I don’t want to spend all day on this, but Peter, when Reagan said, “Government isn’t the solution, government is the problem,” he was speaking in an ideological atmosphere in which statism of the most basic kind was still intellectually respectable. People still spoke of the nationalization of industries as a proper, indeed a legitimate, act that government might attempt in the United States — and asserted, as Mario Cuomo did in 1984, that America could be likened to a family with the government as father and mother. Socialism — real socialism — was granted more intellectual weight than capitalism.

Times have changed. No one need argue any longer with the contention that government can actually run an economy better than the market can because nobody on the planet, not even Communists, believe this any longer.

The threat now economically isn’t from statism. It’s from the manipulation of state power for private ends, i.e., tortious litigation, environmental blocks on development and the like. And on these matters Bush has been steadfastly “conservative.”

The world in which Reagan attacked government was not George W. Bush’s world. And in any case, as you well know, Reagan did not govern as a libertarian in any sense of the word.

Oh, and Peter, no disrespect intended to Lou Cannon, but pray tell, when did Bush get a spending bill from Congress before 9/11?