What W Could Learn from Reagan

Fred Kempe, in the WSJ (European edition) (June 9, 2004):

In the early weeks of this Bush administration, a veteran U.S. senator told me not to compare the new President to his father but rather to Ronald Reagan. The senator, who knew all three, said that while the first President Bush had been one of America's finest public servants, his son and Mr. Reagan had more greatness in them. Both shared deeper convictions that they had a larger mission to fulfill. The terrorist attacks of September 11 provided George W. both confirmation and direction for that sense of calling.

Yet as Bush the Younger worked his way through a skeptical Europe starting on Friday, suffering cold shoulders from Pope John Paul II and Jacques Chirac, one couldn't escape a sense of nostalgia for Mr. Reagan, even before his death on Saturday. Some have argued mistakenly that Europe's overwhelming distaste for George W. Bush has been reminiscent of the 1980s, when Mr. Reagan so deeply irritated many intellectuals here with his, in their view,"simplistic" talk of Star Wars, Evil Empires and Shining Cities on Hills.

Indeed, the European caricatures of Mr. Reagan then portrayed a stridently anti-Communist Hollywood actor in cowboy boots playing out a B-movie script with his Strangelovian finger poised over the nuclear button. In an insulting remembrance, the French standard Le Monde spoke of his economic legacy of Wall Street multi-millionaires and"homeless people victimized by the sad cuts in welfare programs.

The current Bush administration has relished comparisons to the Gipper. Like Mr. Reagan, the spinmeisters said, George W. would confound his critics with historic accomplishments because, like Mr. Reagan, he possessed a fervor about America and its transformative nature. Even critics here concede Mr. Reagan sped the collapse of the Soviet Union and fed the economic re-emergence of America. Under George W., Europeans would again benefit even as they groused from the cheap seats.

In the end, however, was not their commonalties, but rather the stark differences between the two men and their administrations that have been most damaging to Mr. Bush in Europe and in Iraq and at home. President Reagan was a patient and pragmatic president whose sunny optimism inspired friends while his embracing demeanor disarmed enemies. President Bush's combative style and his administration's uncompromising political execution, by contrast, have made life both harder for his friends and easier for his enemies." The rancor toward Mr. Reagan was never as bitter as it has been toward Mr. Bush; the distance across the Atlantic was never as wide....