Posted on 07/19/2008 11:45:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
It could have been a coincidence when Barack Obama gave a major policy speech last week at a building named after former President Ronald Reagan. But it comes from the same campaign that until yesterday had pushed to hold a major foreign policy address at the Brandenburg Gate, where Ronald Reagan in 1987 famously demanded of his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
During his bid for the presidency, Obama has repeatedly praised the political gifts of Reagan, the modern president most revered by Republicans, and whose policies are still held in contempt by many leading liberals.
A year ago Obama compared Reagan favorably to President Bush in a primary debate while defending his pledge to meet directly with the leaders of hostile nations without preconditions. “Ronald Reagan called [Russia] an evil empire,” said Obama, but he also “spoke to the Soviet Union.”
In January, Obama came under fire from within his party after casting himself as an emotive heir to Reagan. “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America,” Obama told a Nevada newspaper in January, noting that Reagan “tapped into what people were already feeling, which is: We want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
David Bonior, then John Edwards' campaign manager, charged that Obama was “wrong, frightfully so, in using Ronald Reagan as an example of voters reaching for change. The breadth of change Ronald Reagan brought was crippling for millions of Americans.”
While Obama made clear that he did not say that he liked Ronald Reagan’s policies, this past week the Democratic candidate made his boldest claim yet to the sunny mantle of the Republican president nicknamed “the great communicator.” As part of his much-touted trip abroad, Obama had hoped to deliver his climatic foreign policy address at the Brandenburg Gate, according to several high-ranking officials associated with the campaign and familiar with the visit’s logistics.
The plan sparked several days of high-profile debate in Germany, where Obama is extremely popular but many feared allowing him to use the venue would embroil Germany in America’s domestic politics.
After Chancellor Angela Merkel deemed the Democratic candidate’s request to use the presidential setting “a bit odd,” Obama foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough yesterday appeared to shut the door on the venue, which he denied had been or was being considered, saying, “The one thing that Barack made clear to us very early is that he didn’t think it made sense at all for him to speak at the Brandenburg Gate which he thought would be, perhaps, too presumptuous.”
The claim, though, came after several days of widely circulated reports previously uncontested by the campaign and confirmed by Politico indicating the campaign had been planning to have Obama speak at the gate.
Reagan’s presidential advisers have taken note of Obama’s apparent preference for the gate over the Schoneberg town hall, where President Kennedy famously declared to the 1.4 million assembled Germans, "Ich bin ein Berliner.”
Reagan’s chief speech writer Tony Dolan, who drafted the 1983 “evil empire” speech, said of Obama’s attempt to speak at the Gate, “This is a French critic endorsing German opera. It’s that shocking. Believe me — the Sens. Obama of his day were among Reagan’s harshest critics.”
Dolan, who termed Obama’s attempt to speak at Brandenburg “absolutely an affirmation” of the rhetoric the Democratic candidate criticizes Bush for employing, recalls French newspaper headlines calling Reagan “la cowboy.” Critics around the globe — and on both sides of the Iron Curtain — regularly dismissed the president as a gun-slinging buckaroo.
At his speech at the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, Jesse Jackson cracked, “I would rather have Roosevelt in a wheelchair than Reagan on a horse.” Four years later, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis said he hoped to work more with allies and change America’s role in the world, instead of “wandering around the world like a lonesome cowboy.”
“The idea that Ronald Reagan was a unifying figure, that the nation rallied around him, that politics were not divisive in that time, is wrong,” said Peter Robinson, who drafted the “tear down this wall” speech. “Ronald Reagan was denounced again and again and again from the beginning of his presidency through to the very end.”
“I myself, in my campaign for president, mentioned that I thought Reagan deserved credit for pervading an optimistic feeling in America,” said Walter Mondale, the 1984 Democratic nominee.
“They’re looking for the best of the past, whether it’s John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. These were very popular presidents,” added Geraldine Ferraro, Mondale’s running mate. “We thought his policies were disastrous. But people loved him.”
Mondale, who had not considered the symbolism of Obama’s attempt to speak at Brandenburg, recalls the concerns he felt at the time of Reagan’s address.
“I don’t think I would have said that [speech], not because I did not want the wall to fall down,” Mondale said. “But I would have been fearful that this direct confrontational rhetoric would strengthen hardliners in the Soviet Union and delay bringing the wall down.”
Looking back earlier this week on Obama’s previous praise of Reagan, Mario Cuomo asked, rhetorically, “What did Reagan transform?”
He answered: “It wasn’t morning in America. If you are saying he transformed Americans toward a new hopefulness, hopefulness doesn’t buy peace, it doesn’t buy jobs.”
“What [Obama] is trying to do obviously is look big, look important, the way Reagan looked big,” Cuomo said. “Having 80,000 people in an auditorium is probably a way to do that, it’s huge,” he added, referencing the arena scheduled for Obama’s convention speech. “And now the Brandenburg Gate.”
“Those men both went with something profound to say,” Robinson said of Reagan and Kennedy’s famous German speeches. “And so far Barack Obama is a politician who speaks nicely. If what you are seeking is a photo shoot where giants stood, he could look small.”
Perhaps, but it’s a tactic he learned from a previous candidate. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan was asked why he so often quoted former Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Kennedy.
“Show me a quotable recent Republican president,” Reagan replied. “JFK’s a hero, and helpful if you’re going after the blue-collar votes — the same way Franklin Roosevelt is.”
DemocRATS need to use this stolen identity tactic to get elected. Who in their right mind would want to vote for a “community organizer” named Barack Hussein Obama? All a ‘RAT can they can do is try to convince the voters that they are really voting for someone else like Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy.
Well, he is like any typical liberal who is always trying to fool everyone without realizing that he is the fool
He isn’t even close to Jimmy Carter... who ranks below a turd IMO.
Yeah, but he difference is Reagan was on OUR side!
To have a whole article written along those lines, is an outrage.
Exactly, and Obama isn’t even on America’s side
Beware of the chameleon. This inexperienced liberal socialist punk has no moral or social foundation so he high-jacks a personality or persona as his own and persuades the dopey American lemmings with the help of the scab media into believing he has a plan, when all he has is an empty head! WAKE UP PEOPLE!
Barack is an Obamination..
Reagan had a sense of humor, and demurred in self-importance. Barry is humorless, and wallows in the Messianic image.
BO is pandering to the Reagan Democrats...
And what exactly is a “major speech” anyway — is it any kind of substitute for a major accomplishment?
Dufus Bambi really does believe the lefty lies that Reagan was an aged senile imbecile who just had great PR/media people and thats how he got elected.
“Obama is no Ronald Reagan, and will never be. No matter how hard he tries”
Ditto.
Just more blasphemy from the Obamessiah...
btt
In a billion years , Obama would never qualify to be a hair on Reagan’s balls ..
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