Obama: The Only Recent President to Cite 'American Exceptionalism'

Only one sitting president in the last 82 years has publicly uttered the magical phrase “American exceptionalism”--care to guess who it is? Ronald Reagan, he of the “shining city on a hill?” George W. Bush, who closed his speeches by asking that “God continue to bless” America? Nope. The only president to publicly discuss (and for that matter embrace) “American exceptionalism” is Barack Obama.

This would be the same president, of course, who is subject to a steadily rising stream of suspicion because of his supposed refusal to give voice sufficient voice to his love of country.

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Director of President Reagan's Office of Management & Budget Says GOP Caused Economic Apocalypse

For Republicans and many Teabaggers (see photo to the left), President Ronald Reagan is a hero and icon. But the truth is that Reagan oversaw a 189% increase in the national debt during his eight years in office. His economic philosophy of giving tax cuts to the most wealthy has led to the average American, which Teabaggers are supposed to epitomize, to pay the debt.

Well, some people are starting to realize what Reaganomics in general and what passes for current Republican economic policy specifically has and will do to this country. Joining this group is David Stockman, who was Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget. He published an op-ed in the New York Times on July 31. He outlines four deformations of the economic apocalypse, but this passage is the one that needs to be heard the loudest:

This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.

In 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts, matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration’s hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces — the welfare state and the warfare state — that drive the federal spending machine.

Soon, the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward. And the Republicans on Capitol Hill who were supposed to cut spending exempted from the knife most of the domestic budget — entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects. But in the end it was a new cadre of ideological tax-cutters who killed the Republicans’ fiscal religion. Link