www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/28/reviews/010128.28brookst.html
For among Republicans, too, there are two patterns, two types, the one inclined toward the spirit of Reagan, the other toward that of Bush. The Reaganites had their formative experiences in secluded corners of college libraries, where they discovered Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Russell Kirk and Leo Strauss. Liberal ideas -- like affirmative action and legal abortion -- are in error and must be disproved and replaced. Reaganites tend to work in think tanks, or wish they did. They care about long-ago disputes, like the guilt of Alger Hiss, because they want you to know not only that liberals are wrong now but also that they were always wrong. The Bushies, on the other hand, are more normal and more boring. They have neat desks and thin briefcases because their reading comes in the form of memos. They tend to work -- very hard, in fact -- in corporations, law firms and other large organizations, and regard themselves as master managers. Reaganites and Bushies are both skeptical of government. The differences are in how they think, not what they think. The Bushies look at the Reaganites and see hapless geeks -- useful if you're in need of a speech, but certainly not the sort to be trusted with real responsibility. The Reaganites see the Bushies as hapless anal retentives. They may be good at playing the bureaucracy, but they don't know where they're going because they have no principles. They say things like, ''Our foreign policy should be in our national interest,'' and think they have expressed one. Since the Republican Party is a conservative, orderly party, the two camps take turns screwing up. Bushian pragmatists dominated the first Bush administration. They got so caught up in the 1990 budget process that they compromised on what were supposed to be their core principles and lost touch with the American people. So after Bush's defeat, the ideologues, led by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, took control of the party. But they were harsh, radical and uncompromising, so now Republicans are once again dominated by Bushianism. Bush generally passed over provocative thinkers and people who give good interviews in favor of sober executives. This is an administration so corporate that the lone academic at the top level -- the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice -- sat on the board of Chevron and has an oil tanker named after her. In the midst of this Bushian risorgimento comes a book to remind us of the differences between the two mental types. The book is called ''Reagan, in His Own Hand,'' and it is mostly a collection of radio commentaries Ronald Reagan delivered between 1976 and 1980, between his failed primary challenge to Gerald Ford and his successful campaign against Jimmy Carter. During those years, Reagan returned to the rubber-chicken circuit, wrote a column and delivered these daily radio messages. Ghostwriters wrote the column, but Reagan actually worked on the radio commentaries himself. He'd sit on airplanes and in the back of cars, drafting piece after piece on legal pads, and would come back from a trip with three weeks of commentaries ready for typing. The dominant impression these drafts leave is that Reagan really was a Reaganite. He'd already been governor of California, but he still saw politics primarily as a battle of ideas. The invention of Alexander Graham Bell- the telephone offers us irrefutable proof of the superiority of the free mkt. The scattered, competing phone companies were left to the magic of the mkt.
Reagan covered everything from bilingual education to the Panama Canal to the political situation in Equatorial Guinea, engrossing himself in a level of detail that frankly surpasses that of almost all op-ed columnists today. In 1978, for example, he came across a speech the Yale law professor Eugene Rostow gave on the proposed SALT II arms control agreement. Reagan couldn't do just one radio commentary summarizing and commenting on Rostow's views. He did six, going through the arcana about mobile launchers, MIRV's, Minutemen versus MX missiles and so on. Reagan was a middlebrow (and I mean that as a compliment). He'd troll through clippings from The Public Interest or National Review, or a policy document someone had sent him, and he'd want to bring it to his listeners' attention. Sometimes, caught up in didactic fervor, he'd get carried away. Unlike radio commentators or newspaper pundits today, he never responded to the news blip of the moment. Skinner, Annelise Anderson and Martin Anderson, have toted up the commentaries by subject matter. Twenty-seven percent of them were on foreign and defense policy, 25 percent were on economic policy, 15 percent were on regulation and individual liberty, 10 percent were on energy and the environment, and the like. As the editors note with some surprise, only 3 percent were on social issues, and only one commentary was on abortion. Judging from these pieces, Reagan was more of a policy wonk than a culture warrior. He says that until he was governor he'd never given the subject much thought. He declared that neither medicine nor law nor theology rendered a clear verdict. If a pregnant woman became a widow and found that her husband had split his estate between her and the unborn child, Reagan wondered, could she abort the child and inherit all of the estate? On the basis of such questioning, Reagan decided that since fetuses had property rights, they must have rights to life. One of the things these commentaries do is blow apart the notion that Reagan was a flighty actor who floated through the presidency on the basis of charm and communication skills. Reagan spent the years leading up to his presidency -- the decades, really -- involved in day-to-day policy disputes. But that doesn't mean that Bush is stupider than Reagan, just that the Bush mind is of a different cast. Reagan must have been happiest reading National Review essays on cold war disputes. If anything, the Bush mentality is the more conservative, if by conservative you mean prudent, managerial and incremental. In fact, the great promise of the Bush administration -- and the early days of any administration are the season to dream -- is that he will finally reconcile the two mentalities. He is staffing his administration with people like Tommy Thompson and Donald Rumsfeld. Thompson is a legislative tactician, but he also pursued the long-range vision of welfare reform. Rumsfeld, an administrator and businessman, has latched on to missile defense. And in one respect Bush already does resemble a Reaganite. Once he gets a policy notion in his head, he sticks with it. Unlike most pragmatists, he doesn't overreact to the daily flow of events. So maybe the two sides of the Republican brain can finally be brought into harmony.
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