Gil Troy: Reagan and the 80s Deserve More Courses

By Gil Troy, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 11-8-09

[Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University and a visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center, in Washington. His books include Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton University Press, 2005) and The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009). With Vincent J. Cannato, he edited an essay collection, Living in the Eighties (Oxford University Press, 2009).]

Alex Majoli, Magnum Photos

Today’s college students, who were born just as Ronald Reagan’s presidency was ending, need more opportunities to understand him and an era that so shaped their America.

Most college students today were born during the 1980s or early 1990s, but they are far likelier to take a history course about the 1960s than about those decades. Market Data Retrieval, a service of Dun & Bradstreet, lists 525 college instructors teaching “the Vietnam era,” meaning the 1960s; courses on the 80s do not even merit a separate category. One publisher’s higher-education marketing manager estimates that although 100,000 students may be enrolled in courses on the 1960s, barely 10,000 take courses on the 1980s. This imbalance reflects the biases and passions of today’s professors far more than the interests or needs of today’s students. Even as many declare the Reagan era over with the rise of President Obama and the fall of the markets, we need more and better courses on the 1980s.

Ten years ago, when I started teaching an honors seminar on Ronald Reagan and the 1980s at McGill University, I could not have made this appeal in good conscience. At the time, I would begin my class with an apology, acknowledging the paucity of good books on the subject. David Stockman and Peggy Noonan had produced riveting memoirs about the Reagan years. But most books followed a predictable path, rehashing the conventional wisdom trailblazed by Garry Wills’s insightful Reagan’s America and Haynes Johnson’s colorful Sleepwalking Through History. We learned again and again about the hedonistic excess of the new Gilded Age and that the president of the United States for most of the decade was considered an “an amiable dunce,” in Clark Clifford’s memorably biting phrase. Too many books seemed formulaic, with diatribes against American greed leavened by anecdotes about Reagan’s declaring ketchup a vegetable (it was actually a Department of Agriculture pronouncement, not his) or Nancy Reagan’s having his presidential schedule dictated by an astrologer (which did occur occasionally). “This is a crucial, complex decade,” I told my students, “but we history profs have not done our job so that you can learn properly about this era.”

History was repeating itself, or actually replicating the politics of the times. Most historians treated Reagan and the 1980s as too anti-intellectual and too conservative to bother studying. The one Bigfoot studying Reagan, Edmund Morris, seemed defeated by the task, unable to complete it, and ultimately unable to keep his work nonfiction. In survey courses, as professors raced through the 20th century, most lingered on the New Deal and the 60s, then ended up sprinting through the 80s, failing to study it properly or situate it within the broader historiographical narrative. Those of us embarking on proj ects or trying to teach classes about the era were immediately suspect, assumed to be conservative renegades out to support the liberals’ Antichrist.

It is one of the great ironies of 20th-century scholarship. Most people yearn for peace and prosperity, but most intellectuals, including historians, seem to detest boom times. In the simplistic Kabuki theater of most 20th-century courses, students learn that the 1920s, 50s, and 80s were bad times, eras of greed and selfishness, of retreat from the great march of prog ress toward bigger and bigger government. By contrast, it is the traumatic times, like the Depression, or World War II, the “good war,” that are great.

From this perspective, the 60s are anomalous. The economy was strong, but so was the push for social justice; thus the attendant professorial approval. Nostalgia for the days of baby-boomer rebellion also feeds the boom in 60s studies. Most baby boomers, who today dominate the professoriate numerically and set the tone ideologically, are invested in justifying the 60s, and in glorifying their own roles in saving the world. In 1999, in Madison, Wis., a top record producer, Steve Greenberg, and I presented a paper for a conference supposedly dedicated to making sense of the decade. Our paper, the “Other Side of the 60s,” analyzed record sales from the time to argue that, on a typical Saturday morning during those halcyon days, far more teenagers and students were washing their cars and listening to bubblegum music like the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” than angrily marching on administration buildings singing about revolution. Many of the professors in the room, who were baby boomers, attacked our paper furiously. Many graduate students, who were Generation Xers, thanked us privately after the session for deviating from the usual self-congratulatory 60s narrative.

Related to this, American history is taught as cyclical, following the explanatory paradigm developed by the great father-son history team of Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and Jr. The Schlesingers taught that bursts of reform in America have always triggered periods of retrenchment. Thus the Progressive era ended with World War I and led to the benighted 1920s; the liberal dynamism of the 1930s and 40s resulted in the conservative complacency of the 1950s; and the revolutions of the 1960s and 70s ended with the counterrevolution of the 1980s. That thesis received a strong boost from Susan Faludi’s best-selling 1991 polemic, Backlash, which focused on feminism’s travails during the Reagan era. Given that ebb and flow, with all its emotional and ideological baggage, who wanted to be on the wrong side of history by teaching and writing about the bad old 1980s rather than the good old 1960s?

That view, says Vincent Cannato, a historian at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, is ahistorical, deterministic, and prescriptive, assuming a correct logic to history. Events are caricatured as either contributing to “progress” or impeding it. This simplistic bias is particularly striking in regard to the dynamic setting up the 1960s versus the 1980s. Just this spring, at the Organization of American Historians meeting in Seattle, a leading boomer-aged historian dismissed me when I dared to question her denunciation of the entire Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II years as a dark era of backlash against blacks, women, gays, and the enlightened among us. I argued that the sexual revolution, the civil-rights movement, gay liberation, environmentalism, and many other social movements had been consolidated, mainstreamed, and even advanced during and since the 1980s. How, I asked, could Barack Obama have been elected if the civil-rights revolution had been so stymied? In response, this senior colleague-who had greeted me warmly before the panel presentations began-gave me a withering look and shuddered.

The deification of the 1960s and the denigration of the 1980s reflect scholarship as advocacy and fantasy, with a dash of self-promotion. Most infamously, the great historian Joseph Ellis was embarrassed eight years ago by revelations that in lecturing about the 1960s, he had falsely injected himself into the narrative with invented tales about antiwar, civil-rights, and football heroics.

What sounds sometimes like a political conflict between 60s hippies and Reaganite conservatives is often a generational conflict, especially in the generally liberal milieu of the academy. As a post-baby-boomer, born, like Barack Obama, in 1961, I am old enough to be counted among that demographic surge but too young even to be able to lie credibly about going to Woodstock in 1969, as so many from that generation do. Those of us born in the early 1960s did not watch Howdy Doody when Bill Clinton watched. We had no Vietnam draft to dodge (or not dodge). We were children of Jimmy Carter’s sourpuss politics and Ronald Reagan’s optimism, shaped more by the goofiness of The Brady Brunch-Michelle Obama’s favorite show growing up-and the gritty chaos of that defining 1980s show, Hill Street Blues.

Obama’s rise and his titanic primary battle last year against Hillary Clinton demonstrated the clashing sensibilities, even amid fellow liberals. In January 2008, during the Nevada primary campaign, Obama confessed to admiring Reagan as a transformational leader. Clinton immediately tried to tie Obama to the GOP’s “bad ideas,” as if by acknowledging the scale of Reagan’s accomplishments Obama was endorsing the content of Reagan’s programs.

Needing baby-boomer votes to win, and aware that presidential campaigns are not forums for subtle distinctions, Obama stopped praising Reagan and stopped bashing boomers. But building up to his candidacy, most dramatically in his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama criticized baby boomers, be they left or right. He cast the Clintons and George W. Bush as too rooted in the 60s’ polarizing politics, which Obama vowed to change.

Certainly there is much to learn about the 1960s. It is remarkable how much those years shaped our world and our politics. But especially since the financial meltdown, and with the passage of time, we also have to do right by the 1980s. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 marked a huge shift in tone, even as many of the phenomena unleashed during the 1960s and 1970s continued to change the world. I emphasize the Reagan Reconciliation. His rhetoric of counterrevolution tempered by his seeking the center helped synthesize the 60s with the 80s, incorporating and accepting the social, cultural, ideological, and lifestyle revolutions sweeping the country during his administration.

Conservatives, be they boomers or younger, are as guilty as 60s-loving liberals of romanticizing their favorite decade. They frequently forget how disappointed they were with Reagan’s shift toward the center during his presidency. Almost from the start, conservatives complained bitterly about Reagan’s moderate choices for the cabinet and his failure to advance their “ABC” agenda for counterrevolution, focusing on abortion, busing, and crime. And Reagan himself embodied the great conservative blind spot of the times. For all his rhetoric about tradition, he and his allies never acknowledged that the consumerist capitalism they celebrated helped further the social movements toward indulgent individualism they detested. The result was an era of conservative libertinism.

Love him or hate him, Ronald Reagan

was the greatest president-meaning the most consequential leader-since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Finally, 20 years after his inauguration, historians have started looking at him and his era skillfully and intelligently. Since 2005 leading historians including James T. Patterson, the late John Patrick Diggins, and Sean Wilentz have published important, and surprisingly respectful, works about Reagan. Wilentz’s The Age of Reagan was the most surprising, as an iconic baby-boomer professor and liberal activist acknowledged how much Reagan’s era had changed and frequently improved America.

Even after the financial meltdown, we still live in the Age of Reagan. His legacy shapes the continuing fights about abortion, taxes, the budget deficit, and health care as well as the debates about greed versus altruism, individual versus community, tradition versus change in America. Moreover, just as we needed to understand Franklin Roosevelt to understand Ronald Reagan,

who modeled his presidency on the most influential president of his youth, we need to understand Reagan to help understand Barack Obama.

President Obama, thus, is leading us back toward studying the Reagan era, even as he tries to lead the country away from Reagan’s antigovernment assumptions. Today’s college students, who were born just as Reagan’s presidency was ending, deserve more opportunities to understand this president and an era that so shaped their America. It may be more fun for professors to trot out tie-dyed T-shirts than power ties as props. It may be more inspiring for students to be asked to chant together, “Hell, no, we won’t go,” the classic antiwar slogan, when they study the Vietnam era than to watch Michael Douglas in Wall Street declare, “Greed is good.” But in the 21st century, it is probably more important to understand Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech in Berlin, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” than John F. Kennedy’s classic “Ich bin ein Berliner.”

And the only way we can understand Barack Obama’s inaugural formulation that the “question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works,” and Bill Clinton’s declaration in 1996 that the era of big government was over, is by studying Reagan’s inaugural proclamation that “government isn’t the solution, government is the problem.” Even if we love teaching the 60s, it is our responsibility as historians to teach the 80s.

The Moderometer: Charting Obama’s Zig-Zag, September 28 to October 12

By Gil Troy, HNN, 10-19-09

Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal and a Visiting Scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC. His latest book is: Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents (Basic Books).

This is part of an ongoing project to track the ideological shifts of the Obama administration. Click here to read the initial installment. Key search phrase for other installments in this series: “The Moderometer”

For better or for worse, the media has largely ignored President Obama’s legislative efforts during the past few weeks, preferring to focus on the president’s highly publicized trip to Copenhagen in support of Chicago’s failed Olympic bid and his surprise Nobel Peace Prize win. Ultimately, as the furor over the Peace Prize reveals, Obama’s policy successes will shape his historic legacy much more than the sideshows of Olympic medals and Nobel Prizes.

October 10, 2009: PROMISES, ONCE AGAIN, TO END ‘DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL’: Speaking at a dinner held by the influential gay advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, President Obama echoed an earlier pledge to end the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. He neglected, however, to set a timetable for doing so, frustrating much of the gay community. As commander-in-chief, President Obama could theoretically overturn the policy by issuing an executive order, as President Harry Truman did in 1948 to end segregation in the military. (Domestic – Left)

October 9, 2009: ACCEPTS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: In an announcement that surprised the world, the Nobel committee announced that President Obama had won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The president accepted the award later that afternoon, saying that he was “deeply humbled” by the prize. Though not a policy move in itself, Obama’s acceptance of the peace prize demonstrated the extent to which he has broken with much of his predecessor’s foreign policy. (Foreign – Left)

October 6, 2009: SEARCHES FOR MIDDLE GROUND ON AFGHAN WAR: Though he remains undecided on whether or not he will send more troops to Afghanistan per General Stanley McChrystal recommendation, President Obama told senior senators and congressmen that he would not substantially draw down American forces in the country. Many Democrats in Congress have recently voiced opposition to a buildup, while Republicans such as Senator John McCain (R-AZ) have encouraged Obama to order the increase without delay. White House officials have indicated that the president is several weeks from a decision. (Foreign – Center)

September 30, 2009: WEAKENS ‘MEDIA SHIELD’ BILL: In move that reflects the administration’s conservative stance on national security matters, President Obama sent a bill designed to protect reporters back to Congress with significant revisions. The bill, sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) and Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), originally included provisions to protect reporters from being forced to testify information obtained from confidential sources. The Obama administration’s changes, however, render those protections largely ineffective when cases involve matters of national security. “The White House’s opposition to the fundamental essence of this bill is an unexpected and significant setback,” Schumer wrote in a response statement. (Domestic – Right)

September 30, 2009: AUTHORIZES E.P.A. TO MOVE FORWARD ON REGULATIONS: Faced with the increasingly low probability that Congress will pass a climate change bill before international talks in Copenhagen in December, President Obama authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to start preparing new emissions rules. Such regulations, which would chiefly affect the country’s 400 largest power plants, have been stridently opposed by both the industry and some elements of the G.O.P. Faced with the prospect of E.P.A. regulation, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) published a joint op-ed piece in The New York Times in response urging bipartisan Congressional action. (Domestic – Left)

September 28, 2009: BACKTRACKS ON GUANTÁNAMO DEADLINE: In his daily briefing, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs implied that President Obama may not meet his self-imposed deadline for closing the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay. “We’re not focused on whether or not the deadline will or won’t be met on a particular day,” Gibbs told reporters. When he took office in January, the president promised to close the prison within a year. This has been made difficult, however, by the thorny legal questions surrounding the prisoners and Congressional opposition to having the men transferred onto U.S. soil. (Foreign – Right)

Snow(e) Job: Tokenism is not Bipartisanship

By Gil Troy, HNN, 10-16-09

When Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine voted for the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill this week, Democrats rejoiced. “We have today a bipartisan bill,” White House Press Secretary Joe Gibbs exulted. While it made sense for Democrats to welcome Snowe’s support after an excruciating, high-stakes process, one moderate maverick crossing the aisle does not make the bill truly bipartisan. Mistaking a deviation for a trend in politics is like mistaking one defection for a peace treaty during wartime.

Wherever one stands on the health care debate, and on Senator Snowe’s decision, it is misleading to call this week’s tokenism bipartisanship. True bipartisanship means working together, building bridges, finding common interests, forging consensus. Bipartisanship is Republicans and Democrats spurred by the graciousness of John McCain and Barack Obama, celebrating the election of the first African-American President last November. Bipartisanship is McCain and 13 other centrist Senators creating a “Gang of Fourteen” to approve Republican judicial nominations so as to head off the “nuclear option” threatening Senate prerogatives Democrats were enjoying. And bipartisanship is the shared feelings of mourning mingled with patriotism after 9/11, epitomized by dozens of tearful, subdued members of Congress spontaneously singing “God Bless America” on the Capitol steps hours after the downing of Flight 93, which may have been targeting that very site.

Historically, true bipartisanship occurred when righteous renegades or statesmanlike party leaders led others to create a broad coalition, even if reluctantly. Back in 1964, Everett Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois, the Senate Minority Leader, was the key figure in breaking the 83-day filibuster against the landmark Civil Rights Bill. President Lyndon Johnson gave Senator Dirksen his famous “treatment,” understanding the secret formula for Congressional cajolery: one part flattery, one part bribery, leavened by a sense of history. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, deployed by Johnson as point man, recalled wooing Dirksen aggressively but elegantly: “I began a public massage of his ego, and appealed to his vanity. I said he should look at this issue as ‘a moral issue, not a partisan one.’ The gentle pressure left room for him to be the historically important figure in our struggle, the statesman above bipartisanship….” More crassly, Humphrey admitted he even would have been willing to kiss “Dirksen’s ass on the Capitol steps.”

Humphrey finally succeeded without going that far. Dirksen broke the filibuster, quoting Victor Hugo: “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come. The time has come for equality … in education and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied it is here.” The cloture vote passed with a surprisingly wide margin of 71 to 29. When asked how he became a force pushing for civil rights Dirksen grandly replied, “I am involved in mankind, and whatever the skin, we are all included in mankind.”

Dirksen’s sense of history made him immortal – they named a Senate Office building after him, among other things. Moreover he saved the Republican Party. Today, whatever else their standing with African-Americans may be at any particular moment, Republicans can say with pride that they helped pass the 1964 Civil Rights bill, thanks to Everett Dirksen.

Similarly, in the 1940s, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg helped lead his party and the nation away from a pinched, provincial, isolationism. President Harry Truman could construct his emerging Cold War foreign policy as bipartisan, thanks especially to Vandenberg. On Friday, April 13, 1945, his first full day in office, Truman lunched with seventeen congressional leaders. Vandenberg hailed this unprecedented move for ending Franklin Roosevelt’s era of presidential unilateralism. Vandenberg’s pronouncement that “politics stops at the water’s edge” built popular consensus behind America’s containment strategy. Vandenberg remained a Republican and occasionally contradicted the President, saying that frank exchanges facilitated true unity. The senator saw himself leading the “loyal opposition” putting “national security ahead of partisan advantage.”

Senator Vandenberg’s journey from ardent partisan isolationist to leading bipartisan interventionist reflected the massive ideological shift Franklin Roosevelt facilitated, and Harry Truman completed. Vandenberg’s rift with the Republican isolationists underlined the continuing American resistance to becoming a world superpower. America did not even have a standing army. Many isolationists such as “Mr. Republican,” Ohio Senator Robert Taft, reluctantly accepted the fight against fascism but hoped returning to normalcy included restoring America’s characteristic insulation.

Facing a divided country and a treacherous world, Truman crusaded for cooperation. In his first speech to Congress, on April 16, 1945, Truman said only “a united nation deeply devoted to the highest ideals” could provide the “enlightened leadership” the world needed. This strategy, and both Vandenberg’s and Truman’s good works, were vindicated repeatedly, culminating with Soviet Communism’s collapse, which historians credit as a bipartisan victory.

By contrast, a century earlier the “Compromise of 1850″ was not much of a compromise — or too much of a compromise. No one was happy. Henry Clay’s nationalist attempt to craft an omnibus package had failed, rejected in the summer of 1850. The legislation passed – but ultimately failed – because the young Democratic Senator from Illinois Stephen A. Douglas crafted a series of shifting congressional coalitions passing individual parts of the legislation, reflecting sectional differences not national concerns. Southerners supported the individual planks which pleased Southerners, while Northern representatives endorsed the pro-Northern legislation. There was no reconciliation, legislative or otherwise. The misnamed Compromise of 1850 failed to find common ground or common terms, the essential elements of bipartisanship. In playing to sectional differences not splitting the difference, the Compromise spread the pain without consolidating any gain.

Senators Dirksen and Vandenberg made history because they were not renegades but pioneers, leading their reluctant, partisan followers across the Red Sea to the promised land of bipartisanship to benefit America. Presidents Johnson and Truman – with assists from Vice President Hubert Humphrey, among others — understood that bipartisanship is not about luring one or two mavericks across the aisle, but convincing a broad swath of citizens and leaders that change is coming, and better to be on the right side of history.

Obama’s prize: Noble hopes in an ignoble world

By Gil Troy, Toronto Globe and Mail, 10-10-09

As liberals rejoice in Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize and conservatives grumble, let’s be honest: It is too early too tell. Awarding this prize either may be prescient or premature. Regardless, the award reflects the noble aspirations of the award committee and the prize winner.

The committee beautifully described Mr. Obama’s greatest accomplishment thus far. “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” the citation says. The fact that despite its racist past, despite the stains of slavery and Jim Crow, the United States sent a black man to the White House was a modern miracle. That this President was only 47 when elected, and had, by his own description, a “funny name,” is even more amazing especially following 9/11.

Mr. Obama’s election in November, 2008, and his inauguration in 2009 bequeathed to the world two magical moments. On election night, the tears streaming down black and white faces the world over said it all. At the inauguration, the iconography was extraordinary. There was the defining image from the 2008 campaign of a thoughtful, messianic Mr. Obama looking off into the distance, with the four-letter word HOPE emblazoned in light blue on a black and red background. There were drawings of Mr. Obama surrounded by ghosts of African-Americans past, the trailblazers ranging from secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to the first serious black presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm.

Images juxtaposed Mr. Obama with Martin Luther King, linking the August, 1963, March on Washington that filled the Mall from the Lincoln Monument with the January, 2009, Obama inauguration that filled the Mall from the Capitol to the Lincoln Monument. Some artists depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten – King Tut’s father – and his Chief Consort Nefertiti.

There were slogans galore: “Yes We Did,” “A Legacy of Hope,” “the Healing Process Has Begun,” and “Thank you Jesus, We Never Would Have Made it Without You.”

Since then, such images and slogans have filled our global village. I have seen home shrines to Mr. Obama in Chateguay and have heard of elaborate shrines in huts in Kenya. During this dark recession year, America’s single greatest export has been the hope Mr. Obama transmitted to billions of the disillusioned, the oppressed, the discriminated against throughout the world. This achievement alone deserves a Nobel.

Alas, even with Mr. Obama in office, the world is menaced by ignoble characters who disdain his noble aspirations. The jury is still out whether Mr. Obama’s politics of hope and diplomacy of engagement can work in a world of al-Qaeda killers, North Korean dictators, Iranian madmen, Iraqi insurgents, Taliban fanatics, Afghan warlords, Pakistani generals, Russian strongmen, Saudi Sheiks, Sudanese slaughterers, Guinean rapists and Hamas terrorists.

So far, there have been no major disasters on Mr. Obama’s watch – but no major successes either. North Korea and Iran continue to develop nuclear power: North Korea launched missiles on July 4 to defy Mr. Obama, while Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole an election and cracked down on democratic forces with barely a peep from the U.S. President. Mr. Obama has kept pressing al-Qaeda with drone attacks, the Taliban with talk of more troops, Iraqi anarchists by refusing to withdraw precipitously.

But the Russians seem to think he can be pushed around, horrific crimes like the mass murder in Darfur and the mass military rapes of opposition protesters in Guinea continue to occur (inevitably, alas). And in a striking, but characteristic contrast from the Middle East, this week, Prof. Ada Yonath won Israel’s ninth Nobel prize – and the first chemistry Nobel for a woman since 1964 – even as Hamas and other Palestinian agitators called for violence in Jerusalem.

The contrast between noble societies that invest in science and ignoble societies addicted to terror, between noble political cultures that produce hope-generators like Barack Obama and ignoble political cultures that produce mass killers, remains stunning – and daunting.

Good people throughout the world should unite in hoping that the aspirations embedded in this award to a rookie President quickly transform into impressive achievements. Thus far, Mr. Obama has dazzled the world with his poetry. Let us hope that when we look back on this moment, his Nobel prize will be a milestone in his ability to turn his transcendent poetry into workable, governable prose, the hopes into feats, and, nations’ swords into plowshares.

The Moderometer, Charting Obama’s Zig-Zag, September 3 to 27

By Gil Troy, HNN, 10-5-09

Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal and a Visiting Scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC. His latest book is: Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents (Basic Books).

This is part of an ongoing project to track the ideological shifts of the Obama administration. Click here to read the initial installment. Key search phrase for other installments in this series: “The Moderometer”

The past several weeks have seen Obama’s search for a centrist position on health care grow more urgent. Back in 1981, Democrats returned to Congress in the fall emboldened in their fight against the Reagan Revolution, blaming the recession on President Reagan and attacking him on the “fairness issue.” This September, Congressional Republicans also returned ready to fight. During the coming weeks, President Obama must decide how far he will go in courting Republican support on the health care bill. And if he fails to garner such support, historians will have to ask whether this was due to an unwillingness to comprise by the Democrats, the Republicans, or both.

The president seemed to make more progress in advancing his foreign policy vision this month.  As so often happens with presidents, dramatic diplomatic decisions—along with star turns at the U.N. and at summits with world leaders—are easier to control than Congressional legislation.  Despite Republican criticism over his decision to scrap George W. Bush’s proposed Eastern European missile defense system, President Obama made some progress in enlisting  the support of Britain, France, Russia, and China in his effort to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon. If this combination of force and diplomacy works, it will represent a truly centrist foreign policy.

September 25, 2009: WITH BRITAIN AND FRANCE, EXPOSES IRANIAN DECEPTION: Speaking with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Obama revealed intelligence that Iran has been secretly building a new nuclear enrichment plant deep inside a mountain. According to Western intelligence officials, the plant’s smaller size and hidden location make it unlikely that it is intended for civilian use. If Iran refuses to allow inspectors to monitor the facility, the U.S. and its allies will likely impose strict sanctions on the country. As Brown said at the conference, “The international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.” (Foreign – Center)

September 23, 2009: WINS TENTATIVE CHINESE AND RUSSIAN SUPPORT AT THE U.N.: In his first visit to the United Nations, President Obama demonstrated that his administration’s increased emphasis on diplomacy has, at least to some extent, paid off. Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, announced his support for implementing tougher sanctions against Iran and its nuclear program, a development that would have seemed unlikely just months ago. Political analysts credit Obama’s abandonment of George W. Bush’s plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe as largely responsible for Russian support on the issue. The president also secured support from both China and Russia on a Security Council resolution to toughen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (Foreign – Center)

September 23, 2009: DECIDES NOT TO SEEK NEW PRISONER LEGISLATION: The Obama administration announced that it would not ask Congress for specific legislative permission to continue holding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, instead relying on authority already provided by Congress.” The move surprised some Democrats who had thought the president would seek to establish a more solid foundation for the indefinite detention of prisoners than George W. Bush’s administration. It would be extremely difficult, however, to craft legislation amenable to both Houses, especially given the current health care debate. (Domestic – Right)

September 17, 2009: ABANDONS BUSH’S PROPOSED MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM: In a major foreign policy reversal, President Obama announced that he would abandon George W. Bush’s plans to build a missile defense system based in Poland and the Czech Republic by 2018. Instead, Obama said he plans to station smaller missile interceptors based on ships designed to counter the Iranian threat. Though Obama’s proposed system should be operational by 2011—far earlier than the Bush version—some Republicans harshly criticized the decision. “Scrapping the U.S. missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic does little more than empower Russia and Iran at the expense of our allies in Europe,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner in a particularly harsh statement. (Foreign – Left)

September 17, 2009: HOUSE PASSES STUDENT LOAN REFORM BILL: The House of Representatives passed a bill championed by President Obama that will expand federal aid to college students while reforming the way that aid is distributed. While the federal government currently subsidizes private lenders to students, the new bill, authored by Congressman George Miller (D-CA), allows the federal government to lend directly to students. It is expected to pass the Senate despite Republican complaints that it will expand the scope of the federal government. (Domestic – Center)

September 14, 2009: URGES INCREASED FINANCIAL REGULATION: Speaking at Federal Hall on Wall Street, President Obama touted the nation’s economic recovery while exhorting Congress to pass increase federal regulation of the banking sector. “The only way to avoid a crisis of this magnitude is to ensure that large firms can’t take risks that threaten our entire financial system, and to make sure that they have the resources to weather even the worst of economic storms,” Obama said in his speech, which came a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. (Domestic – Center)

September 10, 2009: FACES LESSENING CONGRESSIONAL SUPPORT FOR WAR: As he contemplates further troop increases in Afghanistan in the wake of General Stanley McChrystal’s recent report, President Obama is losing support from Congressional Democrats on the issue. “I don’t think there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan in the country or in Congress,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, also came out against sending in more troops on Thursday, saying that the U.S. should first focus on training more Afghan forces. (Foreign – Right)

September 9, 2009: ADDRESSES CONGRESS TO PUSH HEALTH CARE: In a much anticipated, televised address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama invoked the late Senator Edward Kennedy to push for Congress to enact health care reform before the year’s end. The president courted the political centre on an issue that became increasingly polarized over the summer, extolling the virtues of his “public option” while not insisting upon its inclusion in the legislation. Indeed, the only caveat he insisted on for signing the bill was that it not add “one dime to our deficits—either now or in the future.” (Domestic – Center)

September 8, 2009: AMID CONTROVERSY, SPEAKS TO NATION’S SCHOOLS: President Obama spoke to the country’s schoolchildren in a nationally televised address, urging them to work hard and respect each other in the coming year. In a sign of how polarizing a figure the president has become, however, parents and school districts around the country decried the speech or forbade students from watching it. (Domestic – Center)

Playing the Race Card Makes for Ugly Politics

By Gil Troy, Globe and Mail, 9-18-09

[Gil Troy, a professor of history at McGill University and visiting scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, is the author of Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents and The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction.]

Barack Obama’s election to the presidency was supposed to usher in a new, more mature era of race relations, but it could not evoke nirvana. There’s a growing chorus complaining that this summer’s hostility to his stimulus package, to his health-care reform and to Mr. Obama himself is racist.

“I think it’s based on racism. There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president,” former president Jimmy Carter said, clearly forgetting the euphoria when Americans elected a black president.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said she heard “an unspoken word in the air” when Republican Representative Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” during the President’s speech to Congress last week: “You lie, boy!” She also located Mr. Obama “at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension.” In fact, Mr. Obama is at the center of a political storm sparked by his leadership – as all presidents have been.

American politics is a contact sport. The long, rich tradition of American centrism does not negate the equally long colorful tradition of American mudslinging and partisanship. It is unfair and itself divisive to impute racial motives to Mr. Obama’s opponents without evidence. The shrill opposition reflects the high stakes surrounding the current debate, Americans’ enduring ambivalence about big government and the ugly way modern politics plays out in the media, within the blogosphere and on the streets.

Mr. Obama is controversial because he is seeking big changes. He’s no Bill Clinton in his second-term incarnation, focusing on minor policy “Band-Aids” such as the “V-chip” and school uniforms. Mr. Obama wants to be a transformational president like Ronald Reagan. During the transition, faced with the unexpected economic crisis, Mr. Obama read books about how Franklin Roosevelt re-engineered the U.S. economy. Headlines celebrating “Franklin Delano Obama” launched Mr. Obama’s ambitious first hundred days. Spending nearly a trillion dollars to stimulate the economy, taking over the U.S. auto industry, and now trying to solve the perennial health-care riddle – while protecting America and seeking world peace – are sweeping goals. No wonder there’s pushback.

The conservative counterattack is particularly intense because Mr. Obama seems to forget that Americans have mixed feelings about big government. There’s a strong individualistic streak in American thought. Every major jump in the government’s mandate has encountered fierce resistance. Conservatives denounced FDR as a Mussolini and even a Hitleresque dictator.

In 1993, Hillary Clinton was shocked at the vitriol directed her way when she led health-care reform efforts. The Clintons, in fact, endured far more abuse than Mr. Obama has – so far. The Clintons were accused of drug-running, murder, faked suicides, financial corruption, rape and cover-ups galore. After his impeachment, Mr. Clinton lamented Republicans’ descent into the “politics of personal destruction.”

Mr. Clinton and his fellow Democrats suggested these attacks were a conservative Republican tic. The implication then – as now – was that liberals disagreed as rational, reasonable human beings; conservatives were harsh, hysterical, character assassins.

Unfortunately, the loony left can be as vicious as the ranting right. In the 1980s, Mr. Carter and the Democrats called Mr. Reagan a war-mongering racist who would deprive blacks of civil rights while bumbling into nuclear war. One of the Democratic Party’s grand old men, Clark Clifford, called Mr. Reagan “an amiable dunce.” Respected liberal writer Garry Wills called him “Mr. Magoo.”

George W. Bush endured even more vicious attacks. Mr. Carter himself was one of many Democrats who said America’s leaders lied in the buildup to the Iraq war. During the 2004 campaign, an Internet ad compared Mr. Bush to Hitler. Bushophobia became so intense that critics often seemed more disgusted by Mr. Bush than by Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. “There is something profoundly wrong when opposition to the war in Iraq seems to inspire greater passion than opposition to Islamist extremism,” Senator Joe Lieberman, [then] a Democrat, said in 2007.

Vice President Richard Cheney was even more hated, and routinely compared to Darth Vader. Much of this enmity stems from the ever-accelerating news cycle, the blogosphere’s nastiness and Americans’ ability to speak, text and listen only to those with whom they agree.

Mr. Obama promised to lower the volume – acknowledging how shrill politics was under Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush, two white presidents. Obama supporters should not be shocked that Republicans are attacking Mr. Obama as vehemently as Democrats attacked his predecessor.

And it is dishonest for Mr. Carter, Ms. Dowd and others to play the race card, implying that anyone who dares disagree with Mr. Obama’s health-care plan or stimulus package is a redneck. American politics needs a different tone – these delusional, demagogic, racial recriminations only make things worse.

Obama’s Speech Tries Breaking Reagan’s Summer Curse

By Gil Troy, History News Network, 9-10-09

In his Wednesday night speech to a joint session of Congress, Barack Obama sought the perfect formula to express American attitudes toward big government. In 1981 Ronald Reagan proclaimed “government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem.” In 1996 after his health care reform bill failed Bill Clinton declared “the era is big government is over.” “[O]ur predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem,” Obama said, riffing off of Reagan’s critique. “They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, and the vulnerable can be exploited.”

President Obama’s balance showed he understood better than most Congressional liberals the long history of American ambivalence regarding just how big government should be. As I argue in “The Reagan Revolution: A Very Short Introduction,” just published by Oxford University Press, when Ronald Reagan was born in 1911, America’s federal government was still too small to be either the problem or the solution. The Progressive movement was, however, thriving, laying the groundwork for what would be Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, then Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But Reagan was born into an American regime more scaled to the limited government of America’s Founders when they established the Constitution in 1787 than it was to the welfare state he would preside over from1981 to 1989.

Although the American Revolution was far less radical than the French or Russian Revolutions, Americans did rebel against executive power. The Revolutionaries’ experience with the King of England – and his colonial governors – soured a generation on strong, centralized government. The younger men of the revolution such as Alexander Hamilton, who assisted George Washington in fighting the war, better understood the need for effective government. They pushed for the new Constitution in 1787, replacing the Articles of Confederation that bore the mark of the revolutionary struggle by keeping the national government weaker than the states, and the executive impotent compared to the Congress.

Still, the Constitution established a federal government that was not supposed to overwhelm either “We the People” or “these United States.” Moreover, a strong ethos of self-sufficiency reigned. People were supposed to take care of themselves, especially considering America’s riches.

By 1980, Americans were ambivalent. They retained enough of their historic fear of executive power to dislike big government in theory. But after nearly fifty years of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deals and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Americans were addicted to many of the government programs that together made their government big, their tax bills high, their bureaucracy dense but their lives easier and their society more just. The Reagan Revolution played on the frustrations and tried to end this addiction, to no avail.

The post-Reagan standoff developed. Democrats often miscalculated by overlooking the growing, historically-rooted, backlash against big government. Republicans usually erred by overstepping and eliminating essential programs that Americans now took for granted.

As a candidate, Barack Obama invoked Reagan as a talisman – and a standard. While disagreeing with Reagan’s program, Obama envied Reagan’s impact. Obama wanted to be as “transformational” a president as Reagan and considered his two Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, failures. During the Obama administration’s first heady months, the media, popular and congressional lovefest seemed to be propelling Obama into Reagan’s league as a consequential president. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel conveyed the scope of Obama’s ambition by admitting: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Suddenly this summer, the Reagan comparisons became more sobering, more a curse than a blessing. Reagan’s Revolution lost tremendous momentum its first summer. After peaking in August, 1981, with the signing of a major tax cut and the showdown with striking air traffic controllers, Reagan started meeting major congressional resistance. Having visited home during their summer recess, members of Congress returned to Washington worried about the economy and blaming the new president rather than his predecessor for what they started calling the “Reagan Recession.” Looking back, we can now realize that Ronald Reagan made his biggest impact in his first seven and a half months as president. Republicans and Democrats then spent the next seven and a quarter years scrambling on the new Reaganized line of scrimmage without major losses or gains for either side. And – Obama take note – Reagan learned he could have more impact by playing to the center than by pleasing his ideological allies.

History is not a DVD: conditions vary, outcomes are not repeatable. The Obama administration should learn from Reagan’s sobering summer as well as his stunning spring. But even more important, Obama and his Democratic allies must decode the mixed message Americans have long been broadcasting about government, as they essentially say, “yes” to goodies that work for them, but “no” when too many goodies for too many create a government that seems just too big and too threatening to individual freedom.

An ode to Tom Brydon – and all teaching assistants

TAs are the unsung heroes of the university world

By GIL TROY, The Montreal Gazette, 9-8-09

As students return to university this month, the main focus on campus is on the dynamic between students and their professors. “Who’s teaching the course?” is the question on so many students’ lips. But they often give or get a partial answer. The truth is, at McGill and most large universities, students are not taught only by the professor, the marquee name on any course. In the many large lectures that abound, students are taught – and their experiences are often dramatically shaped – by teaching assistants, TAs, who play a critical role in helping the university function.

Unfortunately, most of the recent public attention regarding teaching assistants has been negative. Teaching assistants held a strike at McGill in 2008. Other universities have endured strikes as well. Unionizing TAs gives the impression of a strife-ridden relationship between TAs and professors. This is misleading. Universities thrive because of the warmth and co-operative spirit characterizing most professor-TA relationships

In fact, ideally, the professor is the TA’s adviser as well. By researching and teaching together, the professor and TA integrate the university’s two essential functions – discovering knowledge and transmitting it. The relationship, at its best, is delightfully old-fashioned, with the TA serving an apprenticeship under the mentoring professor’s watchful eye.

Of course, reality often intrudes. For example, at McGill hundreds of undergraduates take U.S. history courses but very few graduate students study U.S. history. Teaching assistants come from other fields, and the relationship between the professor and the TA is less multi-dimensional. Still, the TA is not only helping with discussion sections and grading, but is learning by doing and being coached by a senior teacher.

At McGill’s history department this fall, we are particularly sensitive to the importance of this relationship because one of our superstar TAs during the last few years, Thomas Brydon, died tragically in an automobile accident this summer, along with his girlfriend Laura Nagy. Tom started studying for his master’s degree in 1999. During that decade, he TAed in numerous courses and, most recently, had started teaching his own courses. As he taught, he worked on and completed his Ph.D in British cultural history: “Christ’s Last Ante: Charles Booth, Church Charity and the Poor-but-Respectable.”

I met Tom a year ago as I headed into a difficult semester filled with much travelling – and teaching. I had requested a top-notch TA who could substitute for me if ever I was away or delayed. When the department chair at the time, Catherine LeGrande, assigned me Brydon, a British historian whom I did not know, I was skeptical, knowing the semester he (and I) faced. My skepticism increased when I called him, and good Canadian that he was, he postponed our meeting because he was leaving on a canoe trip. I wondered: “What’s this Canadian bloke who specializes in England going to teach my students about the U.S.?”

Let’s be honest, historians, and certainly this history professor, are lone rangers. Most of us do our research, writing and teaching alone. To share the podium with someone else, to share responsibility with someone else, requires us to stretch outside our comfort zones. We are also thematic chauvinists, rooted in our specialties and doubtful that anyone who has not been steeped in our subject can understand us – let alone teach our material.

LeGrande reassured me, saying, “You’re going to love this guy, he is fantastic.”

If anything, LeGrande undersold him. Tom entered this ambiguous, fluid situation with his natural affability, his considerable experience as a teacher, and his strong vision as an historian – and thrived. He plunged into the work with great enthusiasm, sound judgment, and remarkable talent. Students loved him, respected him and learned from him – as did I.

In addition to mastering the mechanics of the course, Tom also mastered the material. The lectures he prepared were insightful, funny, energetic and well-received.

Tom should have lived to a ripe old age, continuing to teach and learn with the zeal that marks a great teacher and scholar. Coincidentally, highlighting that chain of transmission that links one scholarly generation to another, my graduate school adviser and mentor, David Herbert Donald, died at the age of 88, just weeks before Tom died at 33. Both left unfinished books – and resonant legacies – reminding me that great teaching turns us all into master mimics, as juniors imitate their seniors who imitated their seniors when they were juniors.

To honour Tom’s memory, all of us in the university community, professors, students, and administrators, should reflect on the importance of our TAs, as essential educational colleagues today and living links to tomorrow. And if those who control university budgets could invest more in hiring additional TAs and lowering the teacher-student ratio, that would be an ever more glowing, pragmatic, and most needed tribute to Tom Brydon, the kind of teacher we all wish we had, and the kind those of us in the education business should always aspire to be.

Gil Troy teaches history at McGill University.
© The Gazette (Montreal) 2009

The Moderometer: Charting Obama’s Zig-Zag … July 28 to August 18

By Gil Troy, History News Network, HNN, 8-24-09

Mr. Troy is Professor of History at McGill University in Montreal and a Visiting Scholar at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, DC. His latest book is: Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents (Basic Books).

This is part of an ongoing project to track the ideological shifts of the Obama administration. Click here to read the initial installment.

August 18, 2009: WHITE HOUSE SUGGESTS DEMOCRATS MAY GO IT ALONE ON HEALTH CARE: In what could be a trial balloon testing the possibility of deviating dramatically from President Obama’s search for a bipartisan health care bill, leading Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill suggested they may attempt to pass health care reform without Republican assistance. “The Republican leadership, has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama’s health care proposal is more important for their political goals than solving the health insurance problems that Americans face every day,” White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel declared. (Domestic – Left)

August 15, 2008: RAISES QUESTIONS ABOUT CENTRALITY OF “PUBLIC OPTION” TO HEALTH REFORM: Liberals feared that President Obama was reneging on his commitment to create a public national health insurance option, available to those who cannot afford private insurance or do not wish to patronize private insurance companies. In an ambiguous statement that could have been a tactical assessment or a vision statement, Obama said, “the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform.” The Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius fed liberal concerns by saying the public option is not “essential” to a health care plan. Amid the ensuing outcry, by Tuesday, August 18, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs felt compelled to insist: “The preference is the public option.” (Domestic – Center/Right)

August 5, 2009: DESPITE JOURNALISTS’ RELEASE, MAINTAINS LINE ON NORTH KOREA: A day after former President Bill Clinton secured the release of two American journalists imprisoned in North Korea, President Obama issues a statement that shows no softening in the administration’s position towards the country. Obama thanked both Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore, but described their efforts as simply a “humanitarian mission.” (Foreign—Center)

July 30: SOOTHES RACIAL TENSIONS OVER BEERS: After criticizing the actions of the Cambridge Police in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s widely publicized arrest, President Obama hosts a “beer summit” with Vice President Joe Biden, arresting officer James Crowley, and Gates at the White House. “I don’t think anybody but Barack Obama would have thought about bringing us together,” Gates told reporters. (Domestic—Center)

July 28: EASES SANCTIONS ON SYRIA: The Obama administration again reaches out to Syria by easing the sanctions against the country. Though the Syria Accountability Act prohibits all American exports to Syria other than food and medicine, Middle East envoy George J. Mitchell told the Syrian president that the administration would make exceptions for goods such as civil aviation technology. Republicans criticized the move, which follows the president’s decision in June to appoint an ambassador to the country for the first time in four years. (Foreign—Left)

Gil Troy “NDP to get election strategy tips from Obama campaigners”

By Richard Foot, Canwest News Service, 8-13-09

 

 

…Gil Troy, an American expert on presidential politics, who teaches history at McGill University in Montreal, also says there are vast ideological differences between the Obama White House and the more left-leaning NDP — a distinction that may not be understood by some U.S. Democrats.

If the NDP and its policies were better known in Washington, he says, politicians would likely shy away from publicly befriending it, for fear of provoking accusations by their conservative critics of having cozy friendships with socialists.

“Obama and his people are lucky that Americans ignore Canada and are ignorant about Canadian politics,” says Troy. “I can imagine how much fun the Fox News crowd would have with this news, playing it up as if it showed that Obama had ties to the (Communist) Internationale.”