Happy birthday!

It’s President Ronald Reagan’s birthday today, and anyone who appreciates economic prosperity and world peace should be particularly pleased the old Gipper is still around.

After all, it was the Reagan tax cut and tight monetary policy that rescued this country from the stagflation of the ’70s and sparked 20 years of unprecedented prosperity. On the foreign front, Reagan’s unwavering defiance of the Soviet Union, along with a massive defense buildup, fiscally bankrupted the morally bankrupt regime, resulting in the end of the Cold War.

Of course, many of my liberal friends are revolted by such claims, but I take comfort in the fact most of them are still convinced President Bush is a brainless puppet that stole the election and is out to destroy the world so long as he and his rich friends profit.

In fact, the derision is rather similar to those convinced Reagan was a brainless puppet that won the election with his movie-actor persona and was out to destroy the world so long as he and rich friends profited.

And that is not the only similarity between Bush and Reagan. Both campaigned on tax cuts and faced economic recession in their first year in office. Both were governors of large states after coming late to politics.

After Sept. 11, Bush defined national security as his overarching concern, as did Reagan. In both cases, the enemy was “evil” — empire then, axis now. Consequently, both oversaw (or will oversee) massive increases in defense spending.

But the most important comparison may be the effect of each president on American politics in general and their party in particular.

Reagan brought an entirely new philosophy to the then-free-spending Republicans. Now the question was how much should we cut, not how much should we limit spending. How much control should we divest to the states, not how much control should we take. Not price controls, but tax cuts, so that people could spend their own money on what they wanted, and the economic growth that would follow would more than pay for the cost.

The result was one of the most popular presidents in history — in 1984 Reagan won every state but one — and the birth of a new voter, the Reagan Democrat.

But like most ideological tides, the Reagan revolution slid away from the center, and the Reagan Democrat became the squishy middle. These were the people who supported Ross Perot and who allowed John McCain to throw a scare into Bush at this time two years ago.

This group of voters was sick of social programs, but they were ill at ease with the perception the Republican Party was concerned solely with self-interest. These people saw the good things limited government could do, but the Republicans seemed too cynical and too corporate.

Such was the situation last summer — the electorate was all but perfectly split. But the status quo may be changing. In 1980, Reagan transformed the Republican Party and American politics by shifting to the right. In 2002, Bush is again transforming the Republican Party, this time by shifting away from the anti-government right, and the transformation could, like the Reagan revolution, extend to all of American politics.

In last week’s State of the Union address, Bush laid out a new vision and an overarching purpose for America. No longer are our worries limited to our stock portfolio and our number-one priority, self-gratification. Instead we have a new fight, one for our very lives and the values we cherish as Americans, and we are going to fight it together. And according to Bush, government will play a part.

In enunciating these themes, Bush appealed to nearly all Americans. To the squishy middle, he offered Kennedy-like calls for national service and the aforementioned role of government. Bush co-opted one of the Democrats’ best issues, education, by passing a bi-partisan bill that includes the largest-ever amount of federal spending. Bush appealed to women by emphasizing the commitment of the United States to women’s rights and declaring that would now be a factor in foreign policy decisions. The economic right is still on board with the promise of making last year’s tax cuts permanent, and the religious right is surely heartened by Bush’s obvious and frequently mentioned faith.

Early signs are promising for Bush and the Republican Party. No president has maintained such a high approval rating for so long, and even more telling is the widening gap between Republicans and Democrats in polls for congressional races. Most interesting is the 41 percent of the population that now sees Bush as a moderate — last summer, the number was 24.

There is actually a name for this new philosophy, and it was what Bush campaigned on. It’s “compassionate conservatism,” and early signs are encouraging it will equal the Reagan revolution.

Benjamin Thompson ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in political science.