Obama's ACTUAL WORDS Regarding Reagan on Stephanopoulis Today --->>>

[Stephanie]

I see some Billary supporters are adopting Clintonian tactics. Below is what Obama actually said on This Week this morning, in response to Steph's question about his Reagan remarks. (Transcript by me, video at link).

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=4197048

OBAMA: Keep in mind that Ronald Reagan came in during THE 1980s at a time when Democrats still dominated Congress, when the view was that we are going to solve our problems, oftentimes, by expanding government programs, and he challenged many of those ideas. Now keep in mind that back in the 1980s I was working as a community organizer on the streets of Chicago and seeing the consequences of some of the bad ideas that Ronald Reagan had promoted. But the broader point that I was making, George, and I don't think that this is something that is subject to dispute, is that Ronald Reagan transformed American politics and set the agenda for a long time. When Bill Clinton said the era of small government is over, he was echoing some of the shifts that had taken place. And part of what had happened was, that Ronald Reagan was able to get Democrats to vote the Republican ticket, oftentimes against their own economic interests. And Democrats were often puzzled by that.

The point is that this is one of those moments where I think Democrats have the opportunity to do the same thing that Ronald Reagan did in 1980. I think there are a lot of disaffected Republicans, they've seen the disastrous policies of George Bush, both domestically and internationally, and the question is, are we going to be able to reach out to those independents and those disillusioned Republicans and form a working majority so that we can move our agenda forward. So at no point did I suggest that Ronald Reagan's agenda was our agenda. The point was that in political terms, we may be in one of those moments where we can get a seismic shift in how the country views itself, and our future, so I think we have to take advantage of that.

edit -->> Below is the transcript of Obama's ACTUAL WORDS in the original editorial board meeting, which the Clintons seized on and clumsily distorted.

http://www.nytimes.com/ref/us/politics/21seelye-text.html

In Their Own Words: Obama on Reagan

“I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.

"He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the 60s and the 70s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people just tapped into -- he tapped into what people were already feeling, which was, we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

"I think Kennedy, 20 years earlier, moved the country in a fundamentally different direction. So I think a lot of it just has to do with the times.

"I think we are in one of those times right now, where people feel like things as they are going, aren't working, that we’re bogged down in the same arguments that we’ve been having and they’re not useful. And the Republican approach I think has played itself out.

"I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last 10, 15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies that are being debated among the presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. Well, we’ve done that. We’ve tried it. It’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example…so some of it’s the times.”