The media likes to compare Barack Obama to Ronald Reagan. They note their shared charisma, etc... and attempt to say that Obama is going to be the next "great communicator" and convincer.
What they fail to see is that unlike Reagan, Obama has never really had to convince anyone of his principles and ideals and has never had to convince people that disagreed with him to follow him.
Reagan had to convince the SAG to go along with him. He spent years convincing audiences across the country as a spokesman for General Electric until they fired him for becoming too controversial. He had to convince Californians to follow him as Governor and then convince the skeptics that Goldwater conservatism was the economic answer in order to be elected President after a couple of tries.
Do you recall Obama ever being considered "too controversial" during his pre-Presidential career? In contrast, Obama "organized" a community that already agreed with him. He taught law. He never proposed and fought for anything in the Illinois Senate that was controversial, preferring to stay aloof from the fray. His record is dotted with "bipartisan", not controversy and idealogical conflict. He didn't have a big signature initiative in the Senate that he convinced Congress to pass. The closest he had come in his pre-presidential life to leading people to a conclusion is when he was running for President and adopted a poll-tested platform to campaign on that didn't quite reflect his real goals. Even then, he was trying to get people to see that he agreed with them, not to convince them to change their minds.
With the above biography, is it really a surprise that while Obama may have charisma, he doesn't actually have any idea how to convince the American people to follow his ideas? Now that he's President and he's actually trying to accomplish his goals, he's suddenly discovered that no matter how high his personal popularity used to be, the people don't agree with him. That's causing his personal popularity to sink rapidly as he tries to campaign for what he actually wants to accomplish instead of what the polls said he should announce during the campaign.
Obama does have much in common with a different former President. He inherited a poor economy with problems caused by government regulations and then extended it and made it worse through more government involvement. He's being praised by the press as an "intellectual" president, since most of the media agrees with his core principles. You can find many comparisons between Obama and Carter already out there. Nixon and Ford's domestic and economic policies have more in common with Bush's "Compassionate Conservatism" than you might think.
Reagan had a clearly announced plan to fix the economy once elected. He followed his plan and the economy turned around very rapidly. Some of us were alive in 1981 to see it happen. Obama's plans have just made the economy worse. Like Carter, he started with "even more of the same" things his predecessor was already trying. Like Carter, he's getting more of the same results.
No, Obama's no Reagan, but when 2012 rolls around we're going to need another Reagan. A credible candidate with a clear vision of limited government, lower taxes, and limited spending to get us out of the mess Obama will have created.
