Reagan vs Obama?

Kevin Williamson writes in today's National Review Online edition,

News flash: This is not 1982, and Obama is not Reagan.

The important difference is this: There was a good reason for the Volcker-Reagan recession: defeating inflation. American voters may not be terribly economically sophisticated, but they sure as heck did notice when inflation went from 13.5 percent to 3.2 percent — in two years.

This is a salient point - Ronald Reagan was trying to reduce the damage done by the previous Administration's ham=handed and inept economic policies. And it worked - as Williamson notes, inflation dropped drastically in only two years. Mission accomplished!

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be clear to our friends on the Left side of the political spectrum. One of the commenters writes,

Reagan was an incredible deficit spender, I don't think you can distinguish between Obama and Reagan on that factor.

Unless this is a joke, this comment displays a distressing lack of understanding both of history and of international relations. Yes, Reagan did do some large defiicit spending. But, as was the case with the economic policies, there was a reason. A good one. Reagan believed that the Cold War needed to end and he did not think (correctly, as it turned out) that the Soviet Union could keep pace with the US if the Cold War turned into a competition between economic methodology. By spending freely on the US military, he forced the Soviets into an arms race they simply could not win. And his full-throated defense of liberty and freedom gave heart to the millions of enslaved Eastern Europeans. Essentially, Ronald Reagan put his money where his mouth was and bet that the US could win an economic showdown with the Soviet Union. And he was right.

In 1980, when Reagan came into office, the world was resigned to the grim menace of Soviet tanks and proxy wars. Reagan ended that, at least as far as the Soviets were concerned. Proxy wars will go on forever, but the specter of Russian tanks crossing into Western Europe is gone. Ronald Reagan performed two vital actions during his eaight years in office - he won the Cold War (though the Soviet Union did not finally collapse until his successor was in office) and he crushed the inflation caused by Jimmy Carter and his de-regulation put the US on a solid economic course that has lasted by and large until the current Administration.

I don't see how you can compare Reagan and Obama either, but not for the reasons our commenter friend listed. I don't see how you can compare actions taken with a firm goal in mind - a goal that was achieved in both cases largely by the time Reagan left office - to Obama's destructive spending. If Obama's goal is to make the entire country dependent on government and to make the political class into feudal masters, then I guess he is succeeding. But to me there is a fundamental difference between spending to defeat an enemy and spending to make government more powerful. Reagan was all about smaller government. Obama? Not so much.

Remembering Reagan's Birthday

As I was browsing the blogosphere, the Texas Rainmaker reminded me that today would be the late Ronald Reagan's 97th birthday. Despite his passing in 2004, Reagan remains the most important President of the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Not only did he propose and push a vision of a strong, forceful America, he was willing to truly speak truth to power. Journalists like to claim they speak truth to power, but advocating gay rights, or assisting bureaucrats expose secrets is not exactly courageous when most of the political elites agree with them.

On the other hand, Reagan truly did speak truth to power. As Captain Ed Morrissey reminds us, he was willing to tell the Soviet Union to 'Tear down this wall" and he was willing to spend the Soviets into the dustbin of history, believing as he did that the United States' way of life was in all respects superior. A YouTube video of Reagan's famous Berlin speech is embedded below.



In addition to his courageous stand against the Soviet empire, Reagan also produced some excellent quotes regarding freedom and the necessity to protect it. A few of these quotes are as follows (thanks to Texas Rainmaker for collating these):

“One legislator accused me of having a nineteenth-century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an eighteenth-century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law-abiding citizens should be one of the government’s primary concerns.”

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it on to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.”

“If we lose freedom here, there is no place to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except to sovereign people, is still the newest and most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election. Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”

These quotes reveal that Reagan really did believe in the United States and he believed that personal responsibility and the individual pursuit and defense of freedom were very important. Reagan did not believe in socialism or any of its pernicious relatives such as National Socialism (Nazism) or Communism. And he, unlike so many of his contemporaries, was willing to fight for freedom- an impulse that I doubt Bill or Hillary Clinton would understand.

On this 97th anniversary of Reagan's birth, i hope that all conservatives remember that we must remain eternally vigilant if we are to defeat our enemies both abroad and hidden among us. President Reagan showed that they could be beaten, and his enthusiasm for his country should be an example for us all. God rest you, Ronald Reagan, and thank you for everything.

Hat tips to Captain's Quarters and Michelle Malkin