Morning Again

For much of this Moscow speech, in fact, Obama could have been channeling Reagan. But then the same was true of Obama's two previous bellwether addresses: his Prague speech on nuclear weapons in April and his appeal to the Muslim world in Cairo last month.

The resemblances between Obama and Reagan are not merely in policies—though Prague made it apparent, for example, that Obama is as serious as Reagan was in his determination to reduce nuclear weapons. What Obama seems to share most fundamentally with Reagan is a view of the potential of the presidency. Reagan saw it as a president's job to advance big, game-changing ideas: an end to the Cold War; a world without nuclear weapons. And he had the rhetorical skills to implant these in the public mind. Reagan, it's clear, saw speeches as the single most important task of the president. From his 1983 Star Wars speech announcing a massive missile-defense effort ("Wouldn't it be better to save lives than to avenge them?") to his 1987 call in Berlin ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall"), Reagan grasped that a bold enough speech by the president could set the terms of debate on any issue. Reagan's visit to Moscow in 1988—just a year after that Berlin speech—was, arguably, a vindication of his view.

Obama—easily the most eloquent President since Reagan—wields words as his predecessor did. Obama's speech on race in America in the middle of last year's election campaign changed how the issue can be discussed. Similarly, on the question of health care, it's clear that Obama set out to change the terms of the debate with his rhetoric. The operative presumption is now that there will be health-care reform. That's Obama's doing.

Whether Obama can similarly succeed in setting the terms of debate for game-changing ideas in the international arena remains unclear. His Prague, Cairo, and Moscow speeches are too recent to tell—though the most ambitious (and brilliant) of these, in Cairo, has arguably already altered affairs in Lebanon and Syria. What's clear is that Obama, like Reagan, sees his job as launching Big Ideas—and then letting others figure out how to adjust to them.

© 2009