Props to Nancy Reagan. She has successfully orchestrated her husband's life into legend. She has been determined to rewrite history to preserve his alleged legacy, and unfortunately, she seems to have accomplished it. I will forgive her if she will at least take a strong position on stem cell research. Ronnie didn't do squat for AIDS, but maybe his widow can make some amends.

Meanwhile, is Bush the heir to that Reagan "legacy"? Here is a very astute column (actually abridged for your easy reading) from the Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum:

"The problem with comparing Bush to Reagan is that Bush comes off as a mediocre painter trying to emulate Picasso. He sees the brushstrokes on the surface and knows how to copy them, but because he doesn't understand their underlying purpose he ends up being only a clumsy and ultimately damaging imitation when he tries to craft a painting of his own.

"No analogy is perfect, but in a lot of ways Bush strikes me as being to Reagan what LBJ was to Roosevelt. It's true that LBJ made some powerful and original contributions to the country, particularly in the area of civil rights, but in the end his legacy has been overshadowed by a pair of signature failures. The Great Society and the Vietnam War, consciously modeled on FDR's New Deal and his leadership during World War II, adopted the surface characteristics of FDR's great achievements but ended up as failures because LBJ didn't have Roosevelt's instinctive feel for public opinion or his grasp of why some things worked and some didn't.

"Much the same can be said of George Bush. He learned Reagan's lesson that tax cuts could be powerful political symbols, but then turned that lesson into a blind rule that tax cuts are the answer to every economic problem. Likewise, on foreign policy he saw that Reagan was admired for his steadfast anticommunism, but failed to learn when and where to turn down the volume. As a result, he's a man with only one gear, overreliant on military solutions whether they're appropriate or not.

"Like LBJ, Bush is a man who knows the notes but not the song. He learned the surface lessons of Reagan's presidency -- tax cuts, hawkishness, unyielding rhetoric -- but because he doesn't have the political sensitivity to understand what to do with them he has no choice except to simply offer more tax cuts and more hawkishness, whatever the problem. As a result, he overreaches in a way Reagan never did and will likely be the prime cause of the one thing he most fears: a liberal backlash."