We need you now, Ronnie

For all his greatness, George W. Bush cannot match the romantic eloquence of Ronald Reagan, says Mark Steyn

New Hampshire

Ifeel a bit like a guy who's been dating a pleasant lady in the office for a couple of years and suddenly bumps into the gal he always adored in high school. As readers will know, I'm very supportive of George W. Bush, especially on the foreign policy front. But it was unfortunate that a week of 24/7 Ronald Reagan greatest hits on the cable networks should have had to stop once or twice a day to cross to a blinking, groggy Dubya at some G8 press conference with a duplicitous pseudo-ally going round in circles on Iraq for the umpteenth time. Bush is a great and remarkable president and, between Normandy and G8 and the UN, he actually had a very good week. But gosh, it's hard not to miss the Gipper. . . .

At Washington's National Cathedral, his four eulogists contemplated one of the most well-rounded political personae of modern times and focused on what most appealed to each of them. Mrs Thatcher, by far the best, hailed Reagan as the Great Liberator, the man who killed communism, because that's what matters to her. Her fellow ex-PM Brian Mulroney recalled a twinkly, ingratiating Irish charmer, because that's what matters to him. George Bush Sr remembered the kinder. gentler Reagan. And George Bush Jr spoke of the former president's faith, the 'faith of a boy who read the Bible with his mom'.

These are all useful attributes in a politician, but in Reagan it was the combination that made the difference. Mrs Thatcher is one of the great figures of the age and a tremendous slayer of dragons abroad, but, unlike Reagan, she never found a language to embrace and define Britain's identity, with consequences the country lives with still (i.e., Sunday's election results). Mr Mulroney was an ingratiating, gladhanding pot, but, unrooted in any coherent philosophy other than the next deal, the blarney was insufficient: where Reagan strengthened conservatism and the Republican party as a vehicle for it, Mulroney neglected it and sent the Canadian Conservative party into a death spiral; at the election following his retirement, the Tories were reduced to two seats, and a few months back finally gave up the ghost and got swallowed up by a newer, less squishy party. The first President Bush is a decent, kindly old stick, but kindness defined only as accommodation and 'moderation' soon begins to look an awful lot like weakness and a lack of political backbone: Reagan was Mister Genial but he was steel-spined.

Thatcher, Mulroney and Bush Sr are now retired, so their strengths and weaknesses are for the historians. But Bush II hopes to be around for a while yet, and so the faintly reductive nature of his characterisation of the Gipper was a little disquieting. I don't mind all the God stuff, if only because it drives Max Hastings and Harold Pinter and the rest of the gang into paroxysms of rage. And it's always useful to be reminded of the decisive difference between America and Europe as the radical secularists of the latter embark on demographic suicide. Also, in fairness to President Bush and the Iron Lady, they did a much more eloquent job of ushering Ronald Reagan into the house of the Lord than that ghastly vulgar me-me-me South African pastor at the graveside in California, who when he briefly ceased talking about himself took the extraordinary step of essaying a vocal impression of Mrs T. He provided without doubt the worst moment of the week's observances. I'm sure he brought great comfort to Mr and Mrs Reagan, but he's a cautionary tale in how a politician's 'faith tradition' (in Al Gore's dread phrase) doesn't always translate to the public arena.

What is Bush doing when he talks about God? Well, he's an evangelical Christian and so it's natural to him. To try and zip it up in public would be highly unnatural. But presumably he also subscribes to the Reaganite view that there is a purpose behind the blessings the Almighty has showered on America. To Ronald Reagan, the nation was a 'shining city on a hill' — a phrase he modified from John Winthrop, aboard the Arbella, bound for Massachusetts Bay in 1630, and anticipating the colony he hoped to help build Ca city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are on us'). Winthrop, in turn, got it from Matthew and Isaiah. Reagan just neatened it up a little and planted a 350-year-old catchphrase into the language.

Lots of people use it now: it's like the 'grapes of wrath' and 'terrible swift sword' of 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic', or the 'purple-mountained majesty' and 'fruited plain' of 'America the Beautiful'; it's part of the language connecting the nation to God, part of what David Gelernter calls 'mystic nationalism' or, if you prefer, a civic religion. It urges the nation to a higher purpose without sounding like you're going to be passing the collection plate at the end of the paragraph. Both Bush and his speechwriters sound a little tapped out these days, but they could learn a lot from looking at what Reagan did with his shining city: if you're making a radical departure from the recent past, invent a traditional saying to cover it.

According to National Review's Kate O'Beirne, Reagan invoked America's Founding Fathers more than the previous nine presidents combined. He turned to politics in an era of dry north-eastern country-club Republicanism, but he understood that it wasn't enough — in linking tax cuts and small government to the Founders and the first settlers, he made the conservative vision of America a romance rather than a balance sheet. And every great nation, especially a republic, has to be a romance. Today, politicians of both parties routinely name-drop the Founders, and, though often spuriously, that too is part of the Reagan legacy.

For his part, Bush's conservatism is neither a romance nor a balance sheet. He's adopted a lot of the soft fatuities of the Left — 'Leave no child behind' — and he doesn't care how expensive they are to implement. On Labor Day last year. Bush said, 'We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.' With conservatives like that, who needs Sweden?

Reagan knew better: 'Outside its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.' He didn't say that as president or even as governor, but one Sunday night back in the Fifties as the host of General Electric's weekly playlet 'GE Theater'. There's more conservative philosophy in the average Reagan intro to those old shows with Joan Crawford and Burgess Meredith than we're likely to get in Bush's keynote address at this year's convention.

It may be that there are good sound arguments for federalising education spending or creating a huge new prescription-drug entitlement, but, if so, Bush never makes them — or, to be more precise, he never bothers to place these programmes within any kind of coherent political philosophy. By contrast, the emerging line on Reagan from the johnny-comelately admirers he's won in the media this last week is that, oh, sure, he may have talked tough but that was just for the crowd, He favoured red-meat rhetoric but pragmatic policies.

That's a lot of hooey, but, even if it were true, a bit of red-meat rhetoric would still have been welcome a quarter-century ago. When Reagan called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire' and 'the focus of evil in the modern world', it's not just that nobody else in the leadership of the West talked like that; they didn't think like that. Small example: in 1978 Maurice Bishop's Communist New Jewel Movement toppled the government of Grenada while the prime minister, Eric Gairy, was out of the country. Sir Eric had unusual priorities — he was off giving a talk to the UN on his favourite subject, flying saucers, when Bishop made his move — and he was not the most unblemished of Caribbean leaders, as anyone who attracted the attention of his 'mongoose' gangs can testify. But this was the first ever coup in the British West Indies, and at the time Castro saw no reason why communism couldn't be exported to Barbados and Trinidad and St Lucia and all the rest.

But here's where Maurice Bishop showed a droll sense of humour. He tossed out the constitution, suspended elections, banned political parties, etc. But he decided to leave the governor-general, Sir Paul Scoon, in residence at Government House, and Buckingham Palace raised no objections. So Her Majesty the Queen wound up as head of a Marxist one-party state, presiding over Comrade Bishop's politburo. And nobody thought this was odd, or shameful, or pathetic.

What was shameful and pathetic back then was Reagan refusing to string along like everyone else. The 'evil empire' speech horrified the New York Times's world affairs grandee, Anthony Lewis. 'Primitive,' he sniffed. 'That is the only word for it.' Bush is also wont to talk about evil, or at any rate the axis thereof, and for his pains also gets damned as primitive.

In these pages, Correlli Barnett has dismissed the entire 'war on terror' as a fraud on the grounds that one cannot wage war against a phenomenon. As it happens, the Royal Navy has quite a track record of waging war against phenomena — slavery and piracy. One can certainly make the case that that's what the Bush administration is doing — after all, from Colombia to Sri Lanka, various longstanding terrorist campaigns seem to have mysteriously quietened down since 9/11.

But, in the broader sense, Barnett might be right — that the very name of the war was its first polite evasion, the product of a culture which has banished the very concept of 'the enemy'. From grade school up we're taught that there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated. One sympathises with Bush's difficulties: in the early days, every time he tried to name an enemy, he got undercut. When he denounced the Taleban, Colin Powell said, au contraire. we're very interested in reaching out to moderate Taleban. So Bush switched to the more general term 'evildoers', and crossed his fingers that Powell wouldn't go on Meet the Press and claim the administration was interested in reaching out to moderate evildoers.

Three years on, I think one can make the argument that this fuzziness about the precise nature of the enemy is one reason so many Americans have checked out of the war. The President is getting his way, in Iraq and at the UN. But at home he doesn't seem able to package it all into a great cause the way Reagan did. I mentioned two years ago that ambitious presidents take advantage of extreme circumstances — the way FDR did in the Depression. Bush had an opportunity to shift the broader cultural landscape in 2001 — to take on the enervated, selfloathing. multiculti self-absorption that in the days after 9/11 looked momentarily vulnerable. But he chose not to do so. Unlike Roosevelt, he declined to seize the moment.

But even FDR couldn't have done it without the help of Wall Street and bread lines. What makes Reagan the most impressive president of the century is that he shifted the landscape without any external assistance — no Depression, no 9/11, no nothing: like the Queen and Comrade Bishop, everyone was in 'Can't we all just get along?' mode vis-a-vis the Soviet Union as it gobbled up more and more real estate. Reagan got a notion to win the Cold War at a time nobody else had, And he made it happen.

Bush has set himself a similar challenge — to remake the Middle East. I think he can do it. He's played a shrewd hand with both fractious Iraqi politicians and devious UN diplomats and he's seen off Chirac, but at home there's undeniably a rhetorical shortfall, as there was in his Reagan eulogy. He could use some Reaganesque clarity and toughness, plus a little more lyricism in the patriotic uplift. But one of the problems with the Bush Administration is that they think they're so good at walking the walk they don't have to bother talking the talk. Wrong. Last week conservatives were reminded of everything they've missed these last ten years. Never glad confident 'Morning In America' again? Your call, Dubya.