Obama, Clinton and the Reagan Flap: The Vision Thing Again
With the great Obama "praises" Reagan flap continuing apace, it is fortunate that the lead paragraph of Eric Jong's Friday rant (Barack Hearts Ronnie: An Old New Song) includes a link to video of what Barack actually said (Obama: Reagan Changed Direction of Country in Way Bill Clinton Didn't). The disparity between what Obama said and what Jong heard is striking. Jong and Paul Krugman (Debunking the Reagan Myth) and Hale "Bonddad" Stewart (Ronald Reagan: Fiscal Disaster) remind us of what a sorry president Reagan was and of all the damage his administration did. But what exactly do these facts have to do with what Obama said? Obama reminds us that Reagan brought about significant change--changes like the one's Jong laments: lives ruined, an economy bankrupt, wealth redistributed toward greater concentration. If Jong or Krugman or Stewart heard in these remarks an implication that Obama finds these changes, changes for the better, their ears maybe attuned to some frequencies inaudible to mine. Maybe I'm just not picking up the Hillary Clinton talking points channel. But I'm not going to speculate about why they think--or want their readers to think--Obama's pointing out that Reagan changed the country makes him a fan of Reagan's policies.
I'm much more interested in the substantive question Obama poses: How did Reagan, whom Jong credits with being less intelligent than his horse, manage to do so much damage that lives after him? It seems to me that there were two aspects to Reagan's success at doing ill (and by Reagan's, I mean the success of the directors and scriptwriters of Reaganism, not simply of the aged actor they hired to read the lines and represent the brand). Reaganism succeeded in changing the way people talked about politics and in harnessing those linguistic changes to concrete and far-reaching (albeit profoundly damaging) public policy. Reagan was not out to fine tune the political system. Rather than setting achieving and holding office as an all encompassing goal, the Reagan administration was actually preoccupied with governing--or, I should say, misgoverning.
Take, for example, supply-side economics, which, boy-wonder budget director, David Stockman, early on confessed (or perhaps, boasted), was a sham. From the point of view of political discourse, supply-side economics represented systematically enhancing the position of the wealthy as an economic theory, complete with the aptly named "Laffer Curve," to perfect its transformation from self-interested policy to disinterested (pseudo) science. Like the myth of the "free market" itself, supply-side economic "theory," portrays the interest of one group as the interest of all. It also promises a little counter-intuitive something extra by claiming that lower taxation leads to higher government revenues, or, as Ronnie was wont to put it: "a rising tide raises all ships." Notice how efficiently even this bit of rhetorical treacle does its ideological work of supporting an economic "theory" with an illustration from physics. Supply-side economics (or "voodoo" as G. H. W. Bush famously called it) came to naught as cutting taxes led not to increased revenues but to a huge run up of the federal deficit, which Stewart illustrates in graphic detail. The fiscally favored, however, reaped the windfall of tax relief and the lead lining of a federal deficit that "starved the beast" and gave urgency to cutting social programs, which, of course, the Reaganauts wanted to do all along. Possibly Reagan (et. al.) thought the "Laffer Curve" was real--few things are as easy as convincing oneself that what is good for me is could for the world. But whether cynically manipulative or merely deluded (or some combination of each) the discursive arrangements of Reaganism--the way it talked--connected substantive public policies whose outcomes were consistent with the administration's aims to a larger rhetorical framework, a phantasmagoric vision, but a vision nonetheless.
When the results failed to justify the arguments made to support them, Reagan could still say that supply-side economics worked--because it worked for him--the tax codes it justified created pressure to shrink government and attack entitlements. The failure of supply-side economics did not touch this vision of a society administered by and for its elites. Reducing taxes on the wealthy did not produce the promised rise in revenues. But Reagan just said that was because federal spending was out of control, government was too big, the market was not sufficiently unregulated. That revenue did not follow the Laffer Curve played as a stutter, a technical glitch, in a program that was succeeding marvelously in its own terms.
A remarkable number of the stupid and damaging things Reagan did were done for clear reasons relating to a larger frame of desired results. Those results were both transformative (that is, I think what Obama was trying to get) and achievable. The core of Reagan's vision was to dismantle the New Deal by disabling the institutions that supported it. Much of his new Bad Deal was achieved because its various programs of taxation, deregulation and union busting were understood as parts of a greater whole, and the greater whole was comprehensible as a vision. Reagan's future may have looked like the robber barons' past, but it looked like something, it had a discernible shape that made its various programs and policies interpretable or misinterpretable as goal directed behavior. With the support of big money and the media conglomeration whose creation was part of the program, even this Bad Deal had more appeal to many voters in 1980 than the minutia of competing self-interests that Jimmy Carter had been able to present only as a "moral malaise."
Why did sentimental Reaganism survive the disastrous failures of supply-side economics, deregulation and imperial militarism? Partly because it succeeded in creating and entrenching the institutions that support it: the right wing think tanks and media operations funded by its well-heeled beneficiaries, the wealthy whose wealth it concentrated, the disarray of the Labor Movement it targeted, accelerated by the deregulated movement of capital out of domestic manufacture, but also because the opposition came to accept its discourse, its way of envisioning America, as given.
Krugman, while excoriating Obama for posing the question, nails the answer to why sentimental Reaganism persists today when he says: "that the great failure of the Clinton administration -- more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related -- was the fact that it didn't change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan." In the terms I've been developing, this failure constitutes a failure of vision.
This is why I bristle and worry when Hillary Clinton chastises "dreamers' and touts her ability to get done what can be done. This way of thinking makes the achievable the substance of the vision itself. Rather than saying we must find a way to do what we want, it says we must want to do what we can.
Bill Clinton's signal and, I might add, stupendous, achievement was to take the spending issue away from the Republicans by balancing the budget, yet when G. W. Bush took office his first order of business was to burn the surplus and run up deficits that would potentially starve the beast well beyond Reagan's dreams--starve it once and for all to death. How was he able to do this? Supply-side economics. A complete rerun of Reagan's rhetoric: putting money in the hands of the people through massive tax cuts for the most wealthy would stimulate the economy and increase rather than decrease government revenues. The question that Obama usefully raises and Jong's, Stewart's and Krugman's responses obscure is how is it that such a weak sales pitch was able to sell the same bridge twice? The answer, I suspect, lies in the fact that although Reagan's programs have produced deleterious results, no coherent competing vision has captured the imagination. I take Obama's point about Reagan's having been a transformative president to refer to Reagan's having subordinated his policies to a fairly comprehensive idea of what sort of country he wanted--that vision is, from my point of view, and I hope from Obama's, dystopic and illusory, but it is a vision, and the salient point Obama makes about it is that Reagan (whether by luck or skill) seized a moment when the country was prepared to listen.
We have come a good distance since 1988. The economy is bad, the international situation is threatening, we can remember much better times under Bill Clinton, and we've had seven years of a president so spectacularly venal and incompetent as to restrict all thought of the future to a simple yearning for the day when he leaves office. We may be once again at a moment when a transformative vision might be heard. So far, however, our candidates have not provided it. Obama seems to grasp the need for a coherent counter vision, a comprehensive picture of the progressive future, but he has not begun to articulate one. Hillary Clinton's demonstrated progressive proclivities are in most areas as strong or stronger than any he has demonstrated, but for the moment, she has cast her lot with the doctrines of the DLC, which make winning and holding office paramount. We might recall here that the Reagan transformation was the culmination of a movement that began with Barry Goldwater and consistently favored promulgating its misguided vision over merely holding office. The argument that one can achieve nothing without winning is valid. But, after allowing President Bush two terms in office, during which he has been permitted to grievously damage the Constitution and the rule of law, one has to ask whether winning by appropriating the Reagan vision has achieved much and why the strategy of winning produced two consecutive losses against a candidate as manifestly weak as G. W. Bush. The celerity with which G. W. Bush destroyed the gains of the Clinton years ought to give us pause. No one (on my side of things) wants to let the Republicans win, but 2004 should have shown us that one thing worse than compromising conviction to win is compromising conviction to win and losing anyway.
I want to live in an America in which wealth is equitably distributed, organized labor is supported, imperialism is renounced and public works are proudly and frankly undertaken because Americans care about each other. I want to live in an America in which the rule of law is respected and the environment is treated as a trust to be preserved not a possession to be exploited. I want to live in an America that enlists me in a national effort to fix global warming and end petroleum dependence. I want an America that feels and acts connected to the world and not as an exception to it. I want a Democratic nominee who can and will show people a vision of that country and then justify the programs she or he proposes as the means to that good end. I want my morning in America, and Idon't care which candidate gives it to me. It's time for the good guys to stop imitating Ronald Reagan and start replacing him.
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Morning in America went dark on November 22, 1963, and except for a glimmer during the nineties, we've been following sycophants and shills into the darkness ever since.
You are berating Obama for his comments about Reagan, yet that is what he is trying to change, the partisan bickering. The two main things he said are true, that Reagan was an agent for change, and that Republicans have been the party of ideas.
Obama says he wants to end the bickering, but it appears that many Democrats, if you base it on comments here, love bickering. They love to hate. In fact, I would say that is the number one reason Democrats seem to rarely win the White House. Many people are not comfortable aligning themselves with a party built on hate. The only reason Democrats get as many votes as they do is because many people nostalgically remember the Democrat party of old, the one of ideas, and they don't see how it has changed (or don't want to see). I am not an Obama supporter, but I applaud his efforts to try to change the tone in Washington. Bush tried the same thing, but the party of hate refused to change.
Many of you hate Bush, Reagan, and even hated Bush Sr. As for me, I never hated Clinton. I never hated Carter. And I don't hate Hillary. And that is the difference in the parties, and why I could never vote Democrat. When I am faced with a choice between the party of ideas and the party of hate, it is an easy choice.
I really wish I could have a choice - if Obama had good ideas (or any ideas for that matter), I maybe could support him. But at least the guy is trying to change the tone, perhaps he can bring his party with him. So if you're tired of all the hate like I am, you have two choices; change your party, or come join the Republicans. I recommend the latter, it's not only easier, but you also get the peace of mind of no longer advocating taking money from someone just to give to someone else.
The Democrat slogan: If you rob Peter to pay Paul, you'll always get Paul's vote!
Nice post.
It doesn't translate well into soundbites, which is why so many of the comments here are able to take it out of context to distort the meaning.
The phrase "compromising conviction to win and losing anyway" is the DLC mantra... and Hillary supporters seem determined to repeat it.
Hard to believe so many have forgotten it was progressives whose platform was a winner in 2006 taking back Congress, and DLC policies were rejected. Hillary's campaign to distance herself from her own record may yet fool enough dems, but I won't stand idly by while they try to rewrite history.
I hate the whole concept of "trickle down" economics. Anyone can see that it doesn't work because even though a rising tide lifts all boats, it's only the rich boat-owners who can afford to tow them inland when the storm surge hits.
As far as Obama goes, I'm not an Obama or Hillary lover or hater. But I am someone who is adult enough to recognize when he's basically saying that a lack of new ideas on the Democratic side are what allowed the Republicans to foist their bad ideas on the rest of us.
If one says that a lack of good ideas on the part of The Weimer Republic is what enabled Hitler's rise to power in 1933, is that automatically an endorsement of the Nazis? Or maybe England should renounce representative government because Oliver Cromwell was such a bastard.
I'm convinced this country needs a Democrat in the White House, elected with a mandate to lead. That means a majority. In fact, what we really need is a 45-50 state landslide. Something definitive and historical, to put the old ways to rest and get on with the future. You don't get that, or even come close, without Reagan Democrats coming home.
Reagan democrats left their party because he convinced them his ideas would work and because they felt he was a leader, unlike every other president going back to JFK. They also left because, whether you think they were right or not, they simply didn't believe the Democrats had any ideas at all.
Your'e not going to get them back by telling them how evil Ronald Reagan was, how stupid they were to abet that evil by voting for him and how Obama's statement means he worships at the alter of supply-side.
Chart defense spending and Presidential terms.
Carter oversaw drops in defense spending.
Reagan was responsible for huge increases in defense spending.
George H.W. Bush, Sr, oversaw large drops in defense spending, despite the First Gulf War.
Bill Clinton, also oversaw drops in defense spending.
In fact, the Military Industrial Complex was seeing a one-way decline since there were no credible enemies to justify such huge expenses since the Cold War.
Carter, G.H.W. Bush Sr, and Bill Clinton were all reviled by the right wing. At the core of the right wing, it seems that leaving money at the altar of the Military Industrial Complex, is the prime factor.
Both Reagan, and Bush Jr are both large benefactors of heavy political & media investments -- either to idolize "Reagan's Legacy" or to hinder direct public MSM criticism of Bush Jr.
But Carter, GHW Bush Sr, & Bill Clinton have been villified on the personal level, and have very been common objects of MSM caricature, derision.
Thus, the underlying pattern is: Presidents who advocated drops in defense spending have been greater targets of MSM personal character attacks & hostility, than those who increased spending. Billions of dollars have been at stake for the MIC.
Thank God I'm not the only one who is incredulous on this! I saw Obama say that Reagan changed the trajectory of America. Maybe that's what confused everyone! For the record Hillary & Bill, (and Erica Jong), trajectory means direction. Obama said that Reagan changed the direction of America. And didn't he? Change the direction of America? In a horrible, power and privilage for the rich kind of way. But Reagan changed the direction of your country, whether Billary likes it or not. And attacking Obama for making a simple statement of fact makes the Clintons and their mouthpieces look petty and mean-spirited, or stupid and uninformed. And Bill should stop lying about Obama while he's out there canpaigning for Hillary, or someone is bound to point out that Bill is a philandering liar, who lied under oath, to his wife and the whole country, and who's word is worth shit. No wonder the lies slide off his glib tongue with such ease. Obama should drill home the fact that Bill Clinton is a liar, not to be trusted. And Hillary seems to be taking a page right out of his playbook. (when she's not raising the Rovian spectre of terrorists "watching" and "waiting".
Analogous to Obama's unqualified praise for Reagan's inspirational leadership of optimism would be unqualified praise for Hitler for being such an effective leader, who perceived that the German people were ripe for change and through his inspiration and Germancentric optimism was able to inspire change that had world wide implications, that linger on even today. What a fabulous inspirational model...No
While I don't think that Reagan was involved in exterminating large ethnic groups of people (unless you count selling precursors of poison gas to Saddam hussein), he none the less left a legacy of damage to our citizens, individually and to our Nation as a whole. He was a racist. Destroyed our economy from which we may never recover. Presided over Iran/contr
So good for you and Obama that you can compartmentalize so effectively. That you can offer high praise for Reagan for his leadership skills while ignoring the devastation the leadership engendered. For me, one of the little brains, I don't treat myself to those sort of intellectual party games.
this blew my mind. on hillary's website they have the press release where it says eleven salmon press newspapers endorse her, in the press release it DOES list her FAVORITE presidents with reagan & ghw bush among them.
but...and here is where it gets really interesting if you got to the tab that says
newsroom and hit fact hub she denies saying it.
but she has it on her web site!! unbelievable.
i don't know what to think about the clintons anymore.
Someone, either Clinton or Obama needs to wake up to more than the abstract power of vision. They need to fill the void that is wide as a canyon out there hungry for vision. Because, believe me, if John McCain or Mitt Romney win, they will communicate a coherent narrative and vision that will beat whatever Democrat we put forward. It is not about the "electable" candidate. It is about which story the voter wants to be cast in. If you think that voters didn't see that Bush was less competent than Kerry when they voted him back in, I think you aren't giving them enough credit. They just simply liked the story Bush told about them better than the story Kerry told.
In the end, this season has nothing to do with experience and little to do with good judgment (those just tell us who we "should" vote for) and everything to do with a dream (an inspiring dream to look to, at this point, would tell us who we "want" to vote for). We need to dream new dreams if we are going to capture this country and move forward into a sweeping change.
Either one of these candidates could do this now and run away with the election, I'd wager.
I must agree with this article on all counts. I am an Obama supporter precisely because I think he is the only candidate willing to change the narrative; however, I also take the author's point that Obama has yet to communicate a coherent, far-reaching narrative.
His policies are good and his philosophy is right, but he is not giving us the far-reaching vision, instead he is talking about that there "should" be a far-reaching vision.
I think the one way that Obama could turn this train around in his direction in a big and winning way is to communicate his actual vision in more concrete terms so that we can be inspired by it rather than just being inspired by the general idea of having a far-reaching vision.
On the other hand, if Clinton would like to 1. win clean and 2. heal the division that is starting to happen, she should embrace the point that it is the job of whoever wins to communicate a sweeping vision and narrative.
This is not the moment for covering our crotches and begging the wide world not to hurt us. This is the time for standing and being liberal and being proud of it. This is the time for declaring that liberalism has been right all along and that if anyone wants to follow that standard, it will welcome them. This is not the time to be influenced by "what we can get done".
The only Democratic presidential candidate in this campaign who as late as two years ago supported torture (and by that name) was Hillary Clinton.
(See the Politico.c
As a long-time human rights advocate, I am supporting Barack Obama.
For me, supporting a candidate who supported torture just two years ago is the moral equivalent of supporting a candidate who supported racial segregation just two years ago.
Martin Edwin Andersen
You know why this bothered me, Obama glosses over by not even acknowledging the dog whistle politics of Reagan, the fear and racism that aws used to garner votes. It was not optimism, he was an actor for fucks sake.
And then for Obama to say they were the party of ideas. Their ideas were to destroy Government. Reagan said that his most feared words were, I'm from the Government and I'm here to help you. What the hell?
The big issue here is that Obama disregards all the bad things Reagan did to get his majority and he's praising the Republicans as the party of ideas. They used homophobia, racism and fear to run their platform and to win their elections. There is nothing admirable about this majority no matter how you paint it.
Obama's biggest challenge is communicating with idiots. Idiots only hear what fits their agenda. The Clintons aren't idiots, of course, they're liars. They quite strategically insert the word "better" when quoting Obama's comments on Reagan's ideas.
Reagen did bring out the talking about things after nixon had done so much secrets and manipulation. The trade stuff became a talked issue and there was some things seen now as ok not so great and yet all the republicans line up and say they want to be him. Obama said nothing about liking what reagen did or said he just said it changed the way that things were talked about. No way was that to be taken as the clintons both made it sound to be like. This is a perfect example of what the clintons have done over and over. Taken one thing said and screwed it around to suit their wants/needs to destroy a basic satement and obama. They do this in such obvious ways that people don't get it. They just think we will decide we heard him wrong and they were explaining it for us. Swiftboating by the clintons has made it hard to hear the real messages from obama. The other thing they are doing is smearing the line to have people think they are voting for bill and not hillary or that they will get both. together they are lying to people to get her the vote. She has repeatedly voted for bush and what he has wanted and I doubt bill would have voted the same. She also will run the oval like bush and not bill so this truth isn't being told.
You can't separate Reagan's "transformative" vision (or whatever you want to call it) from the smiling facade they created, and from the horribly damaging policies--that's the whole problem. Reagan's smiling face covered up massive crimes and damage we're still suffering from.
Obama's tightrope walking didn't work at all, and it insults millions as well. And factually it's not even true--What was done during Reagan wasn't new, nor was it successful--unless you were a crony then or rich. That's another problem.
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Posted January 21, 2008 | 10:44 AM (EST)