Presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, 37, is declaring an imminent end to the era of Ronald Reagan, a break from Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi who often evoke the 40th president while laying out their vision for the future.
“The New Deal era lasted almost 50 years only to come to an end with Reagan,” Buttigieg said in a speech at the Young Democrats National Convention in Indianapolis Thursday night. “That the Reagan era lasted the next 40 years with even Democrats sometimes acting like the only thing you can ever do to a tax is cut, the only thing you ought to do with government is shrink it.”
“The New Deal era ended with Reagan. The Reagan era ends with us,” he said.
Establishment Democrats take a much different tone toward the former president than the South Bend, Indiana mayor, who was born during the first term of Reagan’s presidency.
House Speaker Pelosi said last year that Reagan “is the president I quote the most.” She repeatedly references his Jan. 19, 1989, farewell speech, in which he said: “If we ever close the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world will soon be lost.”
A House resolution passed this week that condemned President Trump’s tweet telling minority congresswomen to “go back” where they came from extensively quoted from the same Reagan speech, including lines that called the U.S. “a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world” and lauded America’s “magical, intoxicating power.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has also pointed to the Reagan years as a model. The New York Democrat, first elected to the House in 1980 as Reagan won the White House, said he yearned for the “substance and the process of the 1986 Tax Reform Act” signed by Reagan, in an op-ed two years ago condemning how Republicans and the Trump administration quickly crafted the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Barack Obama took heat after he said that “Ronald Reagan changed the direction of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.” Hillary Clinton later criticized Obama’s comments, arguing that he expressed admiration for Reagan.
“With all the excesses of the ’60s and ’70s and you know, government had grown and grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating,” Obama said. “He tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and … entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
Obama reportedly wanted to be a “big picture president” like Reagan, according to his White House photographer Pete Souza.
Lately, Democrats reference Reagan not because they agree with most of his policies, but in order “to ask Republicans to choose between Reagan and Trump,” as New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski said in a profile earlier this month. They point to Reagan as a model for civility between Democrats and Republicans.
Buttigieg, unlike older Democratic presidential candidates such as former Vice President Joe Biden, rejects nostalgia for the past.
“Don’t listen to anybody in either party who says we can just go back to what we were doing,” he told a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa in June.
Buttigieg used his youth and fresh perspective as selling points at the Young Democrats convention on Thursday.
“Older generations are counting on the younger generations to help break the spell that this president has cast,” Buttigieg said. “We are leading a generational alliance that will finally open the new era in American politics and life.”
The new era, if all goes according to the 37-year-old’s plan, could be the Buttigieg one.
