"I think there is a tension in Clinton between the student of Presidential power and the student of policy," said Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard University political theorist. "As a student of the Presidency, he knows he should keep it simple, but as a student of policy he can't. The risk is that he knows too much. Reagan did not have that problem. For Reagan, a thematic Presidency was easy because he did not know very much. All he had were broad themes on three-by-five cards. Clinton has a CD-ROM in his head."
These facile rationalizations followed less than a week after Clinton's AG had just incinerated 76 Americans -- many of them women and children -- in Waco, Texas.
In working on this biography of Reagan, one thing is clear: how smart and very well informed he was. Smarter than Obama by leaps and bounds.