Though the idea isn?t new, TIME magazine goes out of its way in the latest issue to link Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. A photoshopped cover shows Reagan wrapping his arm around a smiling Obama, while another doctored interior photo links the two presidents? faces. The cover story even features matching photos of Reagan and Obama pretending to throw footballs in the Oval Office. (At least no one placed a cowboy hat on our current president’s head and asked him to ride a horse.)
But while the same story labels the 40th president ?The Role Model? for the 44th, it?s clear that Obama hopes to emulate Reagan?s style rather than his substance.
No one was unclear about Reagan’s guiding philosophy: “Government is the problem,” he declared on his Inauguration Day, and by then he had been saying it for nearly 20 years. Obama’s is more complex. He wants to reset the public’s attitude toward government, reverse 30 years of skepticism and mistrust and usher in a new era in which government solutions are again seen as part of the answer to the nation’s ills. But the yearlong health care debate only reminded Americans of government’s tendency to slow things down, muddle the choices and perhaps make them more expensive. A September Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans had a negative impression of the federal government; they used words like too big, confused and corrupt to describe it. Obama’s signature initiative, a vast expansion of the federal role in health care, has mostly polled under 50% since mid-2009.
