Obama reads about Reagan

Just before Christmas, the White House announced the president's reading list, which included The Role of a Lifetime by Lou Cannon - still pretty much the essential book on Reagan's presidency, though I'd probably reccomend Richard Reeves. The choice is presumably a nod to the centennial, to the spirit of bipartisan understanding, and an invitation to compare the two presidencies. Conservatives have read it as an attempt to emulate Reagan. "Mr. Obama," says son Michael, "apparently thinks that if he can learn how to play the role of a Reaganesque president, he can become as successful as my father, Ronald Reagan." Tevi Troy suggests that:

[H]e is looking to a great president for clues as to how he, too, can become a great president. Reagan’s communication skills were of course superb, but his policies had something to do with it as well, and Obama would have to take on some of Reagan’s ideology to learn the full lesson of Reagan.

If Obama wants to learn anything from Reagan, I expect, it is about how to behave around a hostile Congress (and possibly with a fractious Middle East). Both Troy and M. Reagan's comments seem part of a resurgent defence of Reagan's conservative identity, more of which later.

Incidentally, Reagan only released one reading list during his presidency, on the request of the Baltimore Sun. It included a book on Thomas Jefferson, and one which imagined a near-future outbreak of World War - that would get the bloggers tapping nowadays!

Also incidentally, last year Obama announced that he was reading Edmund Morris's The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. After Reagan read the book, Morris was picked to be his official biographer - no such result for Morris from the Obama White House so far, though it would certainly raise an interesting stink. Morris's thoughts on the announcement here.

On the Reagan Trail

The Peoria Journal Star reports on a Reagan-themed tour of Illinois which took place on his birthday this year, led by his son, Michael. The trail went non-chronologically from Reagan's almer-mater, Eureka College, to his birthplace in Tampico, and then to Dixon, which he would come to see as his hometown.

Edmund Morris' Dutch opens with the biographer and former president visiting Tampico, the first time, for Reagan, since his birth. Reagan sees the room in which he was born and retreats in shock.

He showed no interest in what I tried to tell him about the events of eighty years ago in Tampico. Instead, he took refuge in his own stories about Hollywood...Listening to him, I asked myself who of us, forced so brutally to confront the nothingness from which we have sprung, would not have turned away as he did, knowing it to be indistinguishable from - indeed, identical with - the nothingness that looms ahead?

The celebratory tour did not embrace the themes of darkened memory and approaching death. Instead it emphasised the connection between the Hollywood President and his smalltown, Mid-Western origins. Amongst the weirdly framed photos, we see a Dixon statue of the president looking blankly at a handful of Illinois corn kernels. One Eureka senior remarked:

My newfound appreciation for Ronald Reagan comes from seeing the communities in his life, the values he learned, the culture and his upbringing...It's amazing that he never lost sight of who he was and didn't look down on his roots.

This is certainly a theme that Reagan evoked often enough, and which is asserted in his more friendly biographies, and at the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley. It is not the only story of Reagan, however, who quickly left smalltown Illinois to make his fortune in the great cities of Des Moines, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. Alonzo Hamby thought it "a measure of his political skill that he made us believe he could have been a contented provincial nonentity".

Some earlier thoughts I had on Reagan and the small town.