Barack Obama’s re-christening has arrived. It commenced with a
small private ceremony January 20, Sunday — God’s day. The
actual festivities, with the inaugural address and the grandstand
and mass liberal adulation and veneration, occur Monday, January
21. For those angry liberals who
urged Obama to banish the Almighty from the inaugural, they can
take solace in the public ceremony (traditionally held on January
20) not occurring on the Christian holy day.
Alas, with Obama’s re-coronation, liberals are glorying in an
altogether new epoch, one of supreme significance to their
ideological resurgence: the end of the Reagan era. They’ve desired
it for decades, and you can feel it, see it, smell it at their
websites and blogs. One recent book carries the breathless title,
Barack Obama’s America: How New Conceptions of Race, Family,
and Religion Ended the Reagan Era.
Sadly, I must admit, as a Reagan scholar and admirer, that they
are largely correct. Obama’s reelection does, to a notable degree,
end the Reagan era. We are now in the snares of a despairing period
of left-wing ascendance, marked by gay marriage, forced taxpayer
funding of abortion, an
exploding government class, and, generally big government. As
to the latter, Ronald Reagan had declared in his first inaugural:
“government is not the solution … government is the problem.” The
first Democrat to follow Reagan, Bill Clinton, had similarly stated
“the era of big government is over.” Clinton’s affirmation was also
affirmation of the continuation of the Reagan era.
And then came Barack Obama. Just days after his 2009
inauguration, Obama smashed the Reagan mantle, proclaiming: “the
federal government is the only entity left with the resources to
jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can
break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending
less money which leads to even more layoffs.”
Yes, “only government.” Obama had repudiated Reagan,
and the electorate would again reward him four years later. What
Obama called for 2009 seems to be the new American spirit in
2013.
But is it? Well, the answer is complicated.
For one, Barack Obama is indeed in the process of undoing the
Reagan era. He has done so courtesy of a hopelessly oblivious
American public, one that exhibits mindlessly schizophrenic voting
behavior. Let history record a positively confounding reality that
will baffle future historians (if they dig deep enough): The Obama
era supplanted the Reagan era thanks to a self-contradicting voting
public, one that adores Reagan, refers to him in opinion polls as
the greatest of our presidents, and that overwhelming describes
itself as conservative rather than liberal. All unbelievable, yes,
but true. It is bizarre.
Consider the painful facts:
For a long time now, starting with the Reagan presidency,
Americans have called themselves “conservative” rather than
“liberal” by margins of roughly two-to-one. Generally,
self-identified liberals have hovered around the 20% level, while
conservatives have ranged in the upper-30%, sometimes above 40%. In
2000, the year George W. Bush was elected president, 18% of
Americans said they were liberal vs. 36% who said they were
conservative.
Surely this must have changed in 2008, with the election of
Obama? After all, before he was elected president, Senator Barack
Obama was ranked the most liberal member of a very liberal U.S.
Senate by the respected, non-partisan National Journal,
which is famous for its rankings of members of Congress. Obama was
literally to the left of Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy. In short,
then, the decisive majority of Americans that elected Obama
president in 2008 must have been an overwhelmingly liberal lot?
That’s where the confusion sets in. No, it wasn’t a liberal
lot.
Despite Obama winning the presidency by 54 to 46%, 21% of
Americans who voted in the 2008 election said they were liberal vs.
38% who said they were conservative.
If that seems contradictory for a nation that voted for a man
from the far left as president… well, it is. But it gets worse.
Consider the findings of other surveys done shortly after Obama’s
2008 election:
A major Gallup poll conducted from January to May 2009, at the
height of “Obama mania,” including Obama’s massive inaugural
ceremony, found more self-described conservatives than liberals not
only by a margin of 40% to 21% but in all 50 states. That’s
correct, all 50 states, from California to Massachusetts. And that
electorate chose Obama.
It also chose Reagan. During that same period, a remarkable
nationwide survey was done by Clarus Research Group, which asked
American voters which president should be the model for Barack
Obama in shaping his presidency. One would expect Americans to pick
a liberal president — since, of course, Obama is a leftist. Perhaps
FDR, LBJ, Jimmy Carter. Instead, the top choice was America’s most
conservative president: Ronald Reagan.
How could that be? Answer: it cannot. It is impossible. Barack
Obama could never model his presidency on that of Ronald Reagan.
The two are irreconcilable. You cannot take a president who is a
paragon of liberalism and one who was a paragon of conservatism and
match them ideologically.
On the other hand, it isn’t a shock that Americans would look to
Reagan as their model for the current president. Two years after
the Clarus survey, a Gallup poll released for Presidents’ Day 2011
ranked Reagan the “greatest president” of all time, garnering 19%
of the vote among 44 presidents, beating Lincoln fairly soundly,
who finished second at 14%. Gallup began asking the “greatest
president” question in 1999. Of the 13 times Gallup has done the
survey, the public placed Reagan first four times — 2001, 2005,
2011, and 2012 — and always in the top three. A Zogby poll likewise
released for Presidents’ Day 2011, which asked about presidents
since World War II, listed Reagan as the “greatest,” with FDR
second and Kennedy third. And get this one: an extraordinary June
2005 online survey by the Discovery Channel and AOL (which included
2.4 million participants) declared Reagan the “greatest American of
all time,” beating Lincoln and Washington.
This raises an inexplicable question: How does that same
citizenry twice elect Barack Obama? That’s a darned good
question.
Well, maybe this sudden admiration for Reagan conservatism
suddenly changed in November 2012? Something must have shifted,
right? Surely, there must have been far more self-identified
liberals than conservatives in the November election?
Nope, though liberals did draw a little closer.
According to CNN exit polling, 35% of voters on November 6,
2012 described themselves as “conservative,” and 25% chose
“liberal.” This was identical to a
Pew poll that likewise found a margin of 35-25%.
This also applies to the critical Hispanic vote, which went for
Obama by a landslide in November. In
one survey from the election, Hispanics self-identified as
conservatives over liberal by two to one, 27% to 14%. That’s no
surprise whatsoever. Hispanics are socially conservative. They are
Catholic, churchgoing, pro-life, and don’t support gay marriage.
They should not have voted for Obama at all, let alone by over 70%,
as they did.
Importantly, some conservatives have disputed these
self-designations, insisting that many of those who describe
themselves as conservative really aren’t, and that there are more
liberals than those willing to admit it. Here and there, that may
be true. But, overall, I think the designations are probably fairly
accurate, and have been consistent for a long time now. After all,
when you break down the data, and ask voters questions like whether
they prefer more taxes and more government, well, they generally
don’t — even when they vote that way. They favor the conservative
vision. It appeals to them. And though your television may have
convinced you that half of America is gay, well, it’s far and away
not — and the vast majority don’t support gay marriage either (not
yet), or taxpayer-funding of abortion. No, but they vote for
candidates who do.
There are untold numbers of Hispanics and also blacks who
plainly are not liberal, who are especially conservative on social
and religious issues, but who vote Democrat reflexively. They’re
not alone. There are countless old, traditional Roman Catholics (a
demographic I know very well) who do the same.
So, what does all of this mean, particularly as applied to the
Reagan era?
It means that a self-described conservative, Reagan-loving
electorate has twice voted for a hardcore leftist, Barack Obama,
to, in effect, end the Reagan era. That wasn’t the intent, but
that’s the result.
Thus, it also means — and this would shock Ronald Reagan — that
we conservatives really cannot trust the American public. Reagan,
of course, insisted just the opposite; he was the quintessential
optimist, with an unflagging faith in the American people. He had
the greatest confidence in his fellow Americans.
The deeper truth, however, is that the American voter
cannot be trusted; the American voter cannot be depended upon to
vote rationally. Other elements, far more decisive, influence their
voting behavior, such as (among others) the personalities and
personas and public images of presidential candidates, the
campaigns run by the candidates and their advisers (the
David Axelrod factor), and, most critically of all, the liberal
mainstream media that serves as a 24/7 full-time
partisan/propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. In fact, related
to that media point: what Ronald Reagan actually said was that if
the American public is presented with both sides, it will always
make the right choice.
Well, maybe.
I’ll end with a dose of Reagan optimism: All of this also means
that the Reagan ideal is not over. I believe that most Americans
(for now) still prefer the principles of Reagan and his view of
government over those of Obama. That is because the Reagan
principles are ultimately time-tested and true; they are the
universal, unalienable principles of the Founders, rooted in
eternal Judeo-Christian values and Natural Law. When liberalism is
laid bare, it loses because it is unappealing. Leftists like Barack
Obama still must mask their real beliefs and intentions. A
conservative like Ronald Reagan never had to do that with
conservatism.
What will it take to resurrect the Reagan era? It will take the
right Republican presidential candidate and the right campaign, and
Republicans unifying and rallying behind the candidate — and not
joining the New York Times and liberal smear-artists in
attacking and demonizing our guy (or girl). Or, as another (less
appealing) alternative, it might require a moderate or rare
conservative Democrat, the next pied-piper to lead the
unquestioning Democrat masses. (That’s quite easy to do; Democrats
will vote for and follow any Democrat, regardless of that
Democrat’s beliefs. A moderate or conservative Democrat could stand
against and repudiate absolutely everything Obama did and fellow
Democrats would still support him.)
The Reagan vision and values are already here, ready to be
tapped and to again prevail. They merely require the right
spokesman, and Obama’s exit from the presidency. Once Obama is out
in 2016, we can start anew, again.
Barack Obama’s second inauguration ends the Reagan run that
began in 1981 and dominated for nearly three decades, but it
doesn’t end what Ronald Reagan believed. Reaganism remains. It
lives on, outliving Obamaism.
