Thursday, July 15, 2010
Conservatives can rail all they want about the liberalism of President Barack Obama, but the truth is the man in the White House is much more like GOP idol Ronald Reagan than Democratic icon Franklin Roosevelt, says Bob Samuels, president of the University Council—AFT, the union governing body that represents lecturers and librarians employed by the University of California system.
Obama’s “underlying philosophy” is based on four elements of the Republican revolution of 1980: “distrusting the government, cutting taxes, idealizing free markets, and expanding the military budget.”
For instance, his health care overall does not follow the European model of regulating costs and profits. Instead, it “lets the insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and medical institutions continue to establish their own free market approach to pricing and compensation.”
When it comes to Wall Street, Obama has utilized a “combination of free market fundamentalism and an anti-government rejection of regulation.”
But the most Reagan-like behavior Obama has displayed is with the military. He has been willing to support huge increases for the Department of Defense and risk a ballooning of the national deficit. “Like Reagan, Obama has indicated that he will reduce everything except the defense budget, and this strategy will result in the need to cut relatively inexpensive social programs, while costly military projects continue to expand,” writes Samuels.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Obama More like Reagan than FDR (by Bob Samuels, Huffington Post)
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