Like a lot of Republicans who have watched both Reagan and Bush at close hand, Michael Deaver [the shrewd public relations man who played Karl Rove to an earlier president, Ronald Reagan] 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.
Reagan and The Shrub Compared
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