I’d like to agree with you on this, but Reagan was decent, self-effacing, gracious, and yet confident about the moral, economic, and scientific foundations beneath his decisions.
In fact, the only places where he had regrets about his presidency were areas where he betrayed what he knew for what he ‘felt’ - raising taxes and immigration ‘reform’.
Bush, with the benefit of Reagan’s mistakes felt obligated to repeat them anyway.
That’s why history, as a field of study, has fallen out of favor.
At the end, leaders fit into three categories - those that learn from reading about the mistakes of others, those that need to watch others make mistakes and learn from them, and those that believe that ‘this time its different’.
In comparing Bush, Clinton, and Obama, only Clinton was willing to tailor his ideology with what he saw going on outside the window. This isn’t to say that Clinton was a moral leader, a good leader, or had the country on the right track either.
As an example, he passed welfare reform because he knew it wasn’t actually helping the people it was intended to help, and he refused to lie to blue collar workers about his ability to do anything about low skill labor jobs moving overseas. This stopped at the water’s edge however, with his ‘ignore militant Islamism and it will go away’ foreign policy.
Reagan, however, was amazing, in that he inherited 30 years of ‘Cold War Without End’ orthodoxy and said, “No, my view on this is ‘We Win.’”
Thatcher, however, was the second gift from God that Britain had had in the 20th century. She was, hands down, the best leader of the late 20th century.
I agree that Reagan and Thatcher were great, but the problem is that Gates didn’t work for them.
He worked for Bush and then for Obama. Bush was ethical, whether you agreed with him or not, but Obama is a raving nutcase and I think it was hard for Gates to adapt to this.