QOTD: Rick Perlstein
by digby
On Up with Steve Kornacki this week-end:
I think the reason Obama’s rhetoric and his whole strategic approach to his presidency fails is because going back six years or more, he fundamentally misunderstands the Republican Party. He doesn’t understand they behave, this kind of Leninist cell waiting in the mountains, waiting for the final apocalypse. He claims Reagan as a role model, a transformative presidency. Reagan every day said, “there’s a problem that screwed Americans: the Democratic party and the liberals.”
By drawing that distinction he taught Americans to think that way. Barack Obama is constitutionally incapable of saying, “we have adversaries.” That every time a Democratic president comes in that they handle the government more effectively. Every time a Democratic president comes in, they create more jobs than the Republicans. But to say that would be constitutionally impossible for Obama because he needs to tell this story about reconciliation — there is no Red America, there is no Blue America.
Also too, this:
The presidency is, in important respects, a rhetorical office it’s a bully pulpit as TR called it. And one of the things Ronald Reagan was very good at was losing well. When he lost lost a fight, let’s say when he had to raise taxes, he was very good at using that to drive home his fundamental message: “I have to raise taxes because those liberals made me do it. That’s just what liberals do.” Ultimately, everything, whether he won or lost, he made that a generational project of telling a story about how the world works that kept on hammering home what he wanted the presidents after him to do.
And lo and behold, that’s what the presidents after him did, even Clinton and Obama.
Perlstein is working on a big new book on the rise of Ronald Reagan and he knows of what he speaks.
The good news is that if the president is sincere in his desire to repudiate his former zeal for deficit cutting our way to prosperity, he might be able to leave a different imprint. It will cause a lot of dissonance among people like me who have been intensely frustrated by his insistence on framing every liberal initiative in Reaganesque terms, but if he sustains this message and doesn’t take actions to undermine it — or at least resists the temptation to own the compromise as he usually does and instead blames the House lunatics for making him do the things he didn’t want to do as Reagan did — over the long term it could change the legacy he’s made and set the table for a more liberal future.
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