“It’s still Ronald Reagan’s world … at least as far as taxes are concerned” Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein said recently after President Obama agreed to extend the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
The alternative of allowing them to expire as scheduled would have returned federal taxes and tax rates to those of President Clinton’s era, something that both Obama and Clinton claimed would have been disastrous for the American economy.
Klein’s comment reminds us today on the centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birth just how much across the American political and public policy landscape remains as it was shaped by the Great Communicator.
Obama explained it well during a campaign interview in January 2008: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path … he just tapped into what people were already feeling.”
It doesn’t require a lot of research to discover that Reagan “trajectory” embodied in any contemporary discussion of taxes, the Supreme Court, arms control treaties, State of the Union speeches and beyond.
Think of a trajectory that starts with Reagan’s 1981 Inaugural Address, which was the first presidential inaugural held on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol. They’ve all been held there in the years since.
In that address, Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” In his 1996 State of the Union speech, Clinton famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” Just a few weeks ago, Obama unilaterally announced a two-year pay freeze for all federal employees.
Or, how about today’s No. 1 topic in every state capital — the public employee collective bargaining crisis. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey forcefully challenging the teachers union in his state reminds us that one of the most decisive domestic presidential decisions in history was Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers for their illegal strike against the American people.
And what about the trajectory of the Supreme Court? Of the five justices who make up what is often the conservative majority, two were appointed by Reagan and three originally served in his administration in the 1980s. And the man who leads the court today, Chief Justice John Roberts, was an associate counsel to President Reagan for four years.
“Doveryai, no proveryai” — “Trust, but verify” — was the phrase made famous by Reagan when discussing relations with the Soviet Union in the years before he made the decisive decisions that led to the end of the Cold War.
The phrase has since become standard fare for many a negotiation. Vice President Biden used it so much in lobbying for the recent START treaty with Russia, one would have thought it was his middle name.
Obama’s forthcoming State of the Union address started this year’s edition of what has become an annual game among the pundits guessing who the chief executive will invite to sit in the balcony.
Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter put it this way: “Ever since Ronald Reagan put a ‘citizen hero,’ Lenny Skutnik, in the balcony of the House chamber after he rescued passengers from the wreck of an Air Florida jet that crashed in the freezing Potomac River in 1982, American presidents have used their State of the Unions speeches to honor their own ‘Skutniks,’ as they’ve come to be called in Washington.”
Reagan is also remembered by many for a sign he kept on his desk in the Oval Office that read “You can accomplish much if you don’t care who gets the credit.” It’s still true. And in countless ways big and small, ours is still Ronald Reagan’s world.
Patrick Pizzella was a Reagan senior executive service appointee at three different agencies and more recently served as Assistant Secretary of Labor from 2001-2009.
