At first glance, it probably seems odd that so many Democratic Party presidential hopefuls are trashing the legacy of President Barack Obama.
The 44th president, after all, enjoys a 60 percent approval rating among Americans, according to Gallup — and that number spikes to over 90 percent among Democrats. One imagines someone with Obama’s popularity would be an invaluable ally in beating President Trump.
“The GOP didn’t attack [President Ronald] Reagan, they built him up for decades,” progressive think-tanker Neera Tanden warned Democrats like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris after the most recent presidential primary debate. “Dem candidates who attack Obama are wrong and terrible. Obama wasn’t perfect, but come on, people, next to Trump, he kind of is.”
But the Obama-Reagan comparison doesn’t quite work. Though Obama received hagiographic treatment from most of the media while he was in office, Reagan is, in every measurable way, a more enduring political figure in American life. Not only did Reagan lead a movement that conceived and enacted lasting legislative reforms, his presidency transformed the contours of our political discourse.
Add to that the fact that both ends of Reagan’s term are punctuated by achievements with historic resonance: first the lifting the 1970s economic malaise and then the imminent end of the Cold War.
Obama, on the other hand, presided over the slowest economic recovery in American history, and his most notable legislation, the Affordable Care Act, produced a divisiveness that paralyzed Washington for years.
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