Poppy knows best (from the Economist).

IT IS understandable that the publication of Ronald Reagan’official biography (a mere
14 years after it was commissioned) should revive America’s obsession with its 40th
president. The story of how the star of ‘Bedtime for Bonzo’ went on to become the
grave-digger of communism is of  more than passing interest. And Edmund Morris’book,
‘Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan’ (Random House), has its fair share of surprises, not
least the claim that, by 1987, the president’s advisers were so worried about his mental
state that they considered removing him from office. 

Let us hope that the obsession does not continue for too long. Anybody who goes looking
for the soul of Mr Reagan is bound to be frustrated. (Mr Morris found the search so vain
that, after a bout of depression, he recast his biography as a memoir, writing parts of it
from the point of view of fictional characters.) And anybody who looks for the soul of the
modern Republican Party in Reaganism is bound to be frustrated, too. The presiding genius
of modern Republicanism is not the much-loved Gipper but his successor, ‘Poppy’, otherwise
known as George Herbert Walker Bush.

When Mr Bush left office in 1992 he was one of the most vilified figures in his party.
He had won a brilliant victory over Saddam Hussein, only to become a byword for patrician
goofiness. He had lumbered the party with a vice-president who came straight out of
‘Saturday Night Live’. (Dan Quayle’s decision on September 27th to drop out of the
presidential race was greeted with howls of despair among Hollywood gag-writers.) And,
worst of all, he had handed the keys of the White House to Bill Clinton, an act that most
Republicans regarded as akin to handing the keys of the weekend cottage to Marilyn Manson.

Yet today the Republican Party is much more Mr Bush’s party than Mr Reagan’s. His
eldest son, George W., has such a lock on Republican money that right-wingers have started
muttering about campaign-finance reform; and if W. stumbles, tripped up by his
hell-raising past, his solider brother Jeb is ready to carry the family banner in 2004.
The brothers are not only in charge of two of the most dynamic states in the country,
Texas and Florida; they are also using them to test such Republican enthusiasms as school
choice and faith-based organisations.

The elder Bush is an ever-present force in his son’s campaign, peppering his Austin
headquarters with e-mails, offering advice on tricky personal questions and preparing for
his own most gruelling year of international engagements since leaving the White House.
Many of the son’s foreign-policy advisers (but not his domestic or campaign gurus) come
from Daddy’s old staff. Condoleezza Rice is advising W. about Russia; she served in
President Bush’s National Security Council. Paul Wolfowitz advises on defence. He used to
be an under-secretary of defence. And soon.

George W. even owes his signature idea of compassionate conservatism to his father.
(Remember all the talk in 1988 about a ‘kinder, gentler’ nation and the ‘thousand points
of light’?) He also owes him something that may prove to be an even more powerful asset: a
political name to conjure with.

A recent poll in New Hampshire found that a quarter of the voters there support him for
the simple reason that they admire his father. Focus groups are discovering that many
floating voters give their embarrassment at rejecting the father in 1992 as one of their
most important reasons for liking the son in 2000.

As Bushism advances to the heart of his party, Reaganism retreats to the margins. The
party has all but disappeared in Mr Reagan’s home state, California. Many of Mr Reagan’s
putative heirs on the right have committed hara-kiri; religious and economic conservatives
are at each other’s throats; and Mr Clinton has made a good job of winning back the Reagan
Democrats. Mr Reagan’s contribution to politics was to put his name to an ideology. Mr
Bush has done something much more in line with conservative principles: he has revitalised
a political dynasty.

The obvious retort to this argument is that Junior is far from being a carbon-copy of
his father. Although they both enjoyed preppie educations at Andover and Yale, and both
became fighter pilots, Senior shone at everything he did: he earned a Phi Beta Kappa key
at university and the Distinguished Flying Cross while Junior just coasted.

They are both middle-of-the-road Republicans. But the road has shifted sharply
rightward since Senior’s glory days. Junior is keener on school choice and tax cuts than
his father; he is also, on the negative side, much more ignorant of foreign affairs. (It
is hard to imagine Senior, for all his verbal clumsiness, confusing Slovakia with Slovenia
or talking about the Grecians.) They both threw themselves into public service. But Senior
was happiest playing geopolitics in the comfort of the White House Situation Room; his son
thrives on the stump.

This has given George W. some of the personal characteristics of Ronald Reagan, allied
to the instincts and allies of George Bush. Junior’ childhood in Texas left him with the
sunny conviction that people can remake their lives, provided they have both the will and
the opportunity, just like the drillers and roustabouts who poured into Odessa. It also
provided him with membership of a club from which his father was forever blackballed: the
club of regular guys. He spent his time at Andover goofing around rather than preparing to
be president. At Yale, he preferred drinking with his sports-obsessed fraternity brothers
to discussing world affairs at the Skull & Bones. In all this, he has more in common
with the Hollywood actor and lifeguard than with his father, the epitome of east-coast
preppiness. Even today, like Mr Reagan, George W. regards the nation’s capital as an
inward-looking club full of insufferably worthy people, and he has staffed his campaign
with Texan friends rather than Washington insiders.

Bush Senior has spent the past two decades being unfavourably compared with another
regular guy with an optimistic message about the future of America. But in grooming his
eldest son for office, he is trying to prove that the Bush clan can beat the Reagans of
this world at their own game.

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