Almost immediately after President Obama finished his address at the University of Cairo yesterday, talking heads began comparing our current president to our 40th — Ronald Reagan. You’d have to be drunk, high, comatose or all three to think Reagan would have delivered the same sort of lecture Obama gave.

Obama’s speech, titled with the broad platitude of “A New Beginning,” lacked the positive outlook, the strength, the focus and the soaring oratory to even compare to the Gipper. “Tear down this wall” it most certainly was not.

But let’s not ditter and even attempt to compare Obama’s speech to Reagan’s greatest hits (it’s doubtful Reagan would have given the same “Tear down this wall” speech had he been standing on the other side of the Berlin Wall).

On May 31, 1988, Reagan addressed students at Moscow State University, and he came with goals similar to those of Obama yesterday: To reach out to the people living in the Soviet Union as a friend, to denounce communism, to mitigate tensions and cultural misunderstandings and to reassert pressure for change.

Even ignoring the obvious policy differences the two presidents would have, Reagan’s speech, given the title “Moscow’s Spring,” is remarkably different from Obama’s in tone. Mainly because Reagan’s was positive throughout and, even more so, inspirational.

Where Obama continued to air regrets that the United States has committed mistakes in the past and not lived up to its true calling, Reagan included not one mention of America offending the Soviets.

Where Obama attempted to explain the differences on each side of every issue or complaint the Muslim world might have with the West, Reagan portrayed a consistently positive image of the United States and of freedom.

Where Obama depicted the American world view as morally equivalent with that of the Muslim world, Reagan gave his audience the reasons to reject communism and encouraged them to challenge their government to change.

Here’s Obama giving the Muslim world it’s excuses for hostility toward the United States (there are more examples at each interval of the speech):

The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars.  More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.  Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam. …

… just as America can never tolerate violence by extremists, we must never alter or forget our principles.  Nine-eleven was an enormous trauma to our country.  The fear and anger that it provoked was understandable, but in some cases, it led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals. …

… In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.  Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians.  This history is well known.

Reagan gives the Soviets no such opportunity for excuses. Standing below a large bust of Lenin, he makes a strong case for democracy, freedom and the American way of life.

I’ve been told that there’s a popular song in your country — perhaps you know it — whose evocative refrain asks the question, “Do the Russians want a war?” In answer it says, “Go ask that silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there; beneath those trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my wife; then you will have to ask no more, ‘Do the Russians want a war?’”

But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced you on the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of the Pacific, or the European battlefields where America’s fallen were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their mothers, sisters, and sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too, and you’ll find the same answer, the same longing in every heart. People do not make wars, governments do — and no mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After a colonial revolution with Britain we have cemented for all ages the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true unity as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and friends.

In the Democracy section of his speech, Obama said:

I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by any other.

That does not lessen my commitment, however, to governments that reflect the will of the people.  Each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election.

Reagan makes no such assertion that America does not presume to know what is best for everyone. In fact, the goal of spreading democracy is based on the fact that we do:

But freedom is more even than this: Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to stick – to dream – to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you’re the only one in a sea of doubters.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. …

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith. …

Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free.

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but we’re hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled.

Obama seems to have arrived in Cairo with a speech aimed at completing a shopping list — it was a lecture filled with caveats, instructions and talking points aimed at applying a salve to old wounds — which dragged the speech down.

Reagan arrived in Moscow in 1988 with a speech aimed at inspiring Russians to yearn for freedom.

If you take Reagan’s 1988 speech at Moscow State University and replace “Soviet” for “Muslim World” and “Russian” for “Arab,” you would be awfully close to the speech that Obama should have given yesterday at Cairo University.

Read through the transcripts of both (Reagan here, Obama here), and tell me you don’t think Reagan should have been the one to espouse freedom and democracy to the Muslim world.