Jon Taplin’s Blog

Obama got into a lot of trouble with Democrats for saying, “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Although it was a politically dumb thing to say, its undeniably true. The election of Ronald Reagan was a revolution that fundamentally changed the direction of American politics that had been in place since The New Deal in 1932. As I argued this morning, much of the Reagan Revolution was destructive to the long term economic security of this country, but that doesn’t change the essential facts. Nixon’s administration was in a clear continuity with what went before (even calling for Universal Health Care and inventing the EPA). And Bill Clinton’s administration did very little to change the deregulatory trajectory that Reagan initiated. Clinton pushed the Telecom Bill of 1996, which gave Big Media the power that had  been yearning for. His Banking Deregulation Bill of 1998 was basically written by Sandy Weill and the Citibank legal staff and led directly to the sub prime excesses we are suffering through now. 

I think what Obama was trying to say was that revolutions are still possible. What Reagan accomplished was in getting his supporters to believe that the status quo was unacceptable. No one who knows Obama could believe that he was trying to hold out the neoconservative policies of Reagan as a model he would emulate. What he was trying to say was that America is capable of radical change and that change often comes from an inspirational leader not a bureaucrat.