"Mr. Bush has a philosophy. It is
conservative," wrote Peggy Noonan in 2002. Ah, but times change. Last June she complained, "What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them."
For the last quarter century, Reagan's rhetoric and ideology have guided the conservative movement and the Republican Party, which were effectively fused during his presidency. The Reagan love-in—which includes a project led by GOP operative Grover Norquist to name something in every county in America after Reagan—has been gathering steam since his retirement. It reached an absurd peak at a Republican presidential debate earlier this year, when every candidate outdid the last to seize the late president's mantle.
What few of the GOP candidates would admit, though, is that the purest heir to Reaganism is George W. Bush. In 2003, Bill Keller of the
New York Times even wrote a definitive 8,000-word article in the Sunday magazine called "Reagan's Son," which detailed striking similarities in the two men's personal styles, policies, and even staffing. Speaking to Keller, Norquist blessed the analogy. And since then the key traits that Keller identified as shared by Reagan and Bush—the "enthusiastic assumption of the role of solo superpower," "tax cuts with a supply-side bias," "a shift of responsibilities from government to the private sector, and from the federal government to the states"—have, if anything, intensified. Judging by those aspects of Reagan's record that his cheerleaders extol most ardently, Bush has actually proven
more faithful to conservatism, not less, than his predecessor.
But Bush's new critics spare themselves the pain of finding fault with their hero through selective memory. They remember that Reagan was steadfast (most of the time) in his conservative rhetoric and ideology—just as Bush has been. They forget, however, that in practice Reagan veered from his official line as politics dictated or when, as invariably happened, different conservative ideals clashed.