Comment on Paul Krugma's column 1/18/10

In his column Monday, Krugman compared Obama's apparen reluctance to remind Americans that he inherited the economy in shambles from Bush with Reagan's constant reference to Jimmy Carter's economic policy failures. My take is more broadly framed on the communication differences between Obama and Reagan.

74.
Dan Thomas
Cedar Falls, Iowa
January 18th, 2010
8:50 am
The contrast with Reagan is instructive, particularly in light of candidate Obama's recognition that Reagan's presidency was more transformative than Clinton's. To be sure, transformative it was; and the ghost of the Gipper still hovers above the failure of Democrats to take the golden opportunity they have to undo much of the damage of the rhetorical de-legitimation of government that haunts Obama's efforts to "do too much" in a context where the lingering effects of three decades worth of government-deligitimation efforts leave a public that is still not convinced that government is not inherently bad at worst or grossly incompetent at best.

The flat-out failure of the fiscal regime constructed by Reagan and taken to its absurd conclusion by Bush II ought to have been seized by Obama as the opportunity it was: to remind us that efforts to demonize government as an alien beast in an institutional Republic is a tad dishonest at best and a transparent excuse for redistributing the wealth upward to an unseemly and immoral degree at worst. When we need to be reminded by Warren Buffet that it makes no sense that his secretary pays a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he does, it's fair to ask why a Democratic President has failed to use this quickly-vanishing chance to counter the Reagan dogma.

The Reagan White House spent a lot of time blaming Carter for the economic ills that persisted well after the transformative first Reagan budget was adopted. But the Reaganites also expended enormous efforts convincing the mainstream media and Democrats on the Hill that the 1980 vote signified "a shift to the right" by the electorate and not simply an effort to throw Carter out on grounds of poor performance. A cottage industry in academic political science has since been erected around the proposition that the 1980 vote did not mark a conservative grassroots groundswell that embraced Reagan's policies. But then, as now, it's not really what was that mattered so much as what the press and members of Congress thought was the case and thought what the public believed. Their perceptions, of course, were clearly affected by their estimation of Reagan's skill as a teacher and as an opinion leader on the question of government's competence vis-a-vis the mythical "magic of the marketplace" that was spun as the path to rescuing the Republic. Obama was right in citing the power of Reagan to move the government by pandering to a cynical part of the American psyche that finds little grounds to extend trust to governmental efforts of all but the military sort.

But he's been dead-wrong in failing to use this opportunity to restore a sense of balance in the public mind, where suggestions of government initiative of the most modest kind are shamelessly derogated as socialist government takeovers of a mythically competitive free market that, left to its own devices, allocates rewards efficiently and fairly. It's not Obama's task alone to de-mythologize the Reagan assault on government; nor is it simply Reagan and the 1986 tax reform legislation sponsored, after all, by Democrats Bill Bradley and Dick Gephardt that lingers on as framework of a failed way of funding government in an effective and fair way. An entire political party -- or its remnants in the aftermath of two elections unkind to candidates bearing its brand -- remains committed to the failed tax policies that Obama himself has yet to scrap.

As the mega-recession comes to its technical end, one hopes that it is not too late to rediscover what being faithful to the Democratic Party's heritage really means, not what a sinking vessel that long ago fell short of carrying the Republic forward might be said to think of that heritage.