President Obama is not taking a page out of the Ronald Reagan playbook for his final two years in office.
Even though Reagan is credited with engineering the most dramatic turnaround for a lame-duck president facing an opposition Congress, Obama sees little need for the fresh-start message employed by the Republican commander in chief in year seven of his tenure.
Rather than use embarrassing midterm defeats to make a course correction, as Reagan did, Obama has become increasingly defiant, insisting that a recent uptick in economic confidence — and his approval ratings — validates his approach.
Reagan shook up his senior staff in an effort to show the American public and lawmakers that he was receptive to new ideas. But aside from minor tinkering, Obama is sticking with a tight-knit inner circle and promising few changes in his approach to governing.
Those looking for a more conciliatory Obama were taken aback not only by his downplaying of the midterm elections in which Democrats were shellacked, but also by the unabashedly progressive tone of his State of the Union address and proposed federal budget for next year.
“I was fascinated by it,” Stephen Hess, a former adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter said of Obama’s attempts to sweep aside the results of the midterms.
“I guess Obama thought that if he’s in the cellar, he might as well look up,” Hess added. “He certainly has responded in a very aggressive way. He’s concluded that he can’t get very much with the Reagan approach.”
While Reagan was largely rewarded for changing gears, Obama is out to prove that he can win over Americans through a full-throated defense of his policies.
The Obama White House already has issued the most formal veto threats to begin a new Congress since the Reagan administration began formalizing the practice.
Some of Reagan’s aides say Obama should follow the Republican’s blueprint.
“When we lost the Senate in ’86, the staff was directed to put together ‘floating coalitions,’ ” Frank Donatelli, Reagan’s former political director, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s a marked contrast to what we’ve seen from Obama so far. To just threaten vetoes is a very dangerous game in the long run. The president is expected to be more than a goalie. I think Obama confuses the role of president and chairman of the Democratic National Committee.”
The Obama-Reagan comparison is a natural one, presidential historians say.
“For all of the differences in their agendas at this point in their presidencies, they both stood at [similar marks] on the public’s approval of how they were handling their job,” said presidential historian Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University who focuses on White House communication.
“At this point in his presidency, he had signed his immigration reform bill and tax reform a month before that,” she added of Reagan. “So the second-term important domestic issues were settled policy at this point.”
Still, Reagan went on to sign a major welfare overhaul and legislation to combat homelessness, had Supreme Court nominee Anthony Kennedy confirmed and scored a series of foreign policy wins, such as finalizing a nuclear weapons deal with the Soviet Union.
Even if Obama’s tactics don’t mirror Reagan’s, the president would certainly welcome the Republican’s results, especially when compared to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
The last quarter of Clinton’s presidency was engulfed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Bush’s poll numbers never recovered as he faded into relative obscurity. Fatigue over the Iraq War was Bush’s undoing, and the 2008 financial crisis only made matters worse for the Texan.
Both Obama and Reagan had approval ratings in the mid-to-high 40s at the start of year seven in their White House tenures. Ultimately, Reagan left office with an approval rating above 60 percent.
Obama’s hope now is that historians will look back at the last few weeks as a turning point rather than an outlier.
The White House still points to areas of potential bipartisan compromise, such as trade, cybersecurity, infrastructure spending and modest tax reform. But even White House officials conceded that those efforts have been overshadowed by Obama’s latest push to fight Republicans.
“The president isn’t opposed to Republican ideas,” a senior administration official told the Examiner. “He’s opposed to bad Republican ideas. There’s no point in doing something merely for the sake of bipartisanship if it’s bad policy. He won’t back down on that principle.”
