He said he wanted to be a transformative president and he’s already accomplished that with his health care bill. The Wall Street reforms (which passed on July 15th with the bare minimum of votes) are icing on the cake. But this is like doody on the cake.
Obama will sign the bill at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, the White House said.
The Ronald Reagan building is dedicated to international trade, and it’s the second biggest federal building (after the Pentagon) and the most expensive to construct. The symbolism of signing the Wall Street reforms bill there is wrong on many levels. While other presidents share blame for the economic collapse, no one is more responsible than the man that got ball rolling, Ronald Reagan. And while there is nothing wrong with international trade, the focus of these reforms should be on fixing our domestic economy (Main Street) by reining in our international economy (Wall Street). We want the public comparing these reforms to the reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, not the deregulation of Ronald Reagan.
Roosevelt did not want buildings and monuments named after him, and there are precious few tributes to him in our capital. The modest FDR memorial is basically all we have, and it isn’t the best forum for a presidential signing ceremony. But almost anyplace would be better than the Ronald Reagan building.
I don’t understand the purpose of doing the signing there, but whatever the reasoning, I disagree with it. It’s dumb.
Finally, my account stays signed in when clicking on a topic!
On the subject: perhaps you could argue the opposite? The fact that he’s signing it there isn’t a tribute, but a slap in the face to RR that things are being reversed?
That’s just a weak signal. Maybe if he backs it up with his speech by going after Reagan’s legacy.
Keep in mind that what I just wrote isn’t necessarily what I believe, but I think it could be argued.
Hell, I think there’s a good case to be made in signing it in reverence to FDR, or in signing it as a slap at RR. Seeing as Obama tries to avoid negativity, and he’s a bad actor, it probably would have been better to elevate FDR rather than pummeling Reagan.
Still, I would like for one day for this country to know the truth about Reagan’s legacy: huge deficits, both structural and trade, huge debt, high unemployment, corporate control of government.
I’m going to disagree with both of you. I think its a brilliant move. In practical terms it doesn’t natter a damn where it is signed. The substance is the same. In symbolic terms Obama is claiming ownership of the Reagan legacy – and the right to change it to his own design. He is rightly going to the source of the problem, and starting to fix it at source. Nobody believes this bill will fix everything or that it will be the last measure to address the problems Regan created. But by claiming its lineage – and legitmacy – goes right back to Reagan, Obama is claiming he is the legitimate heir to the tradition, and not the wingnuts and tea partiers who fondly imagine they have a dirct line of succession and legitmacy from Reagan.
The bigger question is whether Obama can transform Reaganomics, or whether it will fatally compromise him. At the moment my money is still, marginally, on Obama.
Again, maybe, if he makes a case against Reagan’s legacy in his speech. If not, then it’s terrible symbolism.
Obama is not going to sully the legacy of Reagan. Just the opposite. Remember that Reagan was given a week long burial in Washington, well attended by the nation and the press. I thought he was Lincoln resurrected. And from my memory, that’s all we heard about the guy all week: he took credit for Gorbachov’s reforms and the end of the cold war and a lot of other stupid things. The historians have a lot of catch up to do.
But for Obama, it suggests that he is running scared already, the 2012 presidential election not that far off. Can’t be a one-timer. Obama must be talking to Clinton much too much, and he is incapable of seeing the nation in its leftward turn. The people want Bush back, right?
I have never had a full grasp on politics, but now I don’t seem to know anything at all.
Obama has a sense of humor. This is great. Reagan started taking the wheels off the finacial regulations one by one.
To sign the bill there, starts putting the wheels back on one by one.
Reagan changed this country into a 2 class system.
Clinton and Bush kept that going.
This bill, no matter how one thinks it’s weak tea, is enormous in that it stops the ability of the financial system to have such enormous power.
Let’s wait to see the Repub reaction to this.
I bet they won’t like it.
FDR had a different situation to deal with than today. Back then he could call on the can do attitude of people in the US. Now, because of all the whining, not so much.
Power is being removed from those that have harmed the middle class and the poor.
“The bigger question is whether Obama can transform Reaganomics, or whether it will fatally compromise him.”
There isn’t any transforming Reaganomics: it’s a fixed game with corrupt results which are visible everywhere around the nation and will be for decades. Obama’s attempt to embrace a kinder, gentler Reaganomics – let’s call it Clintonomics – is a fatal flaw. Clinton came to office in the wake of the last fiscally responsible Republican, Bush 1 who understood Reaganomics to be voodoo economics. Daddy Bush left Clinton a solid fiscal platform on which to encourage the nascent internet tech boom.
Obama doesn’t seem to recognize what has happened: the administration preceding his was as fiscally profligate as Bush 2 was personally. With capitalists finding bigger, more assured profits in “innovative financial instruments” than in developing new tech, the US is no longer in the technological forefront in most areas. The pipeline is not nice and full as it was in 1993, and the tech Valley of Death has grown wider and wider.
Franklin Roosevelt was elected to office pledging to balance the federal budget. But once he got there, he recognized that the situation had deteriorated way beyond conventional solutions, made everyone understand the urgency of radical rethinking and then showed leadership to force the nation in new directions.
Obama came to office on the wing of huge consecutive victories such as occur once a century or so, in the wake of economic disaster resulting directly from the policies of his predecessors – the policies properly grouped under the heading “Reaganomics.” These factors would seem to militate political boldness in abandoning the economic policies he inherited. Instead, he has shown extreme political caution while seeking, as Frank says, to “transform Reaganomics.”
Obama hasn’t explained the urgency of abandoning Reaganomics because he doesn’t see it. He may already be fatally compromised. Boehner thinks the Gulf spill shows we need a moratorium on regulation and the Wall Street Journal thinks we need to try a little Hayek and von Mises as if the past 35 years had never happened, and no one is laughing at them. Why not?
Reagan was the pivotal figure in moving from a “Government is good and here to help you” paradigm to a “Government is bad and must be downsized as much as possible” philosophy. (No he didn’t do a lot of the crap that came afterwards – Clinton et al were just working within the same paradigm).
Obama aspires to be a similarly transformative President changing the paradigm to “Government can work for you if you organise your communities to make it so”.
In doing so, he is working with the establishment as it now is – the MIC and Wall Street because they are far more powerful than the Presidency, and without them he can do nothing – whilst building up alternative organisations and narratives in parallel.
He is thus claiming the mantel of Reagan as a transformer, not Reagan the neo-conservative, and presumably driving the wingnuts crazy as a direct consequence.
The question is whether he can pivot into his own paradigm or be captured by the old.
Maybe because, like Reagan, who Obama admires, cut food stamps, just like Obey says the Obama administration wanted to do.
Norm Dicks is a lousy replacement for Obey. We’re going to miss him. I love him for being perpetually pissed off. I feel the same way about you.
He didn’t repeal Glass Steagall. He didn’t pump money into the economy to create first the Nasdaq boom and then the real estate boom.
He cut taxes some and did some deregulation. Those policies may have been misguided but he can’t be held responsible for the massively excessive degree to which those policies would be extended 15-20 years later.
Reagan didn’t repeal Glass-Steagal. We needed “liberal” Republican Jim Leach and “moderate” Democrat Bill Clinton to do that. Please note also that neither Obama nor the current Democratic Congress did enough to reinstall the wall between depository and investment banking that was the foundation of Glass-Steagall’s effectiveness: i.e. we haven’t even gotten back to reinstating what conservative friends of banking like Carter Glass understood to be necessary for the banking system to function safely.
Encouraging the tech boom at least led to a genuine prosperity based on American innovation and production. Encouraging the housing boom was strictly flensing the whale: cleaning the carcass of what remains of American prosperity, a move in private capital analogous to selling off the national parks: short term prosperity and long-term impoverishment.
What Reagan did was to sell lots of us a flashy bill of goods: if you cut taxes, it will lead to more revenue; government regulation is unnecessary because business cares too much about its long-term reputation to engage in bad acts (which Alan Greenspan admitted was crap); higher productivity will lead to wage increases; deficits don’t matter; etc.
But worst of all, Reagan sold us on the idea that we could maintain broad prosperity while shutting down our productive economy and building up our service economy: we don’t need to make things anymore; we can stay rich by selling pizzas and innovative financial instruments to each other. It was voodoo economics then. Now it has been proven to be voodoo economics, but no one in office seems too concerned, Republican or Democrat.
He ran on a campaign of cutting taxes, deregulating, and spending on the military.
He mostly kept his promises.
He didn’t try to sell anyone on the idea that services were better than manufacturing. He actually imposed quotas on Japanese manufactured goods.
I am not saying I would have voted for him had I been old enough to do so. I am merely saying that the terrible things that happened to the USA over the past 20 years are not his doing.
It was W and to some extent Clinton.
The fact that Republicans worship Reagan doesn’t make Reagan a bad guy. He’d be to the left of 95% of his part if he were still alive.
Reagan signed the biggest tax increase in American history. And if you don’t think he set into motion the reversal of the New Deal that led us where we are now, I guess I can’t blame you for being too young to remember. But BooMan is right about that.
You talking about the guy who opened his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi declaring his belief in States Rights and who gave us the phrase “Welfare Queen” as a euphamism for a Black Woman? Fuck him – may he rot in He’ll for all eternity.
A puzzler. And Obama — the candidate who had so many nice things to say about “transformational” presidents like Reagan as opposed to incrementalists like Clinton, doesn’t strike me as someone who’s inclined by past record, or post-partisan temperament, to diss the Gipper.
At least not so directly, not on the guy’s (symbolic) home turf, which would be rather in your face (and almost unprecedented for a sitting president to do to a former prez). That would certainly end up riling up the Repub base to come out to vote a lot more than it would encourage Dems, imo.
I have no idea what O and Rahm and Axe have in mind here–and I’m already working myself up a bit, fearing still more St Ronnie sucking up by this Dem president.
Obama’s statements seem to me that he has internalized many aspects of Reaganism, government can’t create jobs, spending is a problem, etc.
W/E, I’m pissed at him about education right now. It seems like Duncan is not listening to any teachers at all in regards to things. I’ve now read a number of things saying the proposed changes are going to be worse than NCLB.
Just to add some Godwin to the discussion, this reminds me of Hitler forcing the French to sign the surrender papers in the same rail car where the Germans capitulated in 1918. If only St. Ronnie could be brought back to life to countersign, and then the building leveled.