Obama interview with Reno Journal Gazette
Morning Joe: discussing Bills Clinton's talking Points
The Lasting Leadership of Ronald Reagan
by Jesse Helms, Heritage Foundation
When Bill Clinton took office in 1992, his and Hillary's very first project was their effort to nationalize American health care. It was an old-style, left-wing, big-government project--and it was a colossal failure. The American people wanted nothing to do with a return to big-government liberalism. To make sure Mr. Clinton got the message, they went to the polls in 1994, turned out the Democrat Congress, and elected a Republican majority--a stinging, personal repudiation of Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton got the message. By 1996, he was standing before a Republican Congress declaring: "We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there is not a program for every problem.... The era of big Government is over." Remember that night?
With that one statement, Bill Clinton was conceding Ronald Reagan's victory in the war of ideas; with that statement, Clinton acknowledged that, thanks to the Reagan Revolution, a Democrat President could no longer govern the nation on the basis of the Democrat orthodoxy of big-government liberalism. That orthodoxy had been repudiated, you see, by Ronald Reagan and rejected by the American people. And the only way a Democrat President could govern and expect to be re-elected was do his best to imitate Ronald Reagan.
