[Nesster]

One reason for Republican rage at Clinton was that he in many ways out-Republicanned them.

I think Clinton's administration can take a lot of credit (no president of course acts entirely without the congress and courts etc) though his commerce department. These folks worked hard to get US companies good deals. Clinton understood that in order to milk the cow (the economy) you had to feed it.

Reagan, in his folksy mode, could utter pretty centrist/liberal ideas, such as what he said about the earned income credit.

One reason for Republican rage at Clinton was that he in many ways out-Republicanned them.

I think Clinton's administration can take a lot of credit (no president of course acts entirely without the congress and courts etc) though his commerce department. These folks worked hard to get US companies good deals. Clinton understood that in order to milk the cow (the economy) you had to feed it.

Reagan, in his folksy mode, could utter pretty centrist/liberal ideas, such as what he said about the earned income credit.

If Slick had a liberal congress spending would be almost as bad as the Obaminator's.

[Nesster]

Here's an interesting book review of the book "Neoconservatism"
Book Review - Neoconservatism - By Justin Vaïsse - NYTimes.com

Probably no group of intellectuals has had a greater impact on American politics over the last four decades than the neoconservatives. The Rolling Stones even sang a song about them. Yet who or what exactly is a neoconservative? Over the years the meaning of the word has changed. Initially it referred to a coterie of liberals and leftists, absorbed in domestic policy issues, who raised questions about the efficacy of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-1960s. Today, neoconservatives seem restricted for the most part to the Republican Party and are advocates of a muscular foreign policy. Irving Kristol, who once described himself as a liberal “mugged by reality,” was one kind of neoconservative. His son, William, a lifelong Republican, is an entirely different kind.

This definitional question, and in particular neoconservatism’s extraordinary transformation, is the principal subject of “Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement,” by Justin Vaïsse, a French expert on American foreign policy who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the contours of our recent political past. Vaïsse is a historian of ideas. “Neoconservatism” demonstrates, among other things, that ideas really do make a difference in our lives.

Vaïsse defines neoconservatism by disassembling it. He sees three “ages” to the movement. The first began in the mid-1960s with intellectuals like Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer gathering around Kristol and Bell’s new magazine, The Public Interest, and also around Commentary, under its editor Norman Podhoretz. At the time, all of these writers were sympathetic in principle to an activist government, especially when it came to the economy, but questioned the expectations of Great Society planners of antipoverty and related social programs — or, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, the Good Intentions Paving Company. Challenging what they saw as liberal overreaching and wishful thinking with hard, often crushing, empirical facts, these early neoconservatives were, in a sense, the skeptical conscience of liberalism.

But skepticism about the effectiveness of particular programs soon mutated into broader disenchantment with almost every kind of government intervention and into the conviction that the free market alone offered acceptable solutions to social problems. As neoconservative pragmatism calcified into laissez-faire dogma, some of its godfathers defected. Daniel Bell, a self-described “right-wing social democrat,” for one; Moynihan, who, *Vaïsse writes, “contended that he was the modern incarnation of a Wilsonian Progressive,” for another. By the time President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” neoconservatism was a spent force in domestic policy, hardly distinguishable from the libertarianism of the American Enterprise Institute.

In the second and third ages, as Vaïsse describes them, neoconservatives turned their attention to foreign policy. This wasn’t surprising. The original neoconservatives were devout anti-Communists for whom opposition to Stalinism and the Soviet Union was as much a left-wing as a right-wing position. This is why the neoconservatives of the second age reacted against what Vaïsse calls “the conquest of the Democratic Party by the forces of the New Left,” begun in 1968 and completed in 1972, when George McGovern won the presidential nomination. The McGovern*ites, strenuously opposed to the Vietnam War and distrustful of American power, struck more hawkish Democrats as *naïve about Communism, even isolationist. The neocons rallied behind Henry Jackson, known as Scoop, a Democratic senator from Washington who, though a supporter of the Great Society’s domestic programs, was the most unrepentant of cold warriors. He nurtured the careers of many young men later known as the toughest of the tough-minded — Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams and Douglas Feith.

Second-age neoconservatives formed the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, an organization established for the explicit purpose of winning back the Democratic Party from the McGovernites. *Vaïsse skillfully delineates the maneuvers of the C.D.M. — including the recruitment of party regulars, labor leaders and disenchanted leftists — along with those of its successor organization, the nonpartisan but intensely hawkish Committee on the Present Danger. (Vaïsse also notes that the C.D.M. gave rise to another organization, the Democratic Leadership Council, which in turn gave rise to Bill Clinton.) After Jackson, who had all the charisma of a Northwestern spruce, failed to win the 1976 presidential nomination, many members of the C.D.M. began looking elsewhere.

Vaïsse’s third age, which runs from the Reagan presidency to the present, includes not only neoconservative refugees from the Democratic Party but also a new generation, like the younger Kristol, who came of age within the Republican Party. And Vaïsse’s story of this period is much like his earlier story: the deterioration of a perspective grounded in the reality of the cold war and the threat posed by the Soviet Union into a rigidly hawkish ideology, along with the peeling off of prominent defectors, like Francis Fukuyama.

Here's an interesting book review of the book "Neoconservatism"
Book Review - Neoconservatism - By Justin Vaïsse - NYTimes.com

Oh. What we use to call Reagan Democrats.