“That’s just a little bit theoretical,” said Rep. Dawnna Dukes about the liberal credentials of presidential hopeful John Edwards last week. “Obama and Hillary are both as liberal, but that’s his persona, because John Edwards happens to look more like the Kennedys.”
Of course, that was before Barack Obama told the Reno Gazette editorial board that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America.” Edwards quickly leapt in, slamming the idea that any Democrat might hold up the anti-labor hero of deregulation conservatives for note. The networks, however, say no problem. Calling Reagan a non-controversial figure, “Only on [Edward’s] side of the Democratic party would you feel comfortable condemning him,” Jonathan Alter of Newsweek said on MSNBC last week. CNN this morning discarded him as “the angry white man.”
But the Reagan comparison may be the least surprising of Obama’s words. He went on to say that Reagan “put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. They felt like, with all the excesses of the sixties and the seventies, government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability.”
So who does he sound like more: Ronald “welfare queen” Reagan, or Richard “silent majority” Nixon?
This article appears in January 18 • 2008.
