NEW GOP LOOKS TO REAGAN, THATCHER

Attendance at a weekend conference in Washington, D.C., this past March offered me an opportunity to visit with John O'Sullivan, the British-born former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and current editor of National Review. O'Sullivan was at the Iron Lady's side throughout her tumultuous and historic run as the longest-serving prime minister of this century. I told him it was an honor to meet someone who had worked so closely with a person I rank right up there with Churchill and Reagan as among the three or four greatest leaders of the 20th century.

We had time to kill before leaving for the airport to catch our planes to return home, and so, in the hotel lobby, a long discussion ensued. O'Sullivan is an enormously stimulating conversationalist. I asked him where conservatives in Britain were headed after Thatcher. In so doing I remarked that Thatcherites there, with Prime Minister John Major, must feel a letdown not unlike the bitter disappointment felt by Reaganites over the milquetoast years, half-hearted compromises and missed opportunities of the tin-eared Bush administration.

The scholarly O'Sullivan agreed with my premise and offered many insights. In both cases, he argued, heroic-age leaders of true, world-class status (Reagan and Thatcher) were followed in office by bland caretakers possessing great resumes who had risen through party ranks (George Bush and John Major).

In each case, O'Sullivan stressed, successors Bush and Major lacked the vision of their heroic predecessors and represented conventional pre-Reaganite, pre-Thatcherite modes of their parties' thinking. This thinking proceeds as if the great gains achieved under Reagan and Thatcher -- the tax cuts, the defense buildup, victory in the Cold War, privatization of industries -- were either nonexistent, illegitimate or somehow vaguely embarrassing.

That is to say, both Reagan's and Thatcher's bland successors accepted the critique of the dominant media elites of the regime that went before, the very regimes whose success was the reason those successors had been able to achieve office.

A sort of repudiation of both Reagan and Thatcher, right? Well, yes, certainly, if you stop there. O'Sullivan didn't. He tellingly observed that again, in each case, in both the British Conservative and American Republican parties, a younger generation was surging onto the scene. Further, in each case, this younger generation is inspired -- not by the conventional thinking of the bland Bush and Major -- but by the heroic vision of Reagan and Thatcher. The post-Bush Republicans, like the post-Major Conservatives, were almost certain to be thoroughly Reagan- and Thatcherite.

This fall's American election campaigns confirm O'Sullivan's provocative thesis. Evidence abounds, but for the most telling confirmation, we need look no further than the burgeoning Sunbelt states of Texas and Florida, home to the two gubernatorial candidate sons of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Both are more conservative than was their father, running as they are in an America measurably more conservative than the nation that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980. Of the two, older (47-year-old) brother George W. Bush is more like his moderate father. Running what one keen observer calls "a paint-by-numbers, poll-driven campaign in Texas. Hit hard on crime and welfare but take no risks."

The other brother, 41-year-old Jeb Bush, seems to navigate by the principle that says, "Fortune favors the bold." While golden oldies on welfare and crime are part of his song book as well, Jeb is much the more admirable for the very fact that he is taking more risks. Conventional thinking says to stay away from issues such as full parental choice of schools, else you'll antagonize the powerful lobbies that comprise the public educational establishment. The same thinking counsels chatter about welfare reform, but nothing that could antagonize its entrenched interests.

To this cautious counsel, Jeb answers, "The rich can afford to choose their schools. Why shouldn't the poor and middle income folks have that choice?" As for welfare, Jeb's radical proposal is to pull out of the federal program altogether and "radically replace the failed liberal welfare state."

By way of explanation, Jeb Bush says, "I am not a moderate. I'm a conservative, and I have an edge to my remarks and I don't hide it. I want to win in an intellectually honest way." Of his own education on government, Jeb says, "We've had a 30-year pilot project and it doesn't work."

Jeb Bush appears to have pulled decisively ahead of 64-year-old incumbent Gov. Lawton Chiles, who first ran for office in 1958. This week's televised debate between the two pitted a relaxed, smiling, confident and combative Jeb Bush against a defensive and rather flummoxed Gov. Chiles.

Jeb Bush and scores of other candidates like him are confirming the truth John O'Sullivan told me last March. Fortune, it would appear, does indeed favor the bold.

Peter Kinder is associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.