Obama was right about Reagan

Somewhere buried in the files of the Bloomington, Ill., Pantagraph is a photo of me, at the ripe old age of 10, standing beside my grandfather, confronting then-House Republican Leader Bob Michel.

Grandpa was fond of pointing out that the paper did not choose to print the substance of my question, which was about what Reaganomics was going to do for my parents — both of whom were laid off in the first Reagan recession. My father, a Caterpillar welder, lost his job to our trade deficit, while my mother, a county employee, lost hers to the federal budget deficit that left communities like ours fending for themselves.

A few years later, I wrote my high school term paper on the Iran-Contra affair — concluding, in the wisdom of my 17 years, that it amounted to treason.

As I read Pentagon reports today, alleging Iran has smuggled the weapons that may have shot down our helicopters in Iraq, I am brought back to my youthful conclusions. No one has more reason to dislike Ronald Reagan than I do.

But Larry Spohn's recent column (Re: "Reagan redux?" Insight & Opinion, Jan. 24), vilifying Barack Obama for his accurate comment that Ronald Reagan changed the direction of America — but omitting Obama's comments from the same interview that the Republican Party's ideas had been played out — entirely missed the point of this moment and this candidate.

We cannot undo the damage done to our nation in the past few years. There is no Moses running, who can truly roll back the waters from the levees of New Orleans or turn the tide to unambiguous victory in Iraq. Instead, we must choose carefully a leader who has proven wise, who can find our way forward in treacherous terrain.

But that leader cannot walk alone. Even a bare majority of Americans will not be enough to support them as they try to unite us, to call upon us to make the sacrifices we declined to make after 9/11, save for a few brave souls.

No, that leader will have to inspire. That leader will have to move us and welcome us from the ranks of the apostate to the hosts of the righteous, as one father long ago welcomed home his prodigal son.

Politicians traffic in empty promises. They run on the presumptions that not only will they win, but all opposition will magically fade away once they do.

Obama does not speak of promises, but of what is possible. He promises only for himself, and he tells us truly what he thinks he can do — with our help. He is the only remaining candidate to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning, and from the beginning of his Senate career, he has said it will not be as easy to get out as it was to go in.

The truth is that no Democratic candidate can move the country far unless he or she can garner support from all corners, from Democratic partisans to independents and die-hard Republicans alike. No one will move this country forward unless he or she welcomes back the Reagan Democrats, who voted against their own interests long ago.

That is what Obama's comments — taken out of context and hypocritically politicized by other politicians — were all about. We cannot walk forward alone. We must do so together, and to do that, we must call our brothers and sisters from other political stripes back to being Americans again.

That is the promise of Obama's candidacy, and that is the hope of our generation.

Drew Sedrel

Albuquerque