Barack Hussein Reagan?

AS I watched President Obama address Congress last week, I felt a strange case of deja vu.

In a TV speech before a joint session of the legislative branch, with all the attendant frill and fanfare, a new president gives a talk meant to reassure America that ours is not a sick society.

After pointing out several heroes in the audience, he declares that "Sick societies don't make people like us so proud to be Americans and so very proud of our fellow citizens."

Yet the president also warns that failing to pass his economic program will cause economic catastrophe. Even now, problems with the banking sector are "preventing families across America from buying homes."

"There are still almost 8 million unemployed. The average worker's hourly earnings after adjusting for inflation are lower today than they were six months ago, and there have been over 6,000 business failures."

The new president seems cool, confident, witty, commanding. Compared to his hapless predecessor, he's just plain presidential. Americans respond positively. Even the president's opponents give him high marks for a speech well delivered, and declare that they like the president personally - it's only his policies that are irresponsible.

Of course, the president was Ronald Reagan, who gave his economic recovery speech on April 28, 1981, just weeks after narrowly surviving a would-be assassin's bullet. He dazzled with his poise, humor and optimism.

But he didn't dazzle me. Back in the 1980s, I was a Reagan curmudgeon. I thought of Reagan not as my president, but as a washed-up actor who somehow charmed his way into the White House over better and sounder men. His tax cutting seemed fiscally reckless, just as his foreign policy bravado threatened to turn the Cold War into a thermonuclear one.

Now I'm an Obama curmudgeon. In an unusually hypocritical speech, even for a Chicago politician, Obama said that short-term gains should not outweigh our long-term needs, all the while touting a huge stimulus package meant to pump up the economy . . . in

the short term.

Obama declared that we can't reward the auto companies for their bad decisions, while proposing to do just that, bailing out poorly run Chrysler and GM, which will hurt their better-run competitor Ford. And on mortgages, don't get me started. Apparently in this new "era of responsibility," one of the chief roles of government will be subsidizing irresponsible behavior.

In so many ways Obama, the genial, optimistic liberal, has adopted as his model Reagan, the genial, optimistic conservative who championed balanced budgets in theory, while running up huge deficits through his two terms.

That's why Obama drives Republicans crazy. Watching Obama, Republicans feel like Democrats did when they watched Reagan. He champions one set of values and governs by another. Yet, politically, everything seems to be working for him. It's just not fair.

But then politics is seldom fair, and leadership isn't always what it seems to be at the time.

Last month, I took part in C-SPAN's poll of presidency experts, ranking the chief executives from first to 43rd. Much to my amazement, the overwhelmingly liberal professors ranked Reagan in the top 10. Much as I hated him at the time, I now put the Gipper at No. 4, just behind Washington, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and just ahead of Reagan's own hero, FDR. He belongs on Mt. Rushmore.

Reagan's "reckless" foreign policies essentially ended the Cold War, shattering communist regimes that had murdered at least 80 million people. The "Reaganomics" I derided restructured the U.S. economy, paving the way for the boom of the '90s.

DESPITE ALL his contradictions, and rhetorical smoke and mirrors, I now see Reagan as the greatest president of my lifetime. I just wish I'd appreciated him at the time.

So when I look at Obama's huge expansion of government, his contradictory rhetoric and his legion of crazed fans - I've pretty much stopped taking calls from my own brother - I can't help but wonder if, in the long term, he'll actually end up being the right leader for the time. *

Robert Maranto is on leave from

Villanova University, serving as

the 21st Century Chair in Leadership

at the Department of Education Reform

at the University of Arkansas. E-mail him at rmaranto@uark.edu.