Yes. This Conversation tells a lot of what was happening @ Reagan. It is lengthy enough that I really don't want to make you read the whole thing, nor do I care to take the time to count the paragraphs in order to properly ID the specific link - But you can go to the page and search 'Jim Baker Wing' in the text to arrive at the passage quoted below.
This particular part of the transcript is a conversation between Mike Church and Tony Blakely:
Tony: Let me tell you specifically regarding Federalism because the Reagan White House was divided into the Meese Wing and the Jim Baker Wing. The Meese Wing were the Reaganites. I was part of the Reaganite Wing. The Jim Baker Wing were the pragmatists. They were the Washington operatives who knew how to get things done. Reagan, who I believe was a wonderful man and a principled president, wanted both because he understood that if he just had the keepers of the flame, just the principled people, he wouldn’t get anything done. And if he just had the operators, it wouldn’t matter what you got done because you wouldn’t be acting according to principle. He tried as best he could to bring a balance.
By now, "neocons" are all things to all men [...]
That is true... But only because the definitive concepts of Reagan Conservatism have been removed for the sake of the pragmatists - if the self-evident truths of Reagan Conservatism were adhered to, it would be easy to tell the Conservatives from the NeoCons. For the purpose of this discussion I will define NeoCons as those holding to pragmatism gone amok, yet distinct from the liberal wing of the Republicans. They tend toward a 'moderate' stance, and preach an !UP! the middle campaign strategy. They are concerned with principle as an end to a means, and the win is more important.
[...] but the foreign policy "neocons" hated and still hate Jim Baker.
Accepted. But I think the above quote suggests that Baker is not the point, but rather he and his fellows' powerbase...
It is difficult to track this wing of the Republicans - It is too bad that pissant is gone from here, as he had gone to the monumental effort of compiling a huge link-base explaining the whole thing. While I am very aware of the usurpation which began with Bush the elder, it isn't something I have tracked personally.
You can only get things done in Washington if you have a really big majority in Congress, and those supermajorities don't last. A president may get one if the economy under the previous president was bad enough. But even if the White House has that kind of predominance in Congress it has to prioritize and aim at achieving what it thinks is most important. As you run down the agenda items you start coming across things that appeal to the party faithful but not to the rest of the country. Also, people start getting tired of politicians after a few years. The magic wears off. If the prosperity doesn't return, people throw the administration out, but if things do get better, it's back to business as usual, and people lose interest in politics. So the window to change things is small and any administration is going to concentrate on a few important things and try to do them well, rather than to advance a very broad agenda that won't get through Congress in any case.
Republicans or conservatives have five or six areas of concern, and no administration is going to be able to be effective in all the areas or satisfy all constituencies. Reagan came closest. Not to diminish his achievements, but one reason may be that conservatives were glad to have any victories at all. Bush I ran a more moderate administration and lost a lot of conservative support. You could say something like that in very broad terms about his son, but if you look more closely you can see real differences in how they did things. Bush II was able to hold the tax cutters and social conservatives his father alienated. He compromised on some things and ignored other conservative concerns, and conservatives faulted him for that, but he did go in a different direction than his father. Almost by definition, what a president does is going to be or look more moderate and pragmatic than what party or ideological stalwarts would like, but Bush father and Bush son had rather different policy mixes or flavors.