Fred Barbash-Moderator - From Ross Douthat's review in Sunday's Times:
it’s one of his book’s great strengths that he also recognizes the centrality of compromise to Reagan’s overall success. This was something, he emphasizes repeatedly, that many right-wingers got wrong at the time. Again and again, movement conservatives misread and misunderstood their greatest champion, whether they were bemoaning Reagan’s willingness to include moderate Republicans in his councils or condemning him, in his second term, as a sellout to the Soviets.
Ideological to a fault, Reagan-era conservatives failed to see that “the most successful presidencies tend to be those that have factional disagreements,” rather than those whose inner circles march in perfect lockstep. They often “missed the signals of Soviet vulnerability” that presaged Communism’s peaceful fall. In both cases, Reagan knew better, and the country was better off because he did.
Since “The Age of Reagan” will probably find more readers among conservatives than liberals, this is the message they ought to take to heart — that being like Reagan can mean more than simply checking off a list of ideological boxes, or delivering a really impressive speech. It can mean marrying principle to practicality, tolerating fractiousness within one’s own coalition and dealing with the political landscape as it actually exists, rather than as you would prefer it to be. (And in Hayward’s account of the flailing Reagan-era Democratic Party, conservatives can find an object lesson in what happens if you don’t.) | 