On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Given the constitutional strictures on radical political changes in the
> U.S. - divided government, the Senate, etc. - Reagan's transformation of
> U.S. politics was remarkable. Sure he signed the SALT treaties, but he
> crushed the Nicaraguan revolution and did more than a little to bring
> down the USSR. Firing PATCO was the signal to begin open season on
> unions.
All of those were Democratic party policies carried out in large part by ex-Democrats. The PATCO plan, as you well know, was prepared by Carter, who also initiated the drive towards mass deregulation. And crushing the Nicarauguan revolution most vehementally point-manned by the neoconservatives who, the year before they switched to Reagan, were Jackson Democrats (and who were regarded by deep suspicion by all parts of the Republican party).
I don't disagree with you at all that Reagan left a huge transformative impact. But it wasn't by bringing in new ideas. It was by mobilizing huge support for them. And the ideas that he mobilized support around were not those that distinguished him personally. They were those he shared with the Nixonian mainstream that his supporters always hated. He got those supporters to swallow those ideas, and he got the country to swallow them (when it looked like it was going the other way. He brought back the classical cold war four years after the Church committee had seemingly killed it.)
What I'm saying is that emptiness of charismatic reference was the main club Reagan wielded. And I'm not saying anything new. It widely noted (and decried) at the time and afterwards. Detailed rhetorical analyses on the subject were written by Mary Stuckey in a series of books. A more general and more popular analysis was Michael Rogin's _Ronald Reagan: the Movie_. And it was a constant tropes in hundreds of magazine articles.
This all goes to your point that Reagan had something Obama doesn't. And I'm saying no, from the looks of it, they had exactly the same thing, charismatic rhetoric and delivery. Reagan did a lot for his side with that weapon. Solidifying his party meant betraying every faction of it on major points in order to unify them into a whole. And the result was, as you say, to change the categories and vocabulary of the country's political discourse from one side to the other in a way that has lasted for decades.
Whether Obama does the same is completely open to question. But the emptiness of reference he wields is not something new or something stupid or something impotent. His MLK cadences may be trite and sentimental. But no more than Reagan's movie role tropes. The point is, in both cases, they work -- and not least *because* they are trite and sentimental, aka well-established and heart-tugging.
Michael