Obama Is Not Reagan
BARNES, FRED
Obama Is Not Reagan And other observations from the campaign trail. BY FRED BARNES Barack Obama made quite a splash with his comment last week likening himself to Ronald Reagan. Who’d have...
...Televised debates turn into uninformative lovefests with only fleeting moments of serious disagreement...
...The sameness of the Democratic candidates...
...So each has picked a vague topic to emphasize...
...John McCain won New Hampshire, then lost Michigan...
...What hasn’t Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...The only benefi ciary of the unprecedented number of televised debates has been Mike Huckabee, whose humor in what has seemed like an endless series of debates made him a viable candidate for the Republican nomination...
...But when it does, when he lightens up and stops poking conservatives in the eye, it will be noticed...
...Okay, he lacks Reagan’s sense of humor...
...Reagan had plenty of it and so does Obama...
...So there are fewer of them...
...And so on...
...The absence of momentum...
...Reagan was always unruffl ed...
...been noted is the struggle inside the McCain campaign over whether he should try the opposite tack...
...The media effort to sanitize presidential campaigns has an adverse effect on candidates and on meaningful discussion of issues...
...Insurgent candidates are often combative and inclined to exaggerate wildly...
...And win prizes...
...If this is done in a speech, the candidate is “going negative...
...But it takes the self-discipline of a Reagan or Obama...
...This has left very little of signifi - cance to discuss...
...The man is a smart, tough-minded corporate turnaround artist who would bring skill in fi xing things and decision-making to the White House...
...They’re hot rather than cool...
...Obama will bring us together, Clinton is a change agent, and Edwards will drive the unholy lobbyists out of the temples of government in Washington...
...Now race has slipped in the back door of the campaign to become an issue...
...The key to being calm and composed is self-discipline...
...Here are some others: * The prissiness of the press...
...The idea of momentum is that you generate support in subsequent primaries when you win one...
...Then he suggested he leads an optimistic, dynamic political movement just as Reagan did...
...Candidates pay a price for airing perfectly honest ads that inform voters about an opponent’s record...
...This is not the way to win the presidency...
...Their likability comes into play here, too...
...He fl atters himself to think he heads a movement...
...I did...
...Nope...
...The contrariness of John McCain...
...But he’s been afraid to center his campaign on that...
...Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way Richard Nixon did not and a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said...
...It’s been widely noted that McCain goes out of his way to offend conservatives, despite the political cost to his presidential aspirations...
...Instead, he was chiefl y a social conservative in Iowa, a change agent in New Hampshire, and an economic revivalist in Michigan...
...The defi ning feature of the 2008 primaries is that they have defeated every pundit who tried to see more than 24 hours into the future...
...But here’s how the Las Vegas Sun described Obama during an interview last week: “Looking poised and relatively fresh given the grueling schedule of a presidential campaign, [he] spoke in his customary manner— cool, measured, deliberate...
...Not this year...
...As you may have guessed, the press has a vested interest in campaigns in which candidates only tout themselves and never zing their rivals...
...Who’d have guessed such a thought had crossed his mind...
...That’s who he is...
...But it turned out to have no effect...
...Now he’s the antiWashington candidate...
...I half-expect him to tell Hillary Clinton, “There you go again...
...The overrated impact of TV debates...
...Think John Edwards or Howard Dean or Jesse Jackson...
...They basically agree on health care (more government involvement), taxes (higher), immigration (amnesty in one form or another), and Iraq (get out as fast as possible, regardless of the state of play in the war...
...Whenever Obama has been criticized in televised debates, he’s reacted calmly...
...Change does not come easy to McCain...
...When the press uses the word “attack”—as it does regularly—you might think a mugging or some other act of violence had taken place...
...Obama was right about Reagan as a leader who changed America but wrong about the way in which he’s like the former president...
...Obama was unruffl ed by anything the paper threw at him...
...McCain, however, is more comfortable with concentrating on national security, his experience as a POW and war hero, and patriotism...
...Some McCain advisers—the smarter ones—believe he should stress the conservative goals he’d like to achieve as president, tone down his contrariness, and appeal directly to conservative voters...
...The Reagan-Obama analogy is but one of the notable features of the 2008 presidential race...
...Obama may be different from Clinton and Edwards in style and personality, but the three are ideological peas in a pod...
...In truth, he’s an extraordinarily self-disciplined insurgent candidate who’s like Reagan in personality...
...A TV ad that criticizes or contrasts is an “attack ad...
...Many journalists fi gured Mitt Romney would win the New Hampshire primary after he dominated a debate two nights before...
...The insecurity of Mitt Romney...
...Obama won Iowa, then lost New Hampshire...
...Nor did John Edwards’s strong performance in the fi nal Iowa debate help him in the caucuses...
...All it means is that one presidential candidate has criticized another, usually by favorably contrasting his or her record with that of an opponent...
...And the result will be that conservatives warming to McCain won’t be driven away by a statement by the candidate that alienates them once again...
...But that wasn’t Reagan’s style and it’s not Obama’s...
...Fox News anchor Brit Hume now refers to “no-mentum...
...That leaves a bigger role for journalists to pick apart the record and rhetoric of each candidate...
...Or maybe not...
...You can’t fake likability but you can will it...
Vol. 13 • January 2008 • No. 19
