THE RADICAL PRESIDENCY OF GEORGE W. BUSH; Reagan's Son

N E W  Y O R K, January 26, 2003 -- In December, George W. Bush had one of those turbulent spells that can cause a president nightmares about tumbling over the falls in a barrel. First he purged his economic team, the kind of housecleaning that tends to be taken as an admission of failed policies. He ordered a North Korean freighter arrested at sea, on the way to Yemen with a suspicious cargo of missiles, then sheepishly let it go on its way -- an amateurish misstep in his war on terror. The man he proudly put forth to head an investigation of America's vulnerability to terrorists abruptly declined the job because it would interfere with his consulting business. The party's leader in the newly recaptured Senate blundered into a career-ending display of insensitivity that peeled open the party's history of race-baiting.

And the impact of these seeming embarrassments on President George W. Bush was? Scarcely a nick. No outbreak of articles postulating a White House in disarray. No mutters of discord in his ranks. On the contrary, he (or at least his political judo master, Karl Rove) was hailed for his genius in helping maneuver a presidential favorite into the Senate leadership. Bush's approval ratings held firm and high. Nothing stuck. Any more than a year of corporate scandals, some involving White House friends, had stuck. Any more than the recurring reminders of Al Qaeda's unimpeded reach -- in Bali, in Kenya -- had stuck.

Bush's seeming invincibility to bad news may be exasperating to Democrats, but it was no surprise to Michael Deaver, the shrewd public relations man who played Karl Rove to an earlier president, Ronald Reagan. When Deaver was handling spin for Reagan, one frustrated Democrat described the scandal-proof chief executive as the Teflon President. This time around, Deaver watched the White House twirl and sidestep through the serial crises of December with deep professional admiration. To Deaver there was nothing mysterious about it, no Teflon. It was just the relentless discipline of a president who consistently defies the expectations of people who think they are smarter than he is.

Like a lot of Republicans who have watched both Reagan and Bush at close hand, Deaver sees uncanny similarities between them. The presidents are alike in their outlooks and career paths, in their agendas of tax-cutting and confrontational deployment of American power, in the ideological mix of their advisers. (Whatever you read about the president's inheritance from his father and Gerald Ford, the Reagan DNA is dominant in the staffing, training and planning of the Bush administration.) More than that, there are important similarities of character and temperament. And both are simple men who have made a political virtue of being -- in Bush's word -- "misunderestimated" by the political elite.

That Bush is Reaganesque is a conceit that some conservatives have wishfully, tentatively embraced since he emerged as a candidate, and one that Bush himself has encouraged. The party faithful have been pining for a new Reagan since Reagan, and for Bush the analogy has the added virtue of providing an alternative political lineage; he's not Daddy's Boy, he's Reagan Jr. The comparison has only gained currency since Bush entered the White House. Some Republicans speak of the current era, with the culmination of Reagan's ballistic missile defense and the continuing assault on marginal tax rates and, especially, the standing tall against global evil as the recommencing of the Reagan "revolution."

"I think he's the most Reagan-like politician we have seen, certainly in the White House," Deaver said. "I mean, his father was supposed to be the third term of the Reagan presidency -- but then he wasn't. This guy is."

Reagan's devout do not all buy this analogy. Some wonder about the depth of Bush's commitment to their causes. Others fear the comparison might diminish their hero, now living out his days in an Alzheimer's oblivion. Peggy Noonan, Reagan's gifted speechwriter and a torchbearer for his memory, has portrayed Bush in one of her books as eager to be likened to Reagan, but she insists that the two men are incomparable. Bush, she says, represents "the triumph of the average American man." He is, she told me, "like a successful local businessman in the boring local business who becomes a school board president." (She meant that in a good way.) Reagan, on the other hand, was "hardly your basic man on the street."

Many students of the presidency would argue that a basic-man-on-the-street quality -- a plain-spoken, unassuming genuineness -- is central to the appeal of both men, but Noonan's wariness is understandable. Let's concede that this kind of comparison can be reductionist. At its silliest, it can lapse into a parlor game of the Lincoln-had-a-secretary-named-Kennedy variety. Times change. Presidents reflect their times.

But midway into Bush's first term, measuring the emerging president against Reagan is an instructive way of looking at Bush's qualities and of explaining his popularity. It is even, with a larger margin of error, a basis for hazarding some guesses about the course he will follow, particularly now that his hand is strengthened by a Congress of his own party, by the unlikelihood of internal opposition in 2004 and for that matter by the lack of coherent opposition from the Democrats.

I began this exercise inclined to think of Bush as Reagan Lite -- that is, a president with shallower, unschooled instincts in place of the older man's studied, lifelong convictions, and without the mastery of language that served Reagan so well. Perhaps, I'd have said, he is a bit of a Reagan poseur -- the White House being such a studio of contrivance and calculation. I ended my research more inclined to think that Bush is in a sense the fruition of Reagan, and that -- far from being the lightweight opportunist of liberal caricature or the centrist he sometimes played during his own election campaign -- he stands a good chance of advancing a radical agenda that Reagan himself could only carry so far. Bush is not, as Reagan was, an original, but he has adapted Reagan's ideas to new times, and found some new language in which to market them. We seem not only to be witnessing the third term of the Reagan presidency; at this rate we may well see the fourth.

They are westerners (Midland, Tex., is truly the West, not the South), with a fondness for the region's open spaces and don't-fence-me-in rhetoric. Karl Rove contends that this is one reason that Reagan and Bush have been underrated by the media elite, whose prejudices are still manufactured mainly in the East. As president, Reagan was happiest clearing brush on his mountaintop ranch in California, and Bush loves chain-sawing cedar on his expanse of Texas prairie. Bush is a latecomer to this lifestyle, having acquired his ranch while a presidential candidate, and he is more self-conscious about it. (Reagan disappeared to his ranch and called it vacation; Bush calls his the Western White House and makes it a showcase of his authenticity.) Like Reagan, Bush takes great pains to run his ranch on ecologically sound principles, even as he dismantles environmental regulation. In the West, that is not considered hypocrisy but virtuous self-interest.

Defying the advice of the experts, they launched seemingly hopeless campaigns against popular incumbent governors and astonished their own party by winning. Each went on to win a second term by large margins. Reagan's executive experience was more meaningful. (California has a strong-governor system, while in Texas the governor defers to rambunctious, independently appointed agency heads.) Both managed to work with Democratic legislatures, which often entailed ruthlessness in California but in Texas required mainly charm.

They are the least introspective of presidents, but unashamedly spiritual, professing a personal faith that goes well beyond churchgoing. Bush bonded with Vladimir Putin over the Russian's story of a lost crucifix and opens cabinet meetings with a prayer. Reagan would sometimes astonish visitors by talking about Armageddon in a way that did not seem to be merely allegorical. Both attracted evangelical voters with their born-again vernacular. More than other presidents of recent times, they imbued their civil rhetoric with evangelical themes and suggested that America has a divine assignment in the world to spread what Reagan called "the sacred fire of human liberty."

Bush, like Reagan, is a man of self-discipline, punctual, diet-conscious, religious about his gym time and a good night's sleep, devoted to simple, mind-clearing outdoor exertion, impatient when meetings dawdle. Perhaps Bush, a reformed binge drinker, and Reagan, the son of an alcoholic, each learned to view rigorous routine as a safeguard against chaos.

Reagan and Bush are known as devoted homebodies. Laura Bush is not the assertive, hyperprotective West Wing enforcer Nancy Reagan was, although Karen Hughes played something close to that role for Bush. Bush is more gregarious than Reagan, but they are loners, in the sense that they are perfectly at ease without company. Both men are often described as comfortable in their own skins.

Ideologically they are to the right of the popular median strip. Reagan's principles were developed over decades and fortified by a selective but extensive reading of history. Bush's seem more instinctive. This makes him less predictable. Where Reagan's creed was a catechism of ideas reinforced by anecdotes, Bush's is a more earthbound compound of experience and politics. His relevant schooling includes a dozen years studying the campaigns and presidencies of Reagan and his father, and a largely unsuccessful but self-defining career in oil development, a big-bets industry that mythologizes risk.

"Bush's views are honed more by experience than by information," said a Republican strategist. "For Bush, cutting taxes is not a philosophy. It's the result of spending much of his life immersed in a milieu with people who groused that taxes stifle investment and innovation."

Reagan, who became president just before his 70th birthday, arrived at the Oval Office pretty much a finished product. Bush is still more of a work in progress. But they seem to share a palate of beliefs that mix Christian moralism, American nationalism, laissez-faire economics laced with a heavy dose of supply-side theory and a general mistrust of federal government as inefficient and unaccountable.

Each spent his first wad of political capital pushing a large tax cut -- even as oceans of red ink rose around him. Reagan's first tax bill was more sweeping, but as the details of Bush's next budget make clear, he's nowhere near finished. Each man talked about tax cuts as a way to unleash private energy and, secondarily, as a way to starve oppressive government.

Martin Anderson, who was Reagan's domestic policy chief, helped organize policy tutorials for Bush during the campaign, and says he often felt he was watching a new incarnation of Reagan. "On taxes, on education, it was the same. On Social Security, Bush's position was exactly what Reagan always wanted and talked about in the 70's," he said. "I just can't think of any major policy issue on which Bush was different."

Bush talks, as Reagan did, about a world of black and white, and tends to measure his counterparts in politics and world affairs by a moral standard. Diplomacy was personal for Reagan; once he recognized Mikhail Gorbachev as a genuine reformer, he left behind his most doctrinaire anti-Communist advisers in his willingness to do business with the Soviet Union. Bush is like that, too.

Each man had a trauma early in his presidency, a violent epiphany, that won him an outpouring of popular support and confirmed in him a sense of destiny. For Reagan, it was being shot, almost fatally, outside the Washington Hilton just two months after his inauguration. For Bush, of course, it was Sept. 11.

Both men are optimists --