Tuesday, Sep 20, 2011 08:01 ET
Is the purple president turning blue?
Obama's new rhetoric counts, even if it's insincere campaign rhetoric
By Michael Lind
Their suspicion is understandable. This is, after all, the president who, in the greatest economic crisis since the Depression, marginalized the leading center-left economists and economics experts and surrounded himself with the Wall Street-friendly Robert Rubin wing of the Democratic Party; the president who pushed for an initial economic stimulus only half as large as his advisor Christine Romer said it should be, and then let his attention wander to subjects other than job creation for several years; the president who, elected by Americans weary of war, added a third, unconstitutional war in Libya to the needlessly prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begun by his predecessor. In light of his record to date, it is hardly surprising that many center-left American should want this president to be strapped to a lie detector whenever he makes any public statements.
snip:
Is it all just rhetoric? Maybe. But rhetoric matters. Rhetoric is what sinks into the minds of the voters and changes the political culture, when the wonky details of particular policies are forgotten.
For a generation, the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan has been echoed by Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as Republicans. In his actual policies, Reagan was moderate to liberal, by the extreme standards of today's Tea Party zealots. Reagan assented to repeated tax increases, he did not try to privatize Social Security or Medicare. He retaliated against unfair Japanese export promotion policies. He made peace with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev.
But those reasonable actions do not make up the legacy of Ronald Reagan that has shaped -- one should say, warped -- American politics. Reagan’s rhetorical denunciations of government and idealization of the private sector created the climate in which deregulation could contribute to a second Depression and in which most of the gains from growth over a generation could go to a tiny plutocracy. Reagan did enormous and lasting harm to America with one sentence in his 1981 inaugural address, a sentence that was false then and is false now: "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
snip:
In his plans for job creation and higher taxes on the wealthy, Obama has, at least for now, repudiated the tired Reaganite rhetoric that blames all problems on government and calls on the private sector to solve all our problems with its alleged dynamism and superior efficiency, neither of which have been much in evidence for more than a decade. It remains to be seen whether Reagan era rhetoric can be replaced by a new political language, in which calls on the privileged to do their fair share edge out denunciations of government as inherently corrupt and tyrannical. The future of American political rhetoric as well as politics and policy depends in part on the outcome of the 2012 election.
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as always an excellent commentary by the always brilliant Michael Lind -- Read the full article:
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/news/feature/2011/09/20/obama_rhetoric&source=newsletter&utm_source=contactology&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Salon_Daily%20Newsletter%20%28Not%20Premium%29_7_30_110 Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."
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