Mount Ronmore


Krugman does some debunking, although he concludes, grudging or not, by accepting Obama's premise that Bill Clinton did NOT "change America's trajectory the way Ronald Reagan did"--

Why?

Well, I’d say that the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan.

Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.

Well, without trying to burst any bubbles, it might not be a bad idea to go back even further and recognize that, for all the good he's done post-presidency, and for all the external factors that worked against his administration, Mr. James Earl Carter helped set the table for Reaganism/trickle-down. Carter can in some ways be viewed as the original neo-liberal, which was a popular term when I was young (see Tsongas, Paul). Instead of vigorously defending the economic and social programs that were clearly the next steps of both the civil rights movement AND an acceptance of progressive government in general, Carter chose to believe the myth "failed social programs." On the other hand, he was quite proud of requesting an increase in military spending; he and Zbigniew Brzezinski initiated the destabilization program in Afghanistan that precipitated the Afghan-Soviet war, but also spawned a movement towards fundamentalist Islam which had to that point been virtually nonexistent. Can we all say "blowback?"

To be sure, Carter was far less odious than Reagan or either of the Bushes, but less odious doesn't mean acceptable, unless...well, I guess unless you're perpetually locked into a "lesser of evils" scenario, which is the state of presidential politics, I guess.