On Presidents Day
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President Barack Obama hopes to overhaul the tax code. That must mean he's channeling Ronald Reagan again. He has continued to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. That means he's taken a page from George W. Bush. He's been willing to engage America's opponents. That means he's a carbon copy of Jimmy Carter.
But wait. He pushed his health care overhaul through Congress. That makes him different from Bill Clinton. He's reluctant to levy new taxes to attack the deficit. That separates him from George H. W. Bush.
Now that we celebrate Presidents Day (the third Monday in February) rather than Lincoln's birthday (Feb. 12) or Washington's birthday (Feb. 22), we tend more than ever to look at presidents as a group, a subspecies all its own, and we measure our chief executives by how they conform with their predecessors and how they differ.
So when we consider Mr. Obama's speaking style, we compare him with John F. Kennedy; when we examine his attempts to forge international coalitions, we compare him with the first President Bush; and when we weigh his willingness to take on entrenched Democratic interests, we compare him with President Clinton. Sometimes the president does this himself.
Not so long ago he spoke privately with a confidant about how his communication style differs from Reagan's. It wasn't that he was trying to ape Reagan, as the newsmagazines have been saying. It was that he was trying to learn from Reagan, only to find that what Reagan had -- a way of looking at the world that was instinctive, not intellectual -- cannot be learned. In Reagan's day, his partisans cried: Let Reagan be Reagan. Perhaps the lesson for Mr. Obama is to let Obama be Obama. But that's another column.
Though presidents share many characteristics, they leave their own stamp on the office, reshaping it for all who follow. Consider how different William Howard Taft was from Theodore Roosevelt -- a difference that proved fatal to Taft, who came in third when he ran for re-election -- and how different Kennedy was from Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1914, the radical journalist John Reed compared Woodrow Wilson in the White House with Theodore Roosevelt:
First Published February 20, 2011 12:00 am
