Reagan's televised address apologizing for the Iran-contra scandal and Obama apologizing for the Obamacare rollout / AP
BY:
Of all the analogies being drawn between the calamitous rollout of Obamacare and other government muck-ups throughout history, one deserves a closer look. What’s happening to Obamacare right now isn’t this president’s Iraq war, or his Hurricane Katrina, or his Lewinsky moment. It’s his Iran-contra scandal: a complicated and controversial policy dispute that involves deception, a hostile Congress, and the bludgeoning of presidential credibility. Iran-contra marked the end of the Reagan Revolution, and it’s not hard to see how the implementation of Obamacare might mark the end of the Obama Revolution as well. A boy can dream.
The analogy rests on the following similarity between presidents Reagan and Obama: For much of their time in office, the two men were more popular than their policies, and enjoyed higher personal approval than job approval. Ronald Reagan was always more popular than tax and spending cuts, and Barack Obama has been more popular than Obamacare and the stimulus. Reagan was hard to dislike. Obama is too, or so I’ve been told.
The news in 1986 that the Reagan administration had violated the arms embargo against Iran and traded weapons for hostages, with the proceeds of the weapons sales going to the anti-Sandinista insurgency in Nicaragua, threw the White House into disarray. The subsequent investigations into what exactly happened distracted Reagan and his team and damaged the president’s reputation. It’s hard to recall, especially as Reagan himself was never fully implicated in the scandal, but his approval ratings fell to a second-term low of 47 percent in the Gallup poll and his personal favorability fell as well.
