Jon Meacham Surely Jokes: Reaganesque Obama Ran a 'Centrist' Campaign?

Displaying for the magazine world his characteristic deficit of humility, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offered the assignment of the Big Picture post-election essay on "The Age of Obama" to himself. He offered two strange theories that fly in the face of evidence: that Barack Obama ran a "centrist" campaign and that he in some way already resembles Ronald Reagan. For starters, this is odd because Newsweek hated Reagan while he was president, and rarely found him to be enough of a centrist. Meacham insisted President Obama will disappoint the hard-core ideologues:

The Democratic Party's success in 2008 is not a straightforward revenge-of-the-left drama. Many true believers say this is the dawn of a new progressive era, a time of resurgent (and in many ways rethought) liberalism. The highly caffeinated have high hopes. At the same time, many conservatives – most, it seems, with a show on Fox News – see things the same way, and believe an Age of Obama will be a grim hour of redistribution at home and weakness abroad.

But if Obama governs as he ran – from the center – then there will be disappointed liberals and conservatives. The left may feel somehow cheated, and the right, eager to launch perpetual assaults on the new administration, could well find Obama as elusive and frustrating as the opposition found Reagan.

Obamaphiles might insist Obama looked like a centrist by backing the massive financial bailout package like the rest of Washington, or looked like a centrist by offering a middle-class tax cut, if you believe a Democrat-dominated Washington will pass one. But on the wide array of issues, overall, can it be said Obama "ran from the center"? He stood out in the primaries for being the Great Anti-War Hope, the man who was leftist enough to thrill the MoveOn.org and Code Pink constituencies, the realistic choice of Kucinichites. Was he "centrist" on abortion, gay rights, global warming, "centrist" as he bashed oil companies and drug companies, "centrist" on reining Social Security and Medicaid spending? But Meacham was audacious in hoping someone would buy his theory:

Pressing a centrist message in the presidential campaign, he had a reliably liberal and not terribly interesting voting record in the Senate. Which Obama will show up for work in the White House? The New New Democrat, or the safely liberal former community organizer from Chicago? It seems safe to say that he would not have won as he did if he had appeared to be an eloquent Walter Mondale, or a tactically brilliant Michael Dukakis. He ran as a more practical kind of center-left politician -- not a Great Society liberal, but one who, in the tradition of Bill Clinton, believes in pursuing progressive goals through centrist means and with an occasionally conservative cultural message. The "socialist" attacks of the McCain-Palin ticket failed in part because they stretched credulity.

Liberals who have thrilled to Obama could grow disenchanted with him if he fails to deliver a progressive Valhalla by, say, Valentine's Day. But the Reagan example offers a different – and more likely – possibility. Given Obama's popularity with his base, he may be that rare politician who can get away with making a deal without being seen as selling out. Reagan raised taxes and nobody held it against him, or even noticed all that much. Obama could be a Teflon man for the new century.

It’s simply not true, and Meacham misleads the young and the forgetful, that Reagan’s base barely noticed Reagan’s departures from the conservative line. Conservatives were angry or despaired over his 1982 tax hike (and some loathed the 1986 tax reform), angrily opposed some of his warm overtures to Gorbachev in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, and protested his going soft in supporting the addition of catastrophic coverage to Medicare (which was later repealed). The only grace they awarded Reagan was the assumption that his moderate aides had hornswoggled him into it, and put on their Let Reagan Be Reagan buttons. But Meacham simply has to argue, miles before a historian should attempt a real comparison, that Obama should be lumped in with Reagan:

Obama has more in common with Reagan than appearances might suggest. Reagan's loyalists believed in his issues, or at least one of his issues, and they believed in him. They were anxious for a change from the incumbent administration at a time of shattered confidence and economic turmoil. The comparison is revealing, for it may foreshadow the nature of the next four or eight years. Like Reagan, Obama is an astute performer, a maker of myths and a teller of stories. Like Reagan, he is popularly seen, by friend and foe alike, as an ideological purist—but has demonstrated a tendency toward the pragmatic. Like Reagan, he is the leader of a core of believers so convinced he is on their side that they are likely to forgive him his compromises.

And so now George W. Bush is Jimmy Carter. That’s hardly a good comparison. (Comparing Obama to Clinton could end up being much more accurate.) Does Meacham really believe that MoveOn and the Daily Kosmonauts will forgive Obama straying from the leftist line in the White House? Or is he instructing them to calm down and accept some compromises? How much compromise will Obama be forced to make? After all, Reagan always faced a hostile House majority, and Obama does not. But Meacham has to lard it on:

Obama gets the Gipper. "Reagan spoke to America's longing for order," he has written, "our need to believe that we are not simply subject to blind, impersonal forces but that we can shape our individual and collective destinies, so long as we rediscover the traditional virtues of hard work, patriotism, personal responsibility, optimism and faith."

A man with a vivid literary and historical imagination, Obama is something of a dreamer, if a down-to-earth one.

This is not the first time Newsweek tried to stretch Obama into Reagan's mold. But reading Meacham as he throws his rose petals before the new president, you can almost hear him reading his own implausible prose in that insufferable faux-portentous voice he puts on for Charlie Rose. He wants to be the Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. of Barack Obama’s White House – an intellectual toady. That’s a more plausible comparison than trying to attach Reagan to Obama.