Jellybean Barry?

One would not think Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan would have much in common, other than both having lived in Illinois at some point in their lives. However, if the Illinois senator does become the 44th President of the United States, much of his success will have been due to emulating the 40th President of the United States.

Certainly, their politics, personal stories, career paths and eras in which they came of age are quite divergent. However, in their pragmatic approaches to politics, and their ability to forge personal bonds with legislators who are the political polar opposites, one can easily discern some striking similarities.

You can see the first similarity in their Presidential campaigns. Reagan had a simple rule: Thou shalt not hurt a member of thine own party. Now, as George H. W. Bush can attest, that didn’t mean you couldn’t attack a fellow Republican (or Democrat) on the issues. However, that didn’t extend to gutter politics, such as George W. Bush’s smear campaign on John McCain in 2000.

This approach was a big part of why Reagan enjoyed such sweeping general-election success. He didn’t have to clean mud from his shoes after the GOP conventions in 1980 and 1984 – and this relatively clean image really helped his generally positive and hopeful outlook that his campaigns offered the voting populace.

It’s obvious that Obama is trying to walk the same path. He certainly hasn’t made much of an issue of Hillary Clinton’s personal peccadilloes. He’s certainly taken more shots than Reagan did, but by not jumping into the same sewers as his attackers, he’s got the same benefit of relative cleanliness.

Their positive stumping points are also very similar. Like Reagan, Obama offers a rosy view of America’s future, with more substance than his detractors are willing to admit. Obviously, their implementations are very different. But the approach is very similar.

Obama has been described as an “empty suit”, “Manchurian Candidate”, and, courtesy of the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, “Obambi”. Reagan endured the same types of criticisms, even though he had executive experience by the time he ran for President. One need only recall the 1980 and 1992 Republican primaries for proof. In 1980, the man eventually known as Bush 41 hung the classic “voodoo economics” tag on Reagan’s economic proposals. In 1992, H. Ross Perot dropped some political karma on then-President Bush by, of all things, coining a famously derisive phrase to describe Reaganomics, which Bush had adopted: “Trickle-down don’t really trickle down.”

Obama and Reagan saw the same priority in fixing Social Security. Both also have a very similar funding element: a temporary raise in the capital-gains tax, and an adjustment on the Social Security payroll tax.

Both have shown a clear, demonstrated ability to work with the other party to get their legislation passed. Reagan was famous for panning Congress to the press, who ate up Jellybean Ronnie’s tough talk like cake. However, remember that Congress spent much of Reagan’s eight years under a heavy Democratic influence. Despite this, Reagan managed to get almost all his proposals through. He did this by employing a personal touch not seen since the days of Lyndon Johnson. He knew how to cajole, how to plead, and how to reason with legislators. Even Democrat Tip O’Neill, then the Speaker of the House, grudgingly praised Reagan’s ability to glad-hand his way to one legislative victory after another.

In the U.S. Senate alone, Obama co-authored the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (known in Beltway shorthand as “Coburn-Obama”), the Lugar-Obama non-proliferation bill to reduce conventional WMDs, and another Lugar-Obama bill, the American Fuels Act. These major pieces of legislation were authored with Sens. Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Dick Lugar (R-IN), two of the most conservative Senators. For a “far left liberal”, Obama sure managed to get some polar opposites to work with him. These important pieces of legislation show Obama’s negotiating skills.

Probably the most striking similarity between the two politicians, though, is their ability to turn negative criticism into positive public feeling. Reagan spent a good deal of his Presidency fighting off scandals – including “Iranamok”, which exploded and stayed hot for months, and included several Reagan “inaccuracies”. A lesser politician would have been completely disgraced. Reagan, though, somehow managed to glide through it all relatively unscathed, thus earning another moniker: “Teflon Ron”.

Obama has already dealt with a raft of potential hot-button issues. His racial makeup, his middle name, the unfortunate similarities between “Obama” and “Osama”, his religious beliefs (polling still shows that about a quarter of white Americans who disapprove of Obama still think he’s a Muslim), Jeremiah Wright, Antoin Rezko, William Ayers, “Bitter-gate”, etc.

Many Democrats have been sunk for far less than the perceived weight of those issues. (Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry leap to mind.) However, Obama’s poll numbers seem to have improved after many of these stories broke. And if the controversies have hurt him with the party elite, the superdelegate movement definitely doesn’t reflect it, as Obama is now less than 25 supers behind Clinton, who started out the primary season with over 200 endorsements.

Obama has a Teflon coating wrapped in a Kevlar bodysuit. He’ll need all of his armor in the general election, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood right-wing 527s.

Of course, the two men aren’t really alike. If they ran against each other, they’d have big differences in policy and personal stories. Both men ran for President under strikingly similar national circumstances: burgeoning international crisis, depressed economic circumstances, and stark rises in fuel costs.

Ronald Reagan’s real secret to political success was to offer a hopeful agenda that made Americans believe positive change was not only possible, but even inevitable, if he got elected. If Barack Obama does take the oath of office next January, the concepts of hope and change will have found their greatest advocate since Reagan himself.