Obama’s hundred words in praise of the Gipper have given rise to many thousands of words from Obama’s fellow Democrats denouncing him. (Look, for example, here and here.) Today’s Wall Street Journal offers a sweet response. In part:

It was less his “optimism” or what the country “felt,” as Mr. Obama had it, than it was Reagan’s ideas that account for his success. He shifted electoral coalitions and realigned the U.S. political center to the right because he governed with a genuinely new domestic agenda and approach to foreign policy — and it worked. Still, we suspect Mr. Obama is smarter than his Democratic critics in evoking Reagan as the example he wants to emulate, and it says something about the breadth of his political ambitions that he would do so.
The episode is most telling, though, for what it says about the ancient mariners of the Democratic Party and how little they’ve changed. Supposedly Mr. Obama committed a grievous blunder by nodding at the achievement of one of the most consequential Presidencies of the 20th century. If the rest of the Democrats can’t even recognize the same, it suggests that the change they have in mind is back to the 1960s and ’70s.