The Fundamentally Different Pathmaker

Eugene Robinson says that we should've remembered how, early in the 2008 campaign, 44 disparaged pragmatists:

Sometimes, it turns out, politicians can be taken at their word. More than a year ago, while campaigning for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama told the Reno Gazette-Journal that "Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not." Reagan, he said, "put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it." The implication was that Obama, if elected, would be no less ambitious.