Liberal Democrats are outraged! Why would Barack Obama have anything good to say about a conservative icon like Ronald Reagan? Good God, what was the man thinking?
What did Obama actually say? Here’s a good summary:
“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” the Senator told the Reno Gazette-Journal. “He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. . . . He just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, ‘We want clarity, we want optimism.'”
Obama is saying that Ronald Reagan altered the American narrative so profoundly that he changed the ideological trajectory of the nation. Policy, in Obama’s view, is rooted in narrative–a simple story about who we are.
Paul Krugman begs to differ. Reagan’s narrative, he says, was fundamentally flawed because Reaganonomics didn’t work. The New York Times columnist prefer’s Bill Clinton’s narrative:
The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.
All true, and I’m sure Barack Obama would agree. But debunking Reagan’s narrative is easy; formulating a viable alternative is the hard part.
Bill Clinton managed to get elected, and re-elected, by meeting the Reaganites halfway–stealing the Republicans best ideas and making them palatable (just barely) to Democrats. Hillary Clinton has embraced the same policy of “triangulation”–hence her tepid support for the invasion of Iraq.
Barack Obama gives the Gipper his due because he is trying to change the narrative. To do this, he must tap into the generous, compassionate, inclusive impulses that exist in America, fanning the flames through storytelling. That’s what Martin Luther King, Jr. accomplished–and he may have been the last progressive American to turn the trick.
Ronald Reagan couldn’t simply jettison Dr. King’s narrative, he had to adapt it to his own. Reagan sucked the wind out of King’s dream by shifting the emphasis. Reagan loved black people, so long as they possessed the entrepreneurial spirit he so adored. Upwardly mobile black folks who wanted a hand up, not a hand out, were A-OK with the Great Communicator. Poor people who couldn’t compete were out of luck.
Bill Clinton’s mid-90s welfare reform package represented a tacit admission that Reagan’s narrative was driving the national trajectory.
Friends of Justice is a criminal justice reform organization. So why have I taken a sudden interest in politics? The American criminal justice system is a creature of the zeitgeist, a reflection of the dominant narrative. The system will change only as the national story changes.
Speaking yesterday at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Barack Obama seemed to have been reading my mail when he decried the gap between, “Scooter Libby justice and Jena Six justice.” But that distinction, by itself, won’t move Middle America unless the narrative changes. Obama doesn’t talk about deserving and undeserving poor people (ala Reagan); he talks about hopeful poor people and hopeless poor people. Currently, we are sending the hopeful poor to college and the hopeless poor to prison. Obama wants to change that.
“I wasn’t born into money or great wealth, but I had hope!” Obama told the worshippers at Ebenezer. “I needed some hope to get here. My daddy left me when I was little, but I had hope! I was raised by a single mother, but I had hope! I was given love, an education, and some hope!”
Most progressives are too wonky to understand the power of narrative. We know how the system works, and we understand the importance of heavy political lifting. But we don’t know how to inspire people. Worse still, we don’t think we have to inspire people.
Amy Waldman, the journalist who penned an Atlantic Monthly essay called “The Truth about Jena,” recently appeared on a public radio program to talk about her Jena piece. Waldman was asked the right question: “When you compare this to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, do we lack the right symbols, the right characters, the right stark imagery to effect positive social change, or are the issues so murky that we can’t have that simplicity this time around?”
She responded like a true Clintonesque policy wonk–great critique; no meaningful solution:
In Jena, I felt like there are specific issues that do need to be addressed when it comes to race. The quality of indigent defense, which affects blacks and whites, but I would argue disproportionately affects blacks. The fact that there are still some schools that in fact have never actually desegregated. So you have parents who are sending their children outside of town to public, all-white schools so they can avoid integration. The town lines, so the black areas are mostly excluded from the town. These are difficult issues that take time to resolve, that will take tenacious, dogged, not-very-exciting work, often bureaucratic work. I think it’s easier to go for the character-driven story, rather than taking on these drier issues.
Why then, did Waldman’s Atlantic Monthly piece focus so tenaciously on Mychal Bell and DA Reed Walters? Because it’s the human story, not the “bureaucratic work” and the “drier issues” that capture reader interest. True, behind-the-scenes slogging is necessary to effect change; but it is never sufficient.
Friends of Justice works hard to publicize human dramas like Jena and Tulia because the intense conversation these stories inspire shifts the dominant narrative–however slightly.
I was a $700/month psychiatric social worker in Louisville, Kentucky when Ronald Reagan made his successful run for the presidency in 1979. You could almost feel the shift in public policy. A few months after the election, a young Roman Catholic nun sobbed uncontrollably as she poured out her heart to me. “We’re taking people with mental illness and forcing them out onto the streets. They’ll all end up in prison–where else could they go?”
She was right. And nothing much has changed over the last 28 years. That’s what Obama means by a national trajectory rooted in a simple narrative. Reagan didn’t deal in dry issues and bureacratic detail–he told evocative stories and the issues and bureacracy fell into place.
I don’t like Reagan’s story. It has emptied the mental hospitals and filled up the prisons. It has created a huge and hopeless surplus population. Reagan didn’t tell the right story; but he told it well. If progressives don’t learn from Reagan they will continue to live with his legacy.
Friends of Justice 
The claim that Obama doesn’t talk about the deserving and undeserving poor is absolutely wrong; this is his entire theme, expressly from his remarks about mortage extensions and aid for people who are not trying to game the system. That theme resounds in his health care debates as well, resulting from the fact that he is obviously aware that some people at the bottom or in the middle class use unfair advantage to acquire benefits to which they are unentitled. He has mentioned it several times, mostly as side remarks or afterthoughts.
This usually means that he is not only aware of it, but intimately familiar with the pattern, sufficiently to mention it, and his objection to it. That puts Obama squarely into the category of a person immensely self righteous, and confident in his own righteousness. These qualities are more consistent with the characteristics of callous compassion that Republicans have, not those of Democrats who don’t typically dwell upon those persons who slip though the system. While he may say he is liberal, it’s far more likely that he is a blue Democrat, or conservative Democrat for that reason. As Hillary says, if you are running on your words, they should be your own. And these are very much Obama’s words.
So, presuming that he abides by a system of self righteous indignation to prevent the undeserving poor from social or economic benefits of society, how he proposes government do that is critical to whether his programs are workable, and achieve what he claims they may achieve.
Since most Republicans feel that there is already considerable waste, and presuming there is Democratic waste as well as Republican waste, how he plans to tackle that waste is something the public should want to know.
Further, how he supports driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants but doesn’t recognize them as the undeserving poor is something Americans should want to know as inconsistent with his philosophies, vis a vis, American citizens.