Much of the debate between the presidential candidates will reflect uniquely American issues. But sometimes the arguments will be instantly recognizable to people in Britain. This was certainly the case with Senator Obama’s recent comments regarding Ronald Reagan and the Republicans.

In an interview for a Nevada newspaper on the eve of last week’s party caucus, Obama was quoted as saying that “the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years.” He went on to say that “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s … government had grown and grown.” Reagan, he said, “just tapped into what people were already feeling.”
Substitute “Thatcher” for “Reagan” and put the words into the mouth of a New Labour politician and you’ve got Blairism at its very worst.
This is almost certainly what Obama actually feels, but it was a huge mistake for him to say it out loud. His quotes have been seized upon by his rivals. Obama has already been called the most right-wing of the three Democratic contenders by New York Times columnist (and noted economist) Paul Krugman. The Reagan comments seem to confirm what many progressive Democrats already felt.
But Clinton’s attacks on Obama’s Reagan remarks are a bit disingenuous. Bill Clinton came into office with the backing of the party’s conservative Democratic Leadership Council. Like Blair, he saw positive features in the legacy of the Reagan-Thatcher era. Gone were the days of a federally-sponsored “war on poverty”. Big government, according to Clinton, Reagan, and Obama, is a bad thing.
Of the three candidates, Edwards is the one who comes closest to the more traditional Democratic policies, the ones forged during the New Deal and carried out under presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson. “I would never use Ronald Reagan as an example of change,” Edwards said. “You think about what Ronald Reagan did, to America, the American people, to the middle class, to working people. He was openly, openly intolerant of unions and the right to organize.”
Edwards promised voters that if elected, he “will never use Ronald Reagan as an example.”