After Ronald Reagan won his first election and took the oath of office as California's governor on Jan. 2, 1967, he sent a powerful signal about the mixture of politics and Hollywood-style fantasy that he was starting to invent -- by hiring the Walt Disney Company to produce his inaugural pageantry. I thought of that this weekend as I read that the current generation of Disney execs paid $2 million to Barack Obama's inaugural committee for exclusive rights to broadcast a children's concert with tween megastars Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers. I guess we can only conclude that the Great Communicator was really onto something 42 years ago - his only problem was he didn't know how to monetize it.
It was almost one year ago to the day that the president-to-be surprised some people when the candidate -- who spent a chunk of the 1980s as an inner-city community organizer -- praised Reagan to a newspaper editorial board in Reno, saying, "We want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing."
He didn't mention the word "grandeur," but while his words may be invoking Abraham Lincoln a lot this week, Obama's style in pulling off the most expensive inauguration -- by far -- in American history, even as thousands of Americans are losing their paychecks daily, is straight from the Gipper's playbook. As NBC's new chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd proclaimed as the Obama Express barreled through rural Delaware on Saturday morning, "It seems like Obama is trying to do a throwback to Reagan -- and restore some of that grandeur."
You don't need to be a network pundit to see what Obama is up to here. It's classic "WWCD -- DTO." That stands for "What Would Carter Do? -- Do The Opposite." When Jimmy Carter took the oath on Jan. 20, 1977, Americans were just as alienated by the presidency as they were now, and for pretty much the same reasons - a senseless war that had been waged halfway around the world, Constitutional abuses, a government that spied on Americans, fear over oil supplies and a steady loss of blue-collar jobs.
Carter sought to declare on Day One that the era of the Imperial Presidency was over - shortly after his motorcade pulled away from the Capitol, he hopped out of the limo and walked most of the way to the White House, shaking hands with stunned onlookers along Pennsylvania Avenue.
That wasn't all; Carter replaced glitzy balls with low-priced ($25 a head) parties where the hors d'ouevres were most likely to be pretzels. The punditocray loved it -- the Washington Post reported Carter was "shattering...the idea that a president must be remote and removed from the people." But then the economy and gas prices sunk even worse, with a hostage crisis in Iran, and a nation desperate for answers. Maybe, some thought, we need a dash of the imperial in our presidency after all.
And Ronald Reagan, after defeating Carter in a landslide, was more than happy to indulge that notion. Back came the limos, the formal evening attire, the expensive re-christened inaugural balls, in an pomp-filled event in which Ronald Reagan (who had dispatched a press aide to unveil his Cabinet selections) and wife Nancy played a large role in planning. The affair prompted a Democratic congressman to blast "the incongruity between President Reagan's apparent call for sacrifice and...all the furs and the limos."
But soon the economy was roaring back -- more the result of Carter-appointed inflation fighter Paul Volcker and dropping oil prices than Reagan's policies -- and the groundwork was laid for a modern political myth. Ironically, by the end of the Gipper's presidency many Americans were already exhausted with the naked greed of the 1980s (remember Gordon Gekko?), but then a band of neoconservatives like Grover Norquist hijacked Reagan's legacy, warped it, and with the help of a compliant media created a bogus template for modern presidents, including -- at times -- Barack Obama.
I've recently researched the distorted Reagan legend for an about-to-be-published book -- "Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future" (Facebook group here) -- and had a chance to dwell on its toxic effect on American life, even now in 2009. Ironically, there are a few Reagan qualities that Obama would be wise to study - the 40th president's ability to communicate directly with Americans and convey a sense of optimism, for example. But much of the next four or eight years ought to be devoted to undoing Reaganism -- the assaults on the scientific proof of climate change and fossil fuel scarcity, the billions in red ink, the free-for-all on Wall Street - rather than bowing at its bronze idols.
But now the Obama inauguration crew has turned to Wall Street to help pay the massive cost of an event that with security may cost as much as $200 million, which would be a $40 million more than what President George W. Bush paid for his 2005 affair. One recent study found financial executives gave $7.1 million to defray the inaugural cost, more than any other industry, with many of the top bundlers executives from firms like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Wachovia that will be angling for more bailout cash from the Obama administration.
Then there are the exclusive broadcast deals with Disney and with Time-Warner's HBO, which has the exclusive right to broadcast the Bruce Springsteen-U2-Beyonce extravaganza from the Lincoln Memorial, an arrangement that led activist Jeffrey Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy to say, justifiably, "to not make [the concert] available to the entire country just seems elitist." Inaugural spokeswoman Carole Florman told the New York Daily News the soaring pricetag, the rights deals and the fundraising are necessary because of the importance of this transition, that "you don't want it to look like a schlock affair."
Ronald and Nancy Reagan might have said the exact same thing. The shame here is that while Obama surely didn't need to copy Jimmy Carter, he didn't need to borrow so much from the Gipper, either. Many of us who watched in awe as Obama re-invented the America presidential campaign in 2008 were looking for him to do the same with his inaugural in 2009. A creative approach might have melded that Springsteen-Bono starpower with a tad more democracy, and figured out how to reduce the cost or channel more of that Wall Street largesse to the rising number of needy people, especially in and around D.C.. It's increasingly looking like that's not going to happen.
One other irony was striking this weekend: The posh Georgia 300 rail car that the Obama's and Joe Biden's family rode from Philadelphia to Washington is one that was crafted back in 1930, just as America was sliding into the despair of the Great Depression. As he sped toward destiny in the lap of luxury, hopefully the Reagan-mind Obama pondered one lesson from Jimmy Carter: That sometimes it's good to get out and walk.