It is not Ronald Reagan himself who hangs over the 2012 Presidential election. It is Ronald Reagan as a symbol for the counter revolutionary forces that rose up in response to what we did in the 1960s. Reagan is the post-60s poster child for one American Dream. We'd have to go back to Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency (1901 - 1909) to find anyone to rival Reagan as a champion of those whose American Dream is a dream of empire.
Bill Clinton has to share with a lot of others the role of poster child for the American Dream that produced the 1960s. JFK and LBJ and MLK and Barack Obama himself are all among the poster children for that American Dream. This is why so many of us were disappointed when Obama said on Jan. 14, 2008:
"Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. . .He (Reagan) put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it ... he tapped into what people were already feeling. . . which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and entrepreneurship that had been missing.""
Clinton got angry. I didn't blame him. Reagan had tapped into the spirit that was counter to the spirit that later produced the Clinton Administration, the most dynamic, entrepreneurial, economically successful administration in this century. It produced the:
- Longest economic expansion in American history,
- Lowest unemployment in 30 years,
- Higher incomes at all levels
- Lowest poverty rate in 20 years
- Lowest infant mortality rate in American history
- Largest budget surplus converted from the largest deficit in American history
- Lowest government spending in three decades
- Lowest federal income tax burden in 35 years
Clinton had the highest end-of-term approval rating of any President, ever.
On the other hand, Reagan's "fundamentally different path" was mapped out in the Republican Party's "Southern Strategy," described by one of the architects of the strategy, Kevin Phillips, in his book The Emerging Republican Majority (1969).
The book revealed a conscious effort by the Republican elite that resulted in an appeal to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, super nationalism, greed, militarism, and evangelical hatred. Nixon initiated the strategy but Reagan became master of it.
The "fundamentally different path" led away from the optimism that inspired the President's mother, a white teenager from a father-knows-best, Middle American world in Kansas to go off to help emancipate women on remote islands in the Asian Pacific region. She made a stop off in Hawaii to marry an African man (who was still a subject of the British empire) and to give birth to Obama.
When William Jefferson Clinton was elected President, optimism swept through the communities of those who believed that our American Dream had gotten back into the White House. The first indication to black folk was that Clinton made it very apparent that he liked us, and from eh beginning of the nation we had always thought of ourselves as the barometers for justice, freedom and equality.
Clinton didn't see us as the nation's problem but instead as American problem solvers. To achieve this, Clinton appointed more African Americans, women and Hispanics to the Cabinet than any President in history. Every day when you looked at the news you saw one of the administration's women or minorities solving a problem.
Bill Clinton said he was a black President and actively pursued the American Dream that most black folk found attractive. We used to say that declaring he was black was the underlying reason for that trumped up $50+ million attack on Clinton that ended in impeachment. It was as if Congressional Republican and a cadre of special prosecutors said: "So you want to be black, we're going to beat on you like we'd beat on an n-words."
Can you imagine what would happen to Obama if he said: "I went to Harlem, because I think I am the first black president," to redact and put Bill Clinton's words in Obama's mouth.
Fortunately for the nation Obama either picked or was forced into the very tricky situation of openly expressing admiration for our two most hawkish Presidents, both Republican --Reagan and more recently Theodore Roosevelt-- while the entire Republican political leadership is pledged to destroy his Administration at any cost.
If Obama can take that American Dream of empire and spin it, this could spread our neocolonial empire. ("Neocolonialism," as Wikipedia says: ". . .is the practice of using capitalism, globalization, and cultural forces to control a country (usually former European colonies in Africa or Asia) in lieu of direct military or political control.)
(Such control can be economic, cultural, or linguistic; by promoting one's own culture, language or media in the colony, corporations embedded in that culture can then make greater headway in opening the markets in those countries. Thus, neocolonialism would be the end result of relatively benign business interests leading to deleterious cultural effects.)
I think that the last part of the definition is simplistic. There are not just "deleterious cultural effects." There are some very beneficial effects that an exceptional nation like ours, even with our imperfections, can, and must, have on the world.
And vice versa, we can learn many things from other cultures about being better, happier humans, as we've learned from with Eastern religions, for example. We can become a truly multicultural leader in an emerging multicultural world.
This is, in my view, why the 2012 election is so important. "Obama seems at peace balancing two warring ideals in one truly bi-racial, truly bi-partisan body. So must the nation," I argued in "Twoness" and the American Dream
The previous posts in this series are:
When Michael Jackson Met Ronald Reagan
Foot Soldiers of the Reagan Revolution
The Coming of the Reaganites
Undoing the 1960s
Will the 60s Revolution Be Undone?
Should President Obama Have Gone the Way of LBJ?
New posts in this series are coming soon.
George Davis is creator of the series of world-sourced, interactive books, Barack Obama, America and the World. This series contains the background reporting, drawn from sources across the nation and around the world, that give deeper meaning to the ideas in this post.
