I have no intention of weighing in on the JPod-Peter Robinson debate about the extent to which Bush is a Reaganite–mainly because my own view of the matter is, boringly, somewhere in between theirs. But I was hoping to clear something up. When did Reagan say, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”? The quote is often attributed to his first inaugural address. But whenever I’ve looked up that address (generally for other reasons), I don’t find that quote. Instead, I find: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.” Did he ad-lib “government is the problem” following that line?

In my view, the “in the present crisis” qualifier makes the statement stronger. I would go so far as to say that it marks the difference between an ideologue and a statesman. That formulation also tells in favor of JPod, because it leaves open the possibility that our program should change if government is not “the problem,” or the problem in the same way, as it was then.