President Barack Obama has compared himself a number of times to the Fortieth President of the United States, Ronald Wilson Reagan. Arguing that he and the Gipper share a camaraderie and commitment to moderation and national restoration, the president has cast the current Republican party as a cohort of miscreants, zealots, and right-wing deviants obsessed with opposition instead of compromise.
Aside from the presumed magnetism of their personalities and the persuasiveness of their rhetoric with the American People, there is very little that would mark similarities between these two chief executives, which all but vitiates the argument that the current GOP is merely a right-wing margin of the Gipper's ascendant conservatism.
For starters, President Obama has never resisted attempts to raise taxes on the wealthy. Only a stubborn Republican opposition has prevented him from turning a tepid economic recovery into another recession. Reagan instigated one of the largest tax cuts in American history, encouraging job growth and economic recovery following a devastating decade of economic stagflation.
Rather than uniting diverse elements of the country into landslide victories, President Obama won his election by 53%, only to witness the demise and removal of one Democratic governor after another in 2009, followed by one of the most massive political corrections in U.S. electoral history in 2010. Even Ronald Reagan managed to stave off immense yet inevitable losses in midterm elections. He also polled two of the highest presidential victories, both in the popular vote and the electoral college, in 1980 and 1984.
President Reagan, and his party successors, are by no means advancing a radical agenda. Like the spontaneous Tea Party movement which expanded across the national scene and took Washington by storm every year of Obama's Presidency, the American voters are longing for a return to properly prescribed powers in the Constitution. The incumbent chief executive, in spite of his legal background as a constitutional law professor, has demonstrated a profound and Progressive disdain for our nation's charter, appointing executive officials without Congressional approval and issuing executive orders outside the proper oversight of Congress.
Where the Fortieth President took every step to meet his opposition and seek informed compromise, President Obama has refused to meet and deal with his Republican counterparts, apart from emphasizing his superior knowledge and expertise on matters which even a seasoned statesman would never claim for himself. A rookie senator not even two years in office before launching his presidential campaign, the Chicago pol has raised nothing but ire and incredulity from campaign staffers, Democratic loyalists, and voters of every party persuasion throughout the country.
Ronald Reagan advanced a vision for this country, one infused with optimism that the United States would see better days. Barack Obama only tapped into the naive egotism of the masses, claiming that "we are the change we have been waiting for." Unfortunately for federalism, for capitalism, and for democracy, the changes have gone from bad to worse, and the crawling economic recovery has not masked or made up for the staggering job losses and government expansion under the Obama Administration.
Only the uninformed and distant elitism of today's political class would glibly support any comity between the policies and person of Ronald Wilson and Barack Hussein Obama. The United States, a center-right nation of mixed constancy, found a match in the Gipper, who respected and responded to the frustrations of a nation undergoing one of the most extensive economic corrections in modern history. Hard-left President Obama has ignored the realities of supply and demand, seeking only to supplement his vanity with greater oratorical demands on party, government, and the people. Realizing less that as he speaks, he captivates fewer adherents and dwindling supportm Obama distances himself from the reality and role of government, which Reagan wryfully, yet rightfully, acknowledged as "the problem" for the United States.
No comments:
Post a Comment