Obama through the lens of Reagan

Clarence Page is a columnist and member of the editorial board at the Chicago Tribune.

President Ronald Reagan didn't care much about his legacy, he used to joke, since he wouldn't be around to read it. If he were, he'd have lot to read - and chuckle about.

Reagan's 100th birthday anniversary is today, and a small blizzard of articles and commentaries marvel at his similarities to President Barack Obama. I am fascinated just as much by their differences.

Obama struggles against the rap that he's "too professorial," but Reagan was seldom called an intellectual. Yet, Robert McFarlane, a Reagan national security adviser, once said, "[Reagan] knows so little and accomplishes so much."

Driven by his conservative ideals, Reagan combined his acting skills, people skills and political savvy into what one biographer called "the role of a lifetime." He could sell many Americans on the virtues of smaller government - even as he signed bills that made it bigger.

He never submitted a balanced budget during his eight years in the White House despite his declarations that government doesn't solve problems because "government is the problem." Yet he managed to change national presumptions about activist government that had remained almost untouchable since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The Reagan transformation helps explain why some of the proposals in Obama's recent State of the Union address sounded so Reaganesque: a freeze in discretionary spending and federal salaries, a wish to simplify the tax code, cuts to the Defense Department budget, and a call for a bipartisan effort to fix Social Security. As a Time magazine cover story headlined "Why Obama (heart) Reagan," observes, each of these ideas also was proposed by Reagan after his own party suffered a midterm defeat during a time of high unemployment.

Yet the same comparisons could have been made between Reagan and president Bill Clinton.

Under pressure to govern despite midterm election setbacks and hostile congressional leaders, Reagan, Clinton and Obama gave a vigorous voice to their political base while signing compromises with their political opponents. Yet Clinton and Obama operated within the Reagan template in ways that showed Reagan's legacy: Sell sunny optimism, while casting your opponents as gloomy doomsayers.

That makes Reagan, love him or not, a "transformational leader": He took a visionary position and inspired people to follow. By contrast, a "transactional leader" may speak of "hope" and "change" but mostly works within existing assumptions of reward and punishment to get things done.

Reagan, in transformational style, declared a clear and simple ideology and stuck with it, regardless of what short-term compromises he had to make to move legislation. As a result he is an icon on the right, reverently cited in Republican primary debates. Meanwhile, the biggest complaint you hear from Obama's side is how uneasily the current president fits into any ideological box narrower than "center-left."

In the long run, Obama still has a chance to be seen by history as transformational. If his health care overhaul, for example, survives legal and legislative challenges and wins the hearts of the public in the way of Medicare - which Reagan opposed in the 1960s as creeping socialism - Obama could restore the belief that government can solve problems, not just be one.

"What I would really like to do," Reagan once said, "is to go down in history as the president who made Americans believe in themselves again." Obama's election in itself helped to do that. Doing it with his presidency will be tougher.