Obama's Point About Reagan

The atrocious coverage of our political discourse continues.

This was not an episode of Real World: Myrtle Beach. This was not even personal.

There was a single, important point being made by Barack Obama, which Hillary Clinton spent the night trying to muddy.

It was, what kind of leadership do we want in 2009? Do we want a transactive leader, someone who approaches each issue as a separate battle? Or do we want a transformative leader, one who changes how we think and constantly reminds us of the underlying cause?

Bill Clinton was a transactive leader. He had to be. He was a product of his time, and his time was the high point of the Nixon Thesis of Conflict, of High Reaganism. Building on the earlier work of Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis, working through the Democratic Leadership Council, he created an AntiThesis to the Nixon Thesis, and negotiated compromises which pushed things along in what he thought was the right direction.

Ronald Reagan was a transformative leader. He pushed themes, not details. He pushed ideology, assumptions, myths and values. He did this consistently, from the first time he spoke on behalf of General Electric in the 1950s, through his last acts as President in 1989.

Consistency is both a strength and a weakness in a transformative leader. We can argue about the impacts of Reagan's transformation in our political system all year. (I don't like it.) No one can argue that it's real. If it weren't Bill Clinton wouldn't have spent nearly his entire political career learning into that wind.

Most of our leaders, at a time of crisis, have been transformative in nature. Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt. Each redefined the political landscape, what it meant to be "left" or "right," right or wrong.

Nixon was the exception. Nixon was a transactional leader. He had spent his entire career before 1968 leaning against the New Deal Thesis, seeking first direct confrontation through McCarthyism, and later seeking to moderate it as Eisenhower's Vice President.

This decades'-long struggle changed him. It also brought his hatred, his paranoia, and his contempt for opponents into the heart of movement conservatism, from which it was never removed, from that day to this. Despite everything Reagan tried to do with his smiling, his warm voice, his aw-shucks manner, or his emphasis on themes over details, despite all of it, Nixon's paranoia became central to the Thesis of Conflict, and it remains so even today.

Reagan's well was poisoned before he got to it.

So the questions we have for the Clintons, questions only we the people can answer:

1. Have you really changed? Are you still transactive leaders, as you have been your entire careers?
2. Has leaning into the wind changed you? Hillary keeps talking about "fighting for 35 years." Is that what we're in for now, a fight?

There are also questions for Obama:

1. What exactly is the Thesis you're trying to get across. In simple words, please. Is it compromise, or consensus? Are there values there other than bonhomie?
2. Do transactive leaders have any place in your transformative era?

On this blog I have laid down our previous Thesis, what I take to be our next Thesis, and have indicated that I think Barack Obama embodies that Thesis more than anyone else. I believe that Hillary Clinton is as hated by the right today as Nixon was by the left 40 years ago, and that there's likely nothing that can be done about that.

I have supported John Edwards but I'm a realist. If it's a choice between just Obama and Clinton, I'm with Barack, and now I know why.

Maybe you do, too.