How Reagan's Legacy Lives On

Ronald Reagan utterly remade the American political landscape. Even Bill Clinton, as adroit a politician as America has known, had to conduct his entire presidency in the confined political space in which Reagan placed him. It was because of Reagan that Clinton had to promise to end welfare as we know it. It was because of Reagan that he spoke the fateful line, "The era of Big Government is over."

As it happens, it wasn't overmore on that laterbut make no mistake, what Reagan brought forth was a revolution all the same. Like the Civil War and the New Deal, the Reagan years were another of those hinges upon which history sometimes turns. On one side, a wounded but still vigorous liberalism with its faith in government as the answer to almost every question. On the other, a free market so triumphanteven after the tech bubble burstthat we look first to "growth," not government, to solve most problems. On one side, a U.S. still licking its wounds from Vietnam, reluctant to exercise its power. On the other, U.S. forces in Bosnia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq. On one side, Russians invading Kabul. On the other, McDonald's invading Moscow.

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Reagan was without a doubt the greatest communicator among postwar Presidents. Even J.F.K., with his faintly patrician manner, could not play the effortless everyman as Reagan did. Every politician with national ambitions today tries to capture his easy way and Teflon character. All Republican candidates are conditioned now to always ask themselves, What would Reagan do?

He not only knew how to talk. He also knew how to use the power of his persuasion. "Reagan fundamentally changed the way President and Congress relate," says Al From, former head of the Democratic Leadership Council, which pushed the Democratic Party toward the center — inspired partly by Reagan's success in pushing the G.O.P. to the right. "Before Reagan, if you wanted to get a big idea through Congress, you worked through the leadership. Reagan couldn't do that. The most important leader in Congress, House Speaker Tip O'Neill, was his enemy. So he figured out he had to go to the people. To get a big idea through Congress now, you go outside. Reagan understood that."

Ever since Reagan's departure from the political stage, G.O.P. candidates have been trying to summon his image and perform the magic of uniting their party's disparate factions, from libertarians to religious conservatives to Big Business, under one tent. Don't forget that Reagan also left that imprint on another charismatic actor who now sits in the Governor's chair in California. As he tries to find his way out of a nasty fiscal crisis, Arnold Schwarzenegger is taking lessons from the Reagan playbook all the time. "They both have extraordinary personal charm," observes Ken Khachigian, Reagan's former chief speechwriter. "That goes a great way in taking the sting out of things when you're doing something negative."

Remarkably, Reagan accomplished that while being the most conservative President his party had ever moved into the White House. Make no mistake. By Republican standards, Richard Nixon was middle-of-the-road. He believed his job was not to dismantle the New Deal but to manage it more effectively than the Democrats did. And by those lights, Gerald Ford was no better, naming the ur-moderate Nelson Rockefeller, the bogeyman of the Republican right, his Vice President.

"Reagan took a more moderate Republican Party and made it very conservative," says Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. "Goldwater tried and failed to do that. Reagan succeeded." More than that, Reagan took who was next in line of Republican centrism, George H.W. Bush, vanquished him in the 1980 primaries and then cordially digested him into his own Administration. It was a lesson George the Younger never forgot.

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