Going the Distance--On and off the road with Barack Obama (David Remnick/New Yorker)

[KoKo]

4. There's this one disturbing paragraph that I couldn't fit in..

(I found this disturbing because it was the only program he could find that he thought was worthwhile that government had been able to do...and that he seems to still find Reagan such an admirable president)

---------Snip from Page 18---------

“

One of the things that I’ve learned to appreciate more as President is you are essentially a relay swimmer in a river full of rapids, and that river is history,” he later told me. “You don’t start with a clean slate, and the things you start may not come to full fruition on your timetable. But you can move things forward. And sometimes the things that start small may turn out to be fairly significant. I suspect that Ronald Reagan, if you’d asked him, would not have considered the earned-income-tax-credit provision in tax reform to be at the top of his list of accomplishments. On the other hand, what the E.I.T.C. has done, starting with him, being added to by Clinton, being used by me during the Recovery Act, has probably kept more people out of poverty than a whole lot of other government programs that are currently in place.”