quite well IMHO), ideologically, he more or less contributed to the rightward drift of things.

Now Big Tent Democrat does have a valid point in that Reagan's campaign and rhetoric were more ideologically right wing than Obama's has been left wing. Me thinks that has less to do with Obama's personal beliefs than it does with a cold-eyed look at where the American people are right now and what kind of rhetoric they're ready to get behind.

The validity of his assessment is, I think, borne out by the <2% of the vote netted by Dennis Kucinich in Iowa and NH, as well as the fact that even Edwards' second place finish in Iowa was not powered by the liberal wing of the Party (they broke heavily for Obama), but by self-described conservative caucus goers who went more for Edwards.

Maybe it's true that if Obama, and not Edwards or Kucinich, were to take a more progressive and partisan rhetorical approach, that he'd be equally  or more successful at getting votes, and in the process convince the American people that the Democrats are their true saviors and that the liberals and progressives have been right all along. But based on the response to Kucinich and Edwards, and Howard Dean in '04, for that matter, I don't see any particular evidence to support that.

What I do see, however, is that ultimately, however popular Reagan might have been, the bottom line in the progressive/conservative debate is that progressives want government to work, and conservatives don't. So, the call to unite and bringing people together to get things done, while not progressive on its face, is progressive in a more profound way because it's a call to Americans to demand that their government take action to solve problems. That in and of itself puts the conservative movement on the defensive because, for them, the image of government as ineffectual and politicians as endlessly bickering without getting anything done plays into their essential argument about the nature of government. And IMHO, while the American people are not themselves ideologically "progressive" at this point in history, they do see the need for a government that actually addresses the fundamental challenges facing our government. This is how the progressive agenda is ultimately sold to the American people, because there is no other realistic way to actually address these issues other than to take progressive action.

Is it fair now for us to seriously ask ourselves if it's appropriate for this guy to run for the Democratic nomination? He's already indicated that he sees the job he's running for as a pontificative position, not a particularly work-oriented position.

But I think what he said here has been taken out of context.  He wasn't saying that Reagan's transformation was necessarily for the better.  He was talking about the impact of Reagan and the movement he made.  I think what he's hinting at is a paradigm shift back in another direction.

Obama is among the top 10 most liberal senators and has criticized Reagan numerous times.  The notion that he agrees with Reagan is so silly ....