The Weekly Standard

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Well, there we are. The clock is now officially running on President Obama's second term. The good news: We're only 1,458 days from being done with it.
  
The bad news: Everything else.

If you want to laugh a little bit, there's Ross Douthat's alternate-universe version of Obama's inaugural speech. But if you want to wallow in the moment and get depressed, I highly recommend Matthew Continetti's essay about "The Obama Revolution." Continetti's thesis is that Obama came to Washington to undo the Reagan revolution. And that to a substantial—and possibly even total—extent, he has:

What was the Reagan revolution? It was lower taxes on the wealthy, more money for the Defense Department, a genuine if somewhat easy-going cultural conservatism, and the rhetorical promotion of business, private initiative, and American nationalism. Presidents Bush and Clinton and Bush fussed with the rhetoric—all three of them used language that was more communitarian than Reagan's—and tinkered around the edges of tax and spending policy. Bush I raised taxes, Clinton imposed work requirements on welfare, and Bush II oversaw an additional Medicare entitlement, but Reagan's general approach remained the dominant one.

This is something Obama understood. He wrote critically of Reagan in his first book. But, by his 2008 campaign for the presidency, he had developed something of an appreciation for our fortieth president. It soon became clear that Obama sought to be more like Reagan than Reagan’s successors had been—but in a way that would negate those aspects of Reagan’s legacy that liberals found distasteful. Obama sought to be the anti-Reagan, sought to restore the liberal consensus that prevailed in Washington prior to January 1981. He was not a revolutionary. He was a counterrevolutionary.

Continetti sees Ted Kennedy as the man who prepared the way for all of this. (If you want a really dark giggle, you could think of him as John to Obama’s Second Coming.) It was Kennedy who kept the old liberal flame alive during all of those years when it looked as though Reagan had altered the nation’s political order permanently. It was Kennedy who spent three decades fighting a rear-guard action against the Reagan revolution. And it’s not a coincidence that it was Kennedy who threw his weight behind Barack Obama in 2007, when much of the party establishment was backing Hillary Clinton. Say what you want about Teddy Kennedy: He knew a fellow traveler when he saw him.

And where are we now? Continetti sees the country as much bluer than the totals from November 2012 suggest:

Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections. They have controlled both chambers of Congress for just 10 of the last 20 years. More disturbing was the recognition that conservatives have failed to limit government. Entitlements grew throughout the Reagan Revolution despite reductions in the tax burden. Americans continue to look to the federal government for solutions to every endemic problem, from inequality to the business cycle to rampage killings to the weather. Americans continue to lobby the federal government for additional economic and social rights and guard those rights zealously from interference once they have been granted.

Sounds about right, doesn’t it?

I know what you're thinking: Gee, thanks for cheering me up after the Glorious People's Inauguration Day. But like they say on the late-night infomercials, Wait—there's more!
 
LOOKING BACK


  

"If Cheney was reluctant to open up about his feelings, his talk on policies and politics was, as ever, revealing. He thinks Barack Obama is naïve about national security. He worries that the Bush administration's aggressive intervention in the free market will do long-term damage to conservative efforts to limit government. And though he tried mightily to avoid saying so, Cheney believes that the administration's North Korea policy has failed.”



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