Sometime during one of the crises in the middle of the Reagan years, some Republicans developed a phrase to summarize their frustrations with the president and his policies: The only thing wrong with Reaganism is that it hasn’t been tried yet.

Now, almost a quarter-century since Reagan was elected president, nobody can say that anymore.

Ronald Reagan tried some Reagan conservative ideas, of course. He cut taxes (though he raised them, too). He cut the number of federal jobs (though in the end he raised that, too). He played tough with the Soviets (though there were times when he played nice, too). President Reagan, like Gov. Reagan before him, was not only an ideologist. He was a pragmatist. He left a legacy, but it was a legacy not so much of what he did but what, and how, he thought.

And the natural heir of that legacy is George Bush.

Not the George Bush who succeeded him. That George Bush believed in collective security and pushed through a budget deal in 1990 that President Reagan never would have approved. No, the George Bush who is Reagan’s natural heir is the current President Bush.

Much in common

In truth, the two men have much in common. They are ridiculed on the left for their malaprops. They are reviled in Europe and the Middle East as Wild West cowboys. They also have left scores of people in their wake who made the mistake of underestimating (or, as Bush would say, misunderestimating) them.

The current President Bush is a true supply-sider. He believes in the ascendancy and singular moral purpose of the United States. He knows what he thinks, and he doesn’t think in nuance. This, like the Reagan years, is not a period of nuance anyway.

Reagan, like Bush, wasn’t dumb, nor the beneficiary of its fortunate cousin, dumb luck. “Dumb people don’t get to where he got,” Colin L. Powell said of Reagan in an interview. “People don’t luck up to being elected governor twice and president of the United States twice.”

One thing more: Reagan might not have been a man of the world, but he was a man of his word. In his speech to the book convention the other day, Bill Clinton chided critics who say they are surprised at the current president’s policies. Bush, Clinton said, had set out in the 2000 campaign precisely how he would lead the nation, and where.

Reagan cleared path

The most important factor tying Reagan with the current president is how Reagan made it possible for Bush to govern with Reagan principles.

The first true conservative in the White House since 1933, Reagan made conservatism respectable — no, more than that: romantic — again. He influenced a generation of young people; for all his devotion to his father, the current president more nearly follows the north star of Reagan. And Reagan so moved the center of American politics to the right that many of the ideas that two decades ago would have seemed radical now seem conventional.

Here’s a way to measure the impact of Reagan on our politics: Clinton, the president who served between the two Presidents Bush, governed as a New Democrat. Reagan had made it impossible to be elected as an Old Democrat.

(Postscript: You can type the phrase “the era of big government is over” into every search engine ever invented and all of them will spew out the true author of that remark. It was not Ronald Reagan. It was Bill Clinton, channeling Reagan, not challenging him.)

The celebration of Reagan at his death is his due, but we should try to hold true to the man rather than just to the legend. He wasn’t one of those who pleaded, as England’s Queen Anne did, “to keep me out of the power of the merciless men of both parties.” He was a partisan, no less than his rival, House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., the Massachusetts Democrat. Tip and the Gipper did not see eye to eye. They believed, instead, in the political equivalent of an eye for an eye.

But, like Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy before him — and their acolytes loathe the comparison — Reagan governed with style. He had (and this is the kind of French word that would be death if it tumbled from the lips of John F. Kerry, who doesn’t possess this sort of self-assurance) elan.

“His flaw was that he made it look easy,” said Steve Forbes, the conservative publisher. “His spinmeisters at least should have had him sweating in the Oval Office.”

But Reagan didn’t sweat (except at the ranch, clearing the brush) and he didn’t sweat the details. That occasionally got him into trouble; Sen. Kerry’s early prominence in the Capitol came from his leadership of the Iran-Contra affair. But like most presidents, Reagan’s virtues and his flaws were one and the same. It’s true for most of us, too.

“Part of his legacy is the hardest to hold onto: He was, as he hoped he would be, the president who helped Americans feel good about themselves again,” said Richard Norton Smith, who has been the curator of the Hoover, Eisenhower, Ford and Reagan libraries. “He changed the psychology of Americans.” All true.

Lincoln, who knew something about the presidency, and also about human nature, once quoted the poem memorialists so often cite at times like this, when the great depart only to discover the fate that awaits us all.

It is Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and the phrase that holds poignancy now — with the Reagan monuments sprouting everywhere — is not the usual one (“the paths of glory lead but to the grave”) but these two lines:

“Can storied urn or animated bust

“Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?”

An American original

No matter how many town squares or middle schools are named for him, there won’t be another Reagan, only political figures who try, probably too hard and almost certainly vainly, to be Reaganesque. There hasn’t been another Lincoln, after all, and it’s been 139 years since he died. Indeed, it’s hard to think of an American politician who has been even remotely Lincolnesque. (The last contender was probably Sen. Edmund S. Muskie of Maine. He barely survived the New Hampshire primary in 1972.)

The best thing we can say of Reagan was that he was an American original. The best thing we can say of America is that it is a land big, and fecund, enough to spawn a lot of originals. Reagan understood that about us. Of all the things he liked about us, I believe he liked that best.

David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.