Snap quiz. Who does President Barack Obama think of as one of the most consequential presidents of the 20th century? Kennedy for sure, but you’d be surprised at the other. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama told the New York Times.
Reagan? Mr trickle-down-economy? The guy who failed to act against AIDS? Iran-Contra Reagan? That guy?
“[Reagan] put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people just tapped into — he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing,” Obama told the Times.
He may as well have been…
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