THE NEXT REAGAN? Many on right doubt that the mantle will fit on Bush

Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 8, 2004



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Washington -- Nearly every Republican yearns to be Ronald Reagan's
heir, perhaps few more than President Bush, who makes no secret of his
admiration for the man who preceded his own father as president.

He adapted Reagan's "evil empire" to the "axis of evil," embraced tax
cuts with fervor and even retreated to his Texas ranch or Camp David
on weekends as the outsider who dislikes Washington.

Yet many conservatives who revere Reagan are reluctant to pass his
mantle to Bush.

"I think he's trying, but he's no Reagan in my view," said Doug
Bandow, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who worked
for Reagan as a special assistant to the president for policy
development.

"No. 1 is the fact that Bush really doesn't have a vision," Bandow
said. "Reagan clearly had a set of ideas that he had thought about
very deeply, and believed in very deeply. There is nothing to indicate
that George W. Bush does so."

Yet Bush has clearly sought upon assuming the presidency to avoid the
missteps that led to his father's defeat in 1992, positioning himself
more as a conservative in Reagan's mold than in his father's.

The president has cut taxes each year in office. He cultivates "the
vision thing" -- as Bush's father famously called the Reagan talent he
lacked -- in proclaiming that the invasion of Iraq will transform the
Middle East. His speeches about planting liberty and democracy in Iraq
draw their lineage from Reagan's belief that the people of the former
Soviet Union and its client states in Eastern Europe wanted their
political freedom.

Over the weekend, Bush even dismissed his unpopularity in Europe,
saying, "They felt the same way about him," referring to Reagan. "That
doesn't mean a fellow like me should change my beliefs."

Lee Edwards, an analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation who
has written about the conservative movement, said he believes Bush is
"consciously looking to Ronald Reagan as a model rather than his
father -- after all, they know what happened to Bush 41 in 1992, and
they don't want the same thing to happen in 2004."

Yet many see profound differences between Reagan, who reshaped the
Republican Party to his conservative vision, and Bush, who has sought
to modify Reagan's conservatism with the word compassionate. In doing
so, Bush has presided over an expansion of government that
presidential scholars said is sharply at odds with Reagan's
small-government philosophy.

"Reagan was a government-is-the-problem kind of guy, and Bush is
really much more activist in his use of government," said George
Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University.

If anything, some contend Bush has changed Reagan's limited-government
conservatism into more of an activist neoconservatism that calls for
greater intervention at home and abroad, from the invasion of Iraq to
the administration's faith-based initiative to lend federal support to
religious charities.

While Reagan sought to control entitlement programs and was
particularly hostile to socialized medicine, Bush drove through the
largest expansion of Medicare since its creation under President
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

Government spending under Bush has grown rapidly, not just for the
military but for domestic programs as well.

Edwards called Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education act "very
intrusive federal policy into state and local government" as large as
any such attempt in nearly 40 years. "That's not consistent with
Ronald Reagan's views at all."

Bush imposed tariffs on steel and oversaw an enormous expansion of
farm subsidies. He has failed to veto a single spending bill, only
recently threatening to block a big transportation bill if it expands
beyond the increases he suggested.

"I just don't think (Bush) cares very much about specifics of issues
in a way that Reagan cared passionately about them," Bandow argued.
"Reagan came into office with a vision of what he wanted America to
look like, a vision of what he wanted America to do in the world, and
he had laid those out for decades. George W. Bush came into office
kind of temperamentally conservative but not much beyond that."

Bush, by his own account, arrived on the broad vision of his
presidency and America's role in the world largely after the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks, molded in part as well by his fundamentalist
Christian faith. But he campaigned on humility in foreign policy and
specifically denounced the kind of nation building that his
administration has undertaken in Iraq.

Bush "has chosen to say he thought his father was mistaken in not
having clear-cut goals, in being remiss in the vision thing, and that
was not something he was going to do," said Fred Greenstein, a
presidential scholar at Princeton University. "He set about it in a
way far more like Reagan than his father, but in Reagan's case, the
vision thing was part of Reagan's genetic code ... part of what
organized his life was having goals and values and convictions."

Bush, by contrast, has approached government more in a business-school
model, analysts said, setting out a limited number of goals, and then
working to meet them.

"The specific wiring is a little different," Greenstein said. "In much
of Bush's short political career, goals were more a set of objectives
and good management procedures from business school rather than things
that sort of moved your psyche."

Reagan spent much of his life before assuming the presidency,
including his eight years as California's governor, speaking and
writing about political philosophy and public policy. Bush, by
contrast, ran an oil business and owned a baseball team before serving
six years as governor of Texas.

"If you thought about something for 25 years and reached certain
conclusions, you probably have a greater faith in it than if you
thought about it because you had briefings when you decided to run for
president," Edwards said.

Edward Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, contends
that Bush mistakes stubbornness for the conviction that so many
conservatives admired in Reagan, noting that Reagan read widely, while
Bush brags about never reading a newspaper.

"It seems like Bush is incapable of admitting a mistake and that this
conviction that he presents to the world is just an unwillingness,
once he takes a position, to change it."

Not all conservatives agree.

Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation, contends that
Bush's efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East echo Reagan's
view of the Soviet Union.

Bush "sees this as a great opportunity to bring peace to that part of
the world because democratic governments by and large don't start
wars. Whether or not he can achieve that, I have no idea, but it
certainly is thinking big."