Understanding Obama in historical context

(WARNING WARNING WARNING: This post is long, contains no horcerace analysis of the primaries/caucuses, and is not funny. Proceed at your own risk. --M.)

I've been following with some interest the flap over Obama and Reagan in the past few days. Every blogger in the world has been writing about it at length; Obama's statements have been parsed into total incoherence and Reagan's legacy has been debated with an intensity usually reserved for, I don't know, non-dead politicians. There's no way to summarize this sprawling argument, though some starting-points are Matt Stoller, Ezra Klein, Digby, Big Tent Democrat, Paul Rosenberg, Kos, and Dem Apples veteran Josh Patashnik. Good luck.

What I want to focus on, though, is not the political and ideological implications of this debate (which have been done to death) but the largely-overlooked historical and cultural ones. More than any other of this year's campaigns, Obama 2008 has been deeply and fundamentally tied in with a number of complexes about the 1960s and 1970s (as I have written before), complexes which have little salience among the general public but a great deal among high-information political elites (Obama's target market). The injection of Ronald Reagan into the debate, and let's not pretend it wasn't deliberate, is calculated perfectly to play into those complexes and further promote the 1970s mindset in which his campaign makes the most sense. All politics is ultimately about the past, but it is rarely this obvious -- and it's extremely bad for the Democratic Party. Join me after the jump and I'll explain.

Read more »

Rudy's slipping in the polls? Iran's not evil? Quick, men! To the time machine!

Look what the cat dragged in:

Yes, Rudy Giuliani's latest ad is all about Iran--- but not the Iran you're thinking of, with the nuclear disarmament and protesting students and other such annoying complexities. (Completely true: that declassified NIE report sank a CNN special planned for the 12th called "CNN PRESENTS: We Were Warned -- Iran Goes Nuclear". Darn reality, always ruining a good story!) No, Giuliani wants to talk about the Big Evil Retro Iran of 1980, a presumably safer choice and certainly a more perfect foil for his macho Reagan fantasies -- emphasis on "fantasies". Giuliani really wants us to think that "Rambo" Reagan being in office for an hour caused Iranian terrorists to burst into tears and lay down their arms. It'd be poignant if it wasn't so fucking retarded.

The brilliant Phil Nugent explains the real facts and context very well. All I want to point out in addition is that this follows a pattern I've seen among Republicans for years: that for some presumably psychological reason, they have absolutely no idea what decade it is. The concept of historical context simply eludes these people. Just as they do not understand the difference between TV and real life, conservatives likewise do not grasp the difference between the past and the present; hence this totally earnest attempt to pretend it's still the age when gas cost $1.20 a gallon and Ron Reagan rode around on his horse. To a man, they see nothing wrong with this escapist drivel; I fully expect Mitt Romney to respond with an ad invoking the Miracle on Ice. (And Fred Thompson, who's been doing the Cold War thing for some time, will probably just keep pedaling backwards until he winds up raving about pinkos and the Apollo program. But then, it's Fred Thompson, so nobody will notice.)

---ON THE OTHER HAND, if Giuliani really wants to cast this election in terms of 1980 -- when, if you remember, the incumbent party was soundly defeated due to a clearly failing economy, a disastrous foreign policy and a widely mistrusted leadership -- I suppose I wouldn't really have a problem with that...

From Gipper himself

The miracle of science brings you: a real life view inside Ronald Reagan's brain.