THE FOLLOWING POST WAS WRITTEN BASED ON A REPORT WHICH HAS SINCE BEEN SHOWN TO BE UNTRUE. I’m leaving it up as proof of my fallibility. Obama apparently did not make the statement that was attributed to him. The title to the post has been changed to reflect reality.
Every time I find myself feeling somewhat better about Obama, he says or does something that make me draw back. Here’s the latest: his take on the conservative saint, Ronald Reagan:
[H]e just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
Once again, Barack parrots right wing talking points. Barack was 19 years old when Reagan was elected. Old enough to know better, certainly old enough to have learned the truth by now. I was approaching 30, and I don’t recall that clarity, optimism, dynamism or entrepreneurship was what I was missing, or what Reagan promised. What he promised, or at least what I was hearing, was a reactionary, racist government, dominated by troglodytes, dedicated to the enrichment of the rich, the rape of the environment, the destruction of our sense of community, the abandonment of any shred of a sound energy policy, and appointment of religious whacko judges, all of which we got. And the list goes on. I don’t know where Obama was living when he was 19, but did the folks in his neighborhood really get a warm and fuzzy feeling from Ronald Reagan?
If by clarity you mean simplistic thinking, then yes, we got clarity. If by optimism you mean dead certainty that the government can do no good, then we got optimism. If by dynamism you mean energetic crushing of the poor, the unions, and the middle class, then we got dynamism. And if by entrepreneurship you mean shifting income from the lower and middle classes to the richest 1% while beginning the process of insulating CEOs from either governmental or shareholder oversight, then we get entrepreneurship. In an nutshell, we got a guy who smiled while he slid in the knife. It suits the Republicans to keep telling us that Reagan was a warm and sunny guy that we all loved, but that’s a deliberate lie, and as Rich Perlstein notes here, it’s a method they use to distract us from the real world results of their own policies and helps set us up for their return to power.
So Barack, if you want to talk about optimism, if you want to talk about dynamism and clarity, talk about Democrats like FDR and JFK, who really delivered, or at least tried to deliver the goods. Don’t validate Republican fantasies.
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