Reagan's Son

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.

What Bush is striving for, on the evidence of the choices he has made so far, is bold in its ambition: markets unleashed, resources exploited. A progressive tax system leveled, a country unashamed of wealth. Government entitlements gradually replaced by thrift, self-reliance and private good will. The safety net strung closer to the ground. Government itself infused with, in some cases supplanted by, the efficiency and accountability of a well-run corporation. A court system dedicated to protecting property and private enterprise and enforcing individual responsibility. A global common market that hums to the tune of American productivity. In the world, America rampant -- unfettered by international law, unflinching when challenged, unmatchable in its might, more interested in being respected than in being loved.

If he fails, my guess is that it will be a failure not of caution but of overreaching, which means it will be failure on a grand scale. If he succeeds, he will move us toward an America Ronald Reagan would have been happy to call his own.

I believe they are consecutive sequences of non-white-space characters.

Don't worry about your so-called "grumpiness". I've seen worse. I thought you were being quite nice about it.

I've found doing a search has been a trial-n-error sorta thing, but I think I've got it down. Not that it works all the time. For the most part, it seems to work very well, not that I've got a percentage down or anything like that.

And you're very welcome. :-)

Dear Admin Moderator,

The search for titles that we're supposed to do, before posting, to avoid duplicate posts, is a little quirky. I tend to search on subparts of the entire title, in order to avoid missing something due to a slightly modified or multilated title, but this requires that I know more details to avoid missing matches for other reasons (such as not seeing Reagan's on a search for Reagan -- due to not realizing that the single-quote character was treated like an alphanumeric character, not a separator character.)

Even after some messing with it, I still was guessing wrong as to its behaviour, resulting in my posting dups. I think I've got it now, after a more systematic effort.

Question:

What's the best way to file suggestions for the FR webmeisters? Suggestion:

Search Details:

A word is any sequence of four or more characters that are letters, numbers, underscores (_) or single quotes ('). All other characters are word separators (equivalent to spaces). Word matches are only done on whole words.
Exact phrase matches are done in two steps:
1. First matches are found for any titles containing any matching whole words of four or more characters.
2. Then from those titles, any title having an exact fixed string match on the entire phrase, regardless of word boundaries, is selected.
For example, the article "Reagan Responsible for dow 10k" can be found with the exact phrase search "Reagan Responsible for dow 1", and with "gan Responsible for dow 10k", but not with "esponsible for dow 10k".
Searches are case insensitive. Upper case and lower case letters are treated as identical.

I'd keep this off the main search page, to avoid intimidating the normal folks.

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