Joe Biden, the Reverse Ronald Reagan
Four decades later, another elder statesman seeks to transform Americans’ ideas about the size of government.
President Reagan giving his State of the Union address in 1987. Years earlier, as he kicked off his political revolution, he had stood before Congress and said, “Our government is too big, and it spends too much.”Credit...Courtesy Reagan Presidential Library
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Forty years ago, a new president stood before a joint session of Congress and delivered a simple message: “Our government is too big, and it spends too much.”
Sitting in the audience, the junior senator from Delaware — a young Joseph R. Biden Jr. — couldn’t possibly have predicted how President Ronald Reagan’s words would come to define politics for generations. But for the decades that followed, Mr. Biden, along with most of his party, would operate in the shadow of Mr. Reagan, believing that an outright embrace of big government would be politically detrimental. Like so many Democrats, he joined efforts to curb deficits, fretted about government spending and generally favored more incremental kinds of policies that could attract bipartisan support.