Ronald Reagan's administration gave birth to the politics of the television age

"A quarter of a century ago they sneered at Mr Reagan, just as they sneer at Mr Bush today. "An aimiable dunce", was the considered judgement of Clark Clifford, the worldly consigliere of Democratic presidents for three decades, at one of those Georgetown dinner parties that once were the pinnacle of the Washington social scene.
Mr Clifford was speaking in September 1981, when such was the liberal orthodoxy about the former California governor who had captured the White House. How easy it was to mock about this genial ingenue, with his well known reliance on scripts and a world view that did not extend beyond a set of cue cards. Later, the prevailing view was even more brutal, that Mr Reagan was simply out of it; at the helm of a three-quarters detached presidency, in which Nancy Reagan and her astrologer pulled the strings.
Under Mr Reagan, the teleguided presidency of the 21st century truly began. He was the first chief executive sealed in a bubble, whose every utterance and every step was scripted, for whom presentation was everything, style has supplanted substance and armies of handlers and minders made sure that nothing was left to chance. They called him the "great communicator". The description was faint praise, carrying the implication that it didn't matter what was in the package, as long as the wrapping paper was pretty.
Mr Reagan could come across as the ultimate hands-off president, unknowing and uncaring as the gap beween rich and poor grew. His second term witnessed an epidemic of Wall Street greed that prefigured the scandals of the Bush era, as well as a savings and loan bank debacle that cost the US taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars. . . .
If Tony Blair is the child of Mrs Thatcher, Bill Clinton is the child of Mr Reagan. Just as "Old Labour" was destroyed by Mrs Thatcher, so the Democrats had to move to the centre to win power. When Mr Clinton slipped towards the left, he was punished by the loss of Congress in 1994."