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Lexington
Studying the Gipper
What Barack Obama can and can’t learn
from Reagan’s blithe spirit
Jan 6th 2011 | From the print edition
RONALD REAGAN would have turned 100 next month. That may be one reason why
the White House let it be known that when Barack Obama spent his Christmas vacation
in Hawaii, his holiday reading list included Lou Cannon's “President Reagan: the Role of
a Lifetime”, a whopping biography of more than 800 pages. But the Reagan story may be
on Mr Obama's mind for other reasons as well.
Like Harry Truman's and Bill Clinton's, the Reagan presidency is remembered as an
example of how a president can do big things even when government is divided. On
taking office in 1981 Reagan had a slim majority in the Senate but the Democrats
controlled the House. This is the mirror image of the predicament that Mr Obama is
having to confront only now, after two luxurious years of having a majority in both
chambers. Like Mr Obama, Reagan inherited an economy in greater distress than
America had experienced since the 1930s. More than 7% of workers were unemployed
and inflation was north of 12%. But by the time he and Nancy retired to Bel Air in
January 1989, the man known as the Gipper (after an early role in Hollywood) was
basking in an approval rating of 64%, the highest of any departing president since
Franklin Roosevelt. Little wonder that Mr Obama fancied dipping into Mr Cannon's
biography for a tip or two.
Tearing down that wall
And yet the Reagan story contains no simple formula that Mr Obama can copy to be sure
of an equally happy ending to his own presidential adventure. In big ways and small, the
world of the 1980s was altogether different. History will remember for ever that the
Soviet Union began to unravel on Reagan's watch, helped on its way both by the affable
cold warrior's determination to overawe the “evil empire” with a vast hike in military
spending and by the unexpected rapport he established with Mikhail Gorbachev. No
remotely comparable foreign-policy triumph is available to Mr Obama. It was Reagan's
good luck to become president when the Soviet system was rotting from within. Mr
Obama's bad luck is to have the job at a time when America's new Chinese rival is not
only rising but has also become Uncle Sam's principal creditor.
The economic parallels may be a bit closer. Unemployment rose in Reagan's first two
years, as in Mr Obama's. Like the Democrats last November, the president's party was
thumped in the mid-terms of 1982. Reagan's approval ratings two years in were in fact
lower, at below 40%, than Mr Obama's, which have lately moved back up to around 50%.
By 1984, however, a rebound brought about by steady policy (combined with a notably
weak opponent in Walter Mondale) enabled Reagan to proclaim “morning in America”,
just in time to be re-elected in a landslide. By 2012 employment may have grown enough
for Mr Obama to copy this trick, though it typically takes longer to create jobs in the
aftermath of a recession produced by a financial collapse.
Among Republicans, time has burnished Reagan's place in the pantheon of presidents.
His mantra that government was the problem rather than the solution was revolutionary
for its time. But the revolution he made was decidedly incomplete. Having promised to
boost military spending, cut taxes and balance the federal budget, he found the third of
these promises beyond his reach. Redeeming it would have been possible only by cutting
deep into entitlements, especially Social Security (pensions), an assault on the New Deal
that Congress would not countenance and he did not press. Instead he sent eight
unbalanced budgets in succession up to the Hill, the government spent more money than
it raised, the budget deficit soared from $74 billion in 1980 to $220 billion in 1986 and
America turned from a creditor into a borrower. The stern new fiscal conservatives taking
their seats in the House this week would surely not have approved.
Reagan's two terms saw plenty of other failures. Ethical standards inside his
administration were often lax. He oversaw a humiliating military retreat from Lebanon,
the scandal of Iran-Contra, a too-timid response to the AIDS epidemic and a lot of inept
deregulation, some of which contributed to the savings and loans crisis that led to a
taxpayer bail-out under the first President Bush. He achieved almost nothing in education
or health, and failed to restrict abortion as he had promised conservatives, probably
insincerely.
Why are so few of the failures remembered? Craig Shirley, who worked to re-elect
Reagan, argues that everyone always understood what he was about and where he was
trying to go. That is unusual in a president. Mr Obama may burn with no less ardent a
desire to be a “transformative” president: in 2008 he got into hot water with Democrats
for praising this aspect of the Reagan presidency. But Mr Obama's complicated
aspirations for America are harder to understand than Reagan's straightforward mission to
shrink the state and battle communism, though admirers often glossed over the fact that
federal spending as a share of GDP did not in the end shrink that much (from 22.2% to
21.2%).
Perhaps the hardest thing for Mr Obama to accept about Reagan is that Americans
warmed to him not just because of what he did but also because of the sort of person he
was. Mr Cannon argues that his political magic did not reside only in his happiness and
folksy charm. His greatness was that “he carried a shining vision of America inside him.”
He had a simple belief that nothing was impossible in America if only government got
out of the way. In rejecting the idea of limits, says Mr Cannon, he expressed a core
conviction of the nation. Mr Obama does not share this belief, and is perhaps right not to.
The idea that nothing is impossible in and for America is an illusion. But Americans have
never thanked their presidents for telling them so.
Economist.com/blogs/lexington
From the print edition: United States