You're probably right on that. But I've seen discussions here on FR since the election in which some have speculated whether one day Reagan will be compared favorably to W, rather than the other way around.
At Reagan's funeral Lady Thatcher explained why that will not be: "Ronald Reagan is gone now. But we have something Ronald Reagan never had. We have his example."The Middle East has been a festering sore ever since WWII, but until 9/11/01 it never seemed critical in the way that the Cold War's nuclear arsenals did. If Bush brushes that bane aside in a mere four years, it will not be a greater historical accomplishment than transcending Communism was, for the very reason that it was so easily accomplished.
Bush has done nothing that Reagan wouldn't have done in his shoes - but when Reagan did those things, he didn't have GWB's example to prove that they would work.
The bin Laden challenge is no more severe than the Cold War, even reckoning the sad state of the military after 8 years of the Clinton non-leadership. Bush has been bold, but no more so than Reagan was in confronting the Soviet Union from a position, initially, which Carter left the military and the economy.
Ronald Reagan:"Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan." In the week before Reagan's funeral, the commentators had to give Reagan his due. But you would never have suspected, from what journalists were saying, that half of Reagan's accomplishment was getting what he did done over the opposition of a Democratic Speaker of the House and, in the last 2 years of his administration, a Democratic Senate Majority Leader.
- Whipped Inflation
- Got the Country Going Again,
- Ended the Energy Crisis, and
- Transcended Communism.
Besides Reagan's example, Bush has one other signal advantage Reagan did not enjoy - talk radio and the Internet. The internet came pretty much inevitably, but talk radio was enabled. It was enabled when the FCC "Fairness Doctrine" was abolished so that people like Rush don't have to be balanced with boring liberal commentators. We look back now and see that conservative talk is what the Fairness Doctrine disproportionately inhibited, but at the time it took courage to say that the equal time "medicine" was what was killing the conservative "patient." And abolition of the Fairness Doctrine was due to Ronald Reagan.
If anything, Bush has gone in the other direction with his signing of McCain-Feingold.