Yesterday was the centenary of Reagan’s birth.

A sweep through Twitter and the leftblogs saw the usual wave of fact-challenged, context-denuded twaddle the left always rolls out when the topic turns to Reagan; deficits, tax hikes, the debt, the Soviet Union would have fallen anyway, Iran/Contra  (to which the answers are “the deficits paid for themselves, the hikes came to a small fraction of his cuts, hello Tip O’Neill, and nobody’s perfect”, respectively).

But just like during the glory days of the Cold War, when Sovietologists would pore over Soviet television broadcasts and reading Pravda and Izvestiya to find the subtle hints the regime would send via its official media, you can find a lot between the lines of the offical news organs of the American left as well.  In this case, National Public Radio.

Over the weekend, NPR ran a piece on Reagan’s 100th birthday.  The piece largely focused on…Barack Obama’s various mentions and tributes to Reagan, and the comparisons some (on the left) make between Obama and the greatest American president of any of our lifetimes.

Toby Harnden at the Telegraph notes the meme, by way of pointing out the cold water some of us are throwing on it:

Perhaps more surprising is that there is a new claimant to the Reagan throne this year: President Barack Obama. Having once routinely derided Reagan as, in the words of Democratic greybeard Clark Clifford, an “amiable dunce”, the liberal establishment is now seeking to embrace him.

Obama first tried to grab Reagan’s mantle three years ago when he cited the Gipper as a way of taking a shot at the Clintons by saying that the Republican had “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had not. Reagan, he added, responded to a feeling that “we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship”.

Harnden correctly points out what NPR wouldn’t; it’s just plain wrong:

Some Republicans fear that Reagan is facing a posthumous political emasculation by Democrats who play down his conservatism and recast him as a squishy conciliator.

There is little doubt that Reagan would have been dryly derisive of Obama’s policies and presidency. “Government is like a baby,” Reagan once quipped. “An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

Obama, by contrast, views government as a kindly nurse and the people as the baby. According to his mindset, the people should submit to those in government who know better and whose role is to make decisions and control the purse strings.

Comparisons between their speaking styles are both superficial (delivery is important – and still not the main point) and wrong (Reagan kept delivering great speeches from the beginning of his administration ’til the end; Obama’s fabled oratorical chops have seemed more rote and canned over time).

Just saying.