Obama Panders to Right, Throws Democrats Under the Bus

Obama said what? That the GOP has been the party of ideas for the last ten to fifteen years? Are you kidding me?

Two more videos, including the above, have emerged from Sen. Barack Obama’s interview with the rightwing editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal which later endorsed him (small wonder). [EDITOR'S NOTE/Correction: It is the Las Vegas Gazette-Journal that is conservative, according to MyDD. But it's a small point in that Obama's words stand, as do John Edwards' words below.]

It’s not just more evidence that Obama was willing to say whatever it took to get the conservative editorial board to endorse him. It’s worse. It’s much worse.

It is further evidence that not only does Obama have no sense of the history of the last half of the 20th century — wait until you see the video below the fold — but also that he really is as conservative as his weak health care plan and far weaker economic stimulus plan have hinted. (Then there’s his use of GOP scare-tactic talking points on Social Security, and how he has been embraced by the right — including George Will who last year compared Obama to Ronald Reagan [See "Obama Channels Reagan II."] .)

Paul Krugman is clearly dumbfounded, as am I. Here is the entirety of Krugman’s New York Times blog post today at 3:41 pm:

Reagan and Obama

Read Rick Perlstein. Rick is our premier historian of the rise of modern movement conservatism, and knows whereof he speaks.

What does Perlstein say?

One of the Democratic candidates is getting a bit of abuse for lionizing Ronald Reagan. Here’s part of the relevant quote:

Perlstein quotes Obama:

he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Perlstein adds, “Matt Stoller criticizes Obama thus“:

if you think, as Obama does, that Reagan’s rise to power was premised on a sunny optimism in contrast to an out of control government and a society rife with liberal excess, then you don’t understand the conservative movement. Reagan tapped into greed and fear and tribalism, and those are powerful forces. Ignoring that isn’t going to make them go away.

“He’s right,” Perlstein observes, then goes on:

He’s also right that accepting the right’s successful fantasy-frame about what Reagan was all about surrenders to one of their most successful strategies: affecting innocence about the terrible consequences of their own ideology in the here and now—helping conservatism, as an ideology, survive to fight another day:

“Why would the conservative movement create such idolatry around Reagan? Is is because they just want to honor a great man? Perhaps that is some of it. Or are they trying to escape the legacy of the conservative movement so that it can be rebuilt in a few years, as they did after Nixon, Reagan, and Bush I?

“Liberals always talk as if only the conservatives of our own generation were scary, and the conservatives of a previous generation kind of cuddly,” notes Perlstein. (Read all.)

Here’s the second new YouTube video from the conservative newspaper interview with Obama:

In one fell swoop, Obama disparages the success-filled, non-stop efforts of millions of people during the 1960s and 1970s, efforts that Matt Stoller lists vividly at Open Left blog:

Obama admires Reagan because he agrees with Reagan’s basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of ‘excesses’ and that government had grown large and unaccountable.

[STOLLER'S KEY LIST IS HERE] Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement. The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives to take advantage of the backlash against these ‘excesses’.

It is extremely disturbing to hear, not that Obama admires Reagan, but why he does so. Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship, but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power.

I remember what I did in 1981 after Ronald Reagan became president. I spent every lunch hour in downtown Seattle gathering signatures on Sierra Club petitions demanding that President Ronald Reagan fire James Watt, his Secretary of the Interior who was ready to bulldoze and sell off those “excesses” that Obama disparages — our country’s national parks, national lands, the Endangered Specist Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and on and on.

It was clear to me that President Reagan was trying to undo all the progressive gains that our nation had made in the last decades.

I felt like I was part of a desperate fight to stop us from sliding backwards.

John Edwards also remembers that era well. Via Dale Carrico at Amor Mundi blog:

As usual, it is John Edwards who responds as a person of democratic left actually should:

“When you think about what Ronald Reagan did to the American people, to the middle class to the working people,” said Edwards.

“He was openly -– openly -– intolerant of unions and the right to organize. He openly fought against the union and the organized labor movement in this country. He openly did extraordinary damage to the middle class and working people, created a tax structure that favored the very wealthiest Americans and caused the middle class and working people to struggle every single day. The destruction of the environment, you know, eliminating regulation of companies that were polluting and doing extraordinary damage to the environment.”

“I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.”

Carrico nails it:

In my Audacity of Hype post earlier this week I castigated uncritical Obamaniacs that Hope Without Fight Is Hype and tried to illustrate this point with what I imagined at the time to be something of a stretch as analogies go: Reagan talked about hope. Reagan talked about “Morning in America” as he set out to destroy the achievements of the New Deal and the Summer of Love. That’s when our long national nightmare of corporatism and theocratic pandering began.

Well, Sen. Obama, there was the Reagan public persona, and then there was the Reagan private agenda: Ronald Reagan “borrowed Teddy Kennedy’s nationalist rhetoric … echoed Carter’s incessant talk against Washington, and festooned his speeches with quotations from FDR,” writes Sidney Blumenthal in his 2003 memoir. But, Reagan — just like George W. Bush — “was astonishingly successful in his plan to paralyze the federal government.”

After a rush in his first year to pass an enormous regressive tax cut, accompanied by a large increase in the military budget … Reagan was a president at leisure. He delegated his authority and paid little attention to detail. … His achievement of presiding over a government that permitted the federal deficit to grow to astronomical proportions made a federal social policy virtually impossible to realize. Once he learned that the supply-side economic theory his advisers had advocated was backfiring, producing deficits instead of the promised Niagara of revenues, he was pleased with the deadening effect. He revived the grandeur of the presidency for his stage set but put the executive branch to sleep.

Obama has a dreamy attitude about the presidency. He thinks he can just be the “vision” guy and get “smarter people” around himself, and that the governing will take care of itself.

Never mind that George W. Bush — taking off where Ronald Reagan began — has decimated all key federal agencies of their most experienced staffers and devastated the agencies’ budgets, so much so that some will have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Where will that new president begin? The devastated Department of Justice? The Food and Drug Administration? The Consumer Protection Safety Commission? Every branch of the U.S. military? The Veterans Administration? The Evironmental Protection Agency? Medicare? The Department of Education?

The list of essential federal agencies near death from personnel and budgetary starvation goes on and on. Then there’s our decimated military suffering from worn-out soldiers and equipment.

The new president will have innumerable Herculian tasks to face. Only the most dedicated and hardest-working president will begin to succeed in rebuilding these vital federal institutions.

And Obama thinks that being inspirational will cut it? That being sunny like Reagan — one of our laziest presidents in history — will get the job done?

Give me the worker. Good god, give me the worker.

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P.S. Screw the Democratic party and the Democratic primary . Republicans, you can be a Democrat for a single day, and then go back to your Trent-Lott-lovin’, Tom-DeLay-lovin’, Mitch-McConnell-lovin’ ways! Come on!

P.P.S. I’m a lot more like you than I let on to the Democrats. (Wink.) Just so you know, I’m on your side! Shhhh, don’t let ‘em know. I’m not on the side of those tax-and-spend liberals! Oh yeah, baby, we can make music together! That’s why my economic stimulus plan has TAX CUTS as its feature, not that mortgage help that John and Hillary want to give people. No sirree. Just tax cuts for you people who HAVE jobs. Those without can make do. That’s right.