I want to touch base on a few things before we all rest our minds for the Thanksgiving season. I read an article by Howard Fineman on the Newsweek website. It was about Obama and Ronald Reagan. Now, I’ve noticed this recent tendency by the left to compare Obama to Reagan. Perhaps they do it because Obama invoked Reagan’s name a few times during the campaigns, perhaps not. Well, I see it a bit differently.

They’re doing this because they’re trying to convince themselves, not you, but themselves that Obama’s failures are similar to Reagan’s failures early in his presidency. But what the media fails to understand is that Obama’s ideas and policies aren’t good ideas or good for America. Reagan championed small government, tax cuts across the board, and a freeze on spending. Obama is pushing an activist government, higher taxes by way of a VAT tax or “Value Added Tax” and more spending. Reagan sought to draw the line in the sand when it came to our enemies abroad, namely the former Soviet Union. He never blamed America or tried to minimize American power in order to make our allies and our enemies feel comfortable. Reagan never apologized for American Military and economic might, instead he sought ways to unite the world behind our ideals, rather than plead a case for why our unique principles and individual freedoms weren’t necessarily a model for the rest of the world to follow.

Reagan never imposed on the rest of the world his will, he wasn’t an imperialist. He didn’t think like Teddy Roosevelt that America must expand beyond her borders because she was a great nation destined for world supremacy. Ronald Reagan saw America the way James Monroe saw America, the way one of my heroes Calvin Coolidge saw America: A strong nation engaged in the world but not bound by international and trans-national bureaucracy. America was a force for good, a defense orientated Military and a capitalist economy. We weren’t going to cage ourselves within the confines of the UN or in the case of Calvin Coolidge, the League of Nations. More importantly, our very existence represents the contradiction of ever becoming beholden to international policy and agreements that might compromise our sovereignty as a nation state.

But with Obama, his knee jerk reaction is to compromise American power in order to gather around him both allies and adversaries. He calls it “soft power” but one can argue, and with great success, this policy of accommodation gains us nothing, and sacrifices everything.

The comparison between Reagan and Obama are purely a calculated attempt to reiterate the fear on the left that Obama might instead be compared to Reagan’s 1980 opponent Jimmy Carter. This is a psychological argument within the minds of liberals who can sense the sky falling around them. They hailed Obama’s election as a realignment of the American political landscape. They told us that in order for Republicans to win we must now follow the Obama model and adjust to demographic changes.

And yet, merely 10 months later the landscape remains the same as it did when Reagan was president, Bush I and II were president, and when Bill Clinton was president. Obama’s problem isn’t his charisma, or his speaking ability. His problem is that he’s bound by an ideology that is out of step with America. Americans were willing to give the new guy the benefit of the doubt. They wanted to elect the first minority president and you know, I consider the last election a sort of American Idol election if you think about it.

But when it came time to govern, he didn’t and what he proposed came off as out of the mainstream, political, and irrational. Shutting down Gitmo and trying terror suspects in American courts a few blocks away from ground zero no less, doesn’t sit well with the American people. Neither does back door socialized medicine, energy taxes, sovereignty killing treaties like Kyoto, and the pathetic apology tour across Europe and the Middle East.

No, Barack Obama isn’t Ronald Reagan, he is Jimmy Carter, perhaps a bit worse. And it’s sad and it will be sad when the time comes to vote for either a new president or reelect the one we have now. What will the media do then? If the current economic scene stays the same or gets worse, what will they do? How will they defend such regressive policies? And whom will they compare Obama to this time around?