A year before his first inauguration, Barack Obama laid
out the objective of his presidency: to renew faith and trust in
-activist government and transform the country. In an hourlong interview
with the editorial board of the Reno Gazette-Journal on
January 16, 2008, Obama said that his campaign was already “shifting the
political paradigm” and promised that his presidency would do the same.
His model would be Ronald Reagan, who “put us on a fundamentally
different path,” in a way that distinguished him from leaders who were
content merely to occupy the office. “I think that Ronald Reagan changed
the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not. And in a
way that Bill Clinton did not.”
If
Reagan sought to minimize the role of government in the lives of
Americans, Obama set out to do the opposite. “We’ve had a federal
government that I think has gotten worn down and ineffective over the
course of the Bush administration, partly because philosophically this
administration did not believe in government as an agent of change,” he
complained.
“I want to make government cool again,” he said.
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