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.
Thanks for the information. Moderates usually end up in charge though (or the people who are in charge end up being called or being moderates).
Your statement (and whole post) is a reasonable assessment, but I am afraid I will differ from you in tone:
I care not for either/any party anymore, and tend to see only the push/pull between liberalism and conservatism, and with little exception to consider, conservatism has had few wins, and most of those have merely been holding actions. In the mean time, liberalism continues to make great strides forward. Even though Republicans have held power in some degree for a couple of decades, liberalism has still picked up speed, and at a greater rate than the time between Roosevelt and Reagan, while Republicans were in the wilderness, to be sure. Not a single liberal stronghold has been permanently knocked down, and more are established year by year.
Due to that broad observation, and because the incontinence of liberal ideology is being even yet proclaimed to a largely unsympathetic populace, I have come to the conclusion that the successes of liberalism on the battlefield are not due to any innate goodness held therein, but rather due to a lack of opposition offered up to withstand it - Namely, that the Republicans offer little more than lip service to their conservative platform and base, while by hook or by crook, by ignorance or acquiescence, by whatever the cause, they continually step aside from the fight and let the liberal forces rumble on through.
In fact, I find it to be more insidious than that - Perhaps I have taken to wearing the chinstrap on my tinfoil hat a notch too tight, but the evidence of decades seem to prove collusion more than ignorance. Therefore, I do not see these 'moderates' as being moderate at all, and the republican/democrat parties seem to be two legs of an unrelenting liberal leviathan striding ever forward toward our very near demise.
With that mindset to the fore, I must rise up against this folly of pragmatism - It is the bane of Conservatism. Screw the moderates, I say. We had better ante up and go all in, or we will be moderated into oblivion.