The Morning Plum: Obama as the anti-Reagan [View all]

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The Morning Plum: Obama as the anti-Reagan

Posted by Greg Sargent

Little by little, it’s sinking in that Obama’s inaugural speech has the potential to be a turning point in American history, one akin to Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address in 1981, in which he declared: “Government is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem.” That speech did more than articulate the conservative philosophy of governance; it was a declaration of ideological victory, a proclamation that the nation had opted for a new ideological direction.

Obama’s speech was every bit as ambitious, recasting progressivism in the eyes of the nation, declaring that the country has opted for a fundamentally new philosophical and ideological course. In a must read, E.J. Dionne explains:

Like Reagan, Obama hopes to usher in a long-term electoral realignment — in Obama’s case toward the moderate left, thereby reversing the 40th president’s political legacy. The Reagan metaphor helps explain the tone of Obama’s inaugural address, built not on a contrived call to an impossible bipartisanship but on a philosophical argument for a progressive vision of the country rooted in our history.

The key to Obama’s argument, as Ed Kilgore points out, is that he made the “long lost liberal case that collective action is necessary to the achievement of individual freedom, instead of implicitly conceding that social goals and individual interests are inherently at war.” Indeed, Obama himself put it this way: “Preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.”

Crucially, Obama presented this idea as the philosophical underpinning that unified all of his specific policy proposals, from the vow to combat climate change, to the push for equal pay for women, to the fight for full equality for gay Americans, to the need for voting and immigration reform. He cast inequality and the unfairness of the unfettered free market as threats to freedom, i.e., the freedom to pursue happiness. And this goes beyond the Inaugural: Remember, in his speech laying out his proposal for action on guns, he cast gun violence as a threat to the freedom to pursue happiness within a civil society.

This overarching philosophical argument was at the center of the 2012 election. The battles over Obama’s “you didn’t build that” speech, and over the GOP suggestion that the President’s “redistributionist” and “collectivist” tendencies are fundamentally at odds with the nation’s values, were at bottom an argument over the true nature of our shared responsibility to one another. Republicans angrily argue that Obama unfairly caricatured the GOP position as a “you’re on your own” ethic. But Obama was broadly articulating a legitimate philosophical difference between the parties, and the election results suggest Obama’s vision is shared by the American mainstream and the emerging majority coalition of Obama voters, i.e., nonwhites, college educated women (and to a lesser degree college educated men) and younger voters. Obama’s catchphrase — “we’re all in this together” — was widely mocked on the right, but this emerging coalition appears to understand this argument on Obama’s terms, as a governing ethic for moving the country forward.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/01/24/the-morning-plum-obama-as-the-anti-reagan/

Chris Christie rips President Obama's inaugural speech as 'a manifesto'
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022251023

I really am loving this, especially the Republican reaction.