Obama and the Gipper

No one is surprised when Republican Presidential candidates invoke Ronald Reagan like they're counting prayer beads, but perhaps a better measure of the Gipper's political legacy is the fracas it has kicked up among the Democrats. This week, Barack Obama had the blaspheming temerity to acknowledge that Reagan was a transformational President.

"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America, in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," the Senator told the Reno Gazette-Journal. "He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. . . . He just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, 'We want clarity, we want optimism.'"

The obvious context of Mr. Obama's remarks was his case for "change" versus Hillary Clinton's "experience." But the Internet left went bananas, and John Edwards and Mrs. Clinton ripped into Mr. Obama as well. Mr. Edwards cited the "extraordinary damage" Reagan supposedly visited on the country, while in a conference call with reporters yesterday, Clinton surrogate and Baby Boom liberal Barney Frank said he was "stupefied" by Mr. Obama's "explicit endorsement" of the notion that the GOP is "the party of ideas."

According to this paranoid style, the "excesses" Mr. Obama referenced were liberal emblems like the civil rights, antiwar and women's movements, the Great Society's social welfare programs and the like. Please. More likely, the Illinois Senator was thinking of the actual reasons for Reagan's 1980 success: double-digit inflation, marginal tax rates as high as 70%, high unemployment, Soviet Communism on the march in Afghanistan, hostages in Tehran . . .

Mr. Obama is trying to associate the present with these crises -- and thus frame his candidacy as the advent of a liberal Reagan -- though whatever problems we now face are several orders of magnitude removed from those that gave rise to Reagan. And unlike Mr. Obama, Reagan campaigned on forthright policy reforms -- substance -- and not merely a change in style.

It was less his "optimism" or what the country "felt," as Mr. Obama had it, than it was Reagan's ideas that account for his success. He shifted electoral coalitions and realigned the U.S. political center to the right because he governed with a genuinely new domestic agenda and approach to foreign policy -- and it worked. Still, we suspect Mr. Obama is smarter than his Democratic critics in evoking Reagan as the example he wants to emulate, and it says something about the breadth of his political ambitions that he would do so.

The episode is most telling, though, for what it says about the ancient mariners of the Democratic Party and how little they've changed. Supposedly Mr. Obama committed a grievous blunder by nodding at the achievement of one of the most consequential Presidencies of the 20th century. If the rest of the Democrats can't even recognize the same, it suggests that the change they have in mind is back to the 1960s and '70s. Courstesy Wall Street Journal

How the White House may be won -- in the West

I am looking out the window of my office on the Seattle waterfront. On a clear day, I would see the deep blue of Puget Sound and the jagged peaks of the Olympics to the west. Today, there's nothing to see but the fuzzy outline of a container ship with its lights blurred by a thick gray mist.

At this moment, the race for president seems as foggy as the scene out my window. Burned by bad polls and the errors of conventional wisdom, the big-time pundits are no longer predicting which of the two leading Democratic contenders will get the chance to make history by becoming either the first woman or the first African-American to win a major party nomination. And the will of Republican voters is even more unfathomable, inclined as they seem to be to split their votes four or five ways.

All this uncertainty makes one thing almost certain: voters in the West will, for once, have a powerful voice in clarifying who the eventual nominees will be. Nevada became a prime battleground for the Democrats this last week. On Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, when 22 states will hold primaries or caucuses, a third of them will be in the West, including the big enchilada, California.

If, after that, the nominations are still in doubt, there's another prize to be won the following Saturday: Washington, with the second biggest cache of delegates in the West.

Once the nomination fights are over, the West could play a pivotal new role in determining November's victor because the West is not the Old West anymore. It's not even the New West it once was.

The political cliché is that California, Washington and Oregon are dominated by Hollywood liberals and Prius-driving tree huggers while the Mountain West is the domain of gun-toting ranchers and fervent members of evangelical megachurches. Democrats get the coast; Republicans get the Rockies.

Though superficially accurate, that division has not always held. Ronald Reagan swept all of the Western states twice while, in his two runs, Bill Clinton took the coast and picked off several of the mountain states. In 2000 and 2004, though (with the exception of New Mexico's defection to Democrat Al Gore), the cliché held true. That meant the real game was played elsewhere, in swing states like Ohio and Florida with lots of electoral votes.

In 2008, things could be different. Democrats have a strong shot at winning most of the West. If that should happen, the solid Republican base in the old Confederacy will not be enough to save the Republican candidate from defeat. Democrats could string together a new winning coalition from the states of the Northeast, the northern tier and the Far West.

Florida has 27 electoral votes; Ohio has 20. They were the pivotal states in the two narrow victories of George W. Bush. If Al Gore in 2000 or John Kerry in 2004 had been able to steal Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and Montana from the GOP column, Florida and Ohio wouldn't have mattered and Bush would be cutting brush in Crawford instead of running the country.

This year, those four states and their 27 electoral votes could go to the Democratic nominee. Why? Because Democrats are now winning in the West. Of the 11 governors in the Pacific Coast and mountain states, seven are Democrats and the most prominent of the Republicans, California's Arnold Schwarzenegger, solidified his popularity only after defying the Republican president on global warming.

Of the 22 Western U.S. senators, 10 are Democrats. Only in Idaho and Utah have voters not sent at least one Democrat to the U.S. Senate or the governor's mansion in the last few years.

In large part, this shift toward Democrats in the mountain states has been driven by demographic changes. Thousands of Californians have moved in and brought their progressive political sensibilities with them. The region has gained a more urban outlook in booming cities such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Denver (where, significantly, the Democrats are holding their nominating convention). The Hispanic population has increased throughout the West and, especially in this year of heated immigration politics, those are people who lean sharply toward the Democrats.

This realignment has also come about because a new breed of Democrat has ridden into town. Montana provides a prime example. There, voters have elected a Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer, and a new Democratic senator, Jon Tester, who are both ranchers. They don't carry themselves like citified Democrats in Seattle or Los Angeles or Boston. They don't scare their fellow ranchers with wild schemes to lock up the land and tax folks to death. They are genuine Democrats, but they speak with a Western twang and talk about common sense and common ground.

Yes, the right Democrat can take the West and leave the Republicans in the dust. But is someone named Barack or Hillary the right kind of Democrat? Read more of DAVID HORSEY @ Seattle PI

Image Of The Day

This was sent to me and I cannot confirm it independently but it's of a helicopter rescue mission in Afghanistan. Sometimes we forget what amazing people we have in the military - people with skills and balls most of us cannot even imagine. Whatever our differences about strategy and policy, I really don't see any evidence that the vast majority don't respect - even revere - the troops who are out there. I don't mean this as a typical look-at-me-I'm-a-patriot-Fox-News kind of gesture. But these kids are astonishing. Comments courtesy of Andrew Sullivan