This was written and published before the passing of the Health Care Reform Bill so perceptions may have changed a bit, but there are some very good insights into Obama’s approach to governance and why his non-ideological, lets-do-it-the-right-way style has failed to connect with the public. This article isn’t online, so here are some choice passages, especially ones that bring up Reagan:
To be an effective communicator, a President needs a strong world view, a fundamental vision of why things are the way they are and how they ought to be, which can be simplified into a few key ideas and images–in short, an ideology. For Obama and his advisers, there is no worse pejorative. Their distaste for ideology sometimes causes them to sand down the sharper edges of their own proposals…
A year in, Obama’s Presidency resembles, in uncanny ways, Ronald reagan’s at the same point. The public has rejected a previous President, and has attached inchoate hopes to the new one; an ambitious domestic agenda is being forged amid economic misery and widespread discontent. Thirty years later, it’s easy to forget how perilous Reagan’s situation was in 1982… Reagan spent his second year negotiating with Democrats in Congress while urging the country to give Reaganomics a chance. For Washington, he continued a rhetorical offensive in televised speeches and in midterm campaign appearances, always drawing a distinction between his views and those of the Democrats, between his future and their past. He directed supporters to pressure vulnerable Democrats in their districts. Reagan could recover from battlefield setbacks because he was fighting a larger war. His talent for phrasemaking and anecdote derived from having a strong worldview: unlike Obama, he began with a set of ideas and found the evidence to match them and the words to dramatize them. “Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that’s only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe,” he said in his first State of the Union Message, in 1982. “They are the decades of tax and tax and spend and spend.”
And an interesting bit coming from Congressman Barney Frank:
…[Frank] said that Obama “would have been better off with a more adversarial approach” toward pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, and banks. “Reagan, to his credit, had an ideological agenda,” Frank said. “Obama was trying to be favorably viewed by seventy per cent, and Reagan was willing to settle for fifty-seven percent. He understood an intense fifty-seven percent was better than a sort of feel-good seventy.”
With the Health Care Bill finally passing–with zero Republican votes–Obama will hopefully begin to take a more aggressive approach towards pushing through legislation and figure a way establish a resonating message that’ll stick.
Filed under: Article
