Gosh, I sure hope Obama doesn’t channel Reagan

Reagan was a nice enough man — but a terrible president. I know, I know, you’re not supposed to say this. Even political opponents are supposed to recognize and applaud his sunny disposition, his death grip on various bromides, his mystical connection with the voters, the wisdom in his simple view of a complicated world and so on. I am unpersuaded…

Whatever he may have said in his second State of the Union speech, Reagan was obviously not a man for cutting the defense budget. As for tax reform, it was a defensive response to criticism that his tax cut the previous year had been too kind to the well-to-do. Obama, who also has displayed little interest in tax simplification, threw it into the stew to allay critics saying he was too tough on the well-to-do.

The third category of evidence is noncoincidences: actions and remarks so general or unobjectionable and so commonplace that they could be used to tie any president to any other. Reagan once said, “Let us … concentrate on the long-range, bipartisan responsibilities of government.” Obama has “made compromise his new watchword.” Obama wrote of Reagan that he “recognized the American people’s hunger for accountability and change.” Never mind that bipartisanship was never a big Reagan theme. Nor was compromise ever his watchword, nor accountability, nor change.