After a controversial cover story last month by Niall Ferguson, “Hit the Road Barack: Why we need a new president,” Newsweek has followed-up with a piece by Andrew Sullivan voicing the opposite view
The new cover reads: “The Democrats’ Reagan: What Obama will achieve in his second term.”
Ferguson, a former adviser to GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, outlined how he feels President Barack Obama has failed to follow through on his 2008 election promises. Newsweek and Ferguson have received considerable criticism on the facts and analysis presented in his article.
Just over a month after publishing Ferguson’s anti-Obama cover article, Newsweek, the venerable news-magazine acquired by The Daily Beast, has done a 180. Sullivan draws a direct comparison between Obama and the revered two-term former president Ronald Reagan. Given that Obama and Reagan are from different political parties, Sullivan notes that Reagan struggled through his first term, but the economic growth of his second term transformed the entire nation. He suggests that Obama is in a similar situation, and argues that in the next four years, if re-elected, Obama’s second term will be more productive.
Sullivan writes that Obama “will emerge as an iconic figure who struggled through a recession and a terrorized world, reshaping the economy within it, passing universal health care, strafing the ranks of al -Qaeda, presiding over a civil-rights revolution, and then enjoying the fruits of the recovery.”
This Newsweek cover is not Sullivan’s first. He has written several pro-Obama articles that have made the magazine’s front cover. The most recent of which labeled Obama the “first gay president” after his historic embrace of marriage equality.
As one of Obama’s biggest supporters, Sullivan feels Obama has all the iconic characteristics Reagan possessed. He even encourages 2008 Obama supporters to continue to stand behind the president because change takes time and “it makes no sense to bail on him now.”
Follow Carrie Healey on Twitter @CarrieHeals.