Reagan's passing....

... may provide an unexpected boost to the Bush reelection campaign. Nighttime and news programming is awash with retrospectives on this icon of the conservative movement, and consider the parallels between his terms in office and Bush's:

- A fight against a looming and imminent evil (communism / Islamic fascism)
- A set of firmly held beliefs, simply expressed and easy to understand (the "universality of the value of liberty and freedom", as put by Condi Rice), yet contemporaneously widely criticized as simple or misguided by the liberal Left/Europe
- A down-home, Man-of-the-Common-People approach to governance
- To quote a Bush ad: "Steady leadership in times of change" :-)

To be sure, there are divergences from the Reagan template in the Bush approach to leadership: runaway federal spending, a marked trend toward Big Government, and questionable suppression of domestic civil rights in the fight against terror, for example.

Nevertheless, all this proves the undeniable advantage of the incumbent when seeking a second term.

Go Bush Go !

"Our country is a special place, because we Americans have always been sustained, through good times and bad, by a noble vision -- a vision not only of what the world around us is today but what we as a free people can make it be tomorrow."
-President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004)