The Trouble With Barack (Spoiler: he is not Reagan)--John Meachem

[underpants]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/232167?GT1=43002

Obama is accused of being too radical, but he's been governing from the middle for a year. So why all the anger? Because he's leading with his head, not his heart.

First, a bit of personal history. I am a Southerner, a churchgoer, and a swing voter in presidential elections. I believe America is a center-right nation. I am at work on a biography of George H.W. Bush. I pay plenty of taxes already, thanks, and I have no automatic faith in government's capacity to solve problems. I share these details to make clear that I am not a reflexive lefty. Far from it.

To me, however, the evidence fails to support the contention that the Barack Obama who governed from Jan. 20, 2009, to Jan. 20, 2010—the day after Scott Brown's defeat of Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race—was a Chicago Che or even an unreconstructed Great Society liberal. Obama is essentially a centrist. His world view cannot be easily consigned to the familiar categories of left and right. In fact, those categories have been obsolescent since George W. Bush effectively nationalized the banks and Obama won the nomination on a center-right cultural platform. No matter how simplistic competing cable networks try to make things, when you have a Republican president behaving like a European socialist and a Democratic president who opposes gay marriage and has added troops to Afghanistan, you are living in a volatile ideological age.

ne thing Obama could do without much pain would be to learn from the rhetorical clarity and practical flexibility of a president whose example he has often considered: Ronald Reagan. In legend, Reagan was a model of consistency, a leader who campaigned against government and the Soviet Union, stuck to his principles, carried the day at home and abroad, and became a rightly revered figure.

I am not arguing that Obama has tried to do too much, a trope that seems unmoored from the reality of the office. He could, however, stand to think about a soundbite or two (or three) that would give the country a clear sense of where he wants to leave us after his hour upon the stage.

Obama is no Gipper. He would be the first to tell you that. But there is hope. The last president who averaged a 57 percent job-approval rating for his first year? Ronald Reagan.