http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/01/17/reagan-advisers-see-a-bit_n_82057.htmlReagan Advisers See A Bit Of Their Former Boss In Obama - Politics on The Huffington Post
BY Sam Stein
The Huffington Post
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Added Peter Robinson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute and a speechwriter for Reagan's White House: "I do believe Obama is right in looking back at the election of 1980 and saying that was a historical inflection point. Of course there is a certain amount of self-flattery involved in that statement, but he might be right." Robinson added: "I do think Ronald Reagan would have found Barack Obama appealing."
Others former Reagan officials said they saw aspects of Reagan in Obama's attempt to present himself as the candidate outside the status quo.
"A lot of people of different persuasions see him as the only candidate in the race who has much chance of creating any change. My friends don't see much difference between Hillary Clinton and McCain and George Bush for that matter. Whether it is justified or not, I don't know. But there has been some sort of feeling that among people in the running, that Obama might actually change the status quo," said Paul Craig Roberts, the man tasked with overseeing Reaganomics. "I think that's the way Reagan came across, that he was not the status quo president. And of course whenever someone comes into office they turn into the status quo, but it takes a little longer to get that way when you don't start out there."
Of course, with any historical analysis there are multiple interpretations. And some former Reagan advisers, even those who see a bit of the 1980 Gipper in Obama's current candidacy, point to sharp contrasts between the two.
"The dynamics are entirely different," said Bruce Fein, Reagan's deputy attorney general. "Reagan's campaign was built on expanding and strengthening the confidence of the United States at a time when it was at its lowest depth, and we had a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union... We have an opposite problem today. We have an arrogance. We have a government that feels it is too superior... We have an executive branch that is bloated and ballooned suggesting that Osama bin Laden is the equivalent of the Soviet Union... I think
comparison shows he is living in a different mental universe than people who know history... It seems to me is the same old thing other than the mindless statement of change. What does that even mean?"
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