"You heard people saying it was too small, you had people saying it was too large," Axelrod replied. "We believe it's where it should be."

That might be wishful thinking. As Gregory pointed out, the economy is currently underperforming by nearly $3 trillion; a stimulus package worth one-quarter of that surely won't hurt, but it raises the possibility that, when they focus on the '10 midterm election 18 months or so from now, Americans will judge the stimulus plan a failure - and take out their frustration on Obama's party.

But in a way, we've traveled this road before. The parallels between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama - in terms of their appeal, their style and the circumstances under which they won office, not their ideologies - are many, and the example of Reagan's first term offers a guide to the political roller-coaster Obama may be in for.

Reagan, like Obama, rode to office on the strength of his personality (and with a devoted grassroots following among his party's true believers) at a time of economic gloom, international turmoil, and sagging national confidence. And as with Obama, Reagan's lopsided victory prompted forecasts of the other party's long-term demise. Before the 1980 election, Republicans were seen as a permanent minority party, on Capitol Hill and across the country. After it, they controlled the White House and the Senate and had pulled within 26 seats of a House majority.

Reagan's prescription for the country's domestic woes involved massive tax cuts, which - aided by his surprisingly durable (Obama-like, it might be said) popularity - he pushed through Congress in the first half of 1981. Meanwhile, Democratic congressional leaders fared miserably in polls and, for the first time ever, surveys showed as many voters calling themselves Republicans as Democrats.

By the summer of ‘81, Republicans were openly forecasting even bigger gains for their party in the 1982 midterm elections. A swing of just 26 House seats would put the G.O.P. in charge, and with redistricting shifting 17 Northeast seats to the G.O.P.-friendly Sun Belt, Republicans figured they were already at least halfway there. And in the Senate, where Republicans already held a 54-46 advantage, Democrats would have to defend 19 seats in '82, compared to only 13 for Republicans, numbers that made Republican gains almost inevitable.

Read the rest.

That's right: The 68-year-old chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as you might have heard, was given a role in the film, playing a man who is roughed up by Ledger's knife-wielding Joker. And now C-Span-2's loyal audience of Capitol Hill staffers, political dorks and elderly shut-ins, to whom the somnolent Leahy is a well-known figure, has responded by flooding America's megaplexes to catch their hero on the big screen.

But this isn't the first time that Hollywood has cashed in on the draw of America's political class. Here are just a few other memorable acting turns by politicians:

* Senator Paul Simon, Saturday Night Live (December 1987): The big-eared, bowtie-clad Illinois Democrat took a detour from the White House campaign trail to appear with the musician who shares his same name. When announcer Don Pardo declared "Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Simon" at the top of the show, both the politician and the musician walked out onstage, arguing about which one was actually supposed to host the show. Eventually, Simon the politician relented, leaving the other Simon to host the rest of the show.

* Michael Dukakis, Cheers (November 1990): On the same day that Massachusetts voters went to the polls to choose Dukakis' gubernatorial successor, the Duke—two years removed from his ill-fated presidential campaign—filmed an opening sequence with Ted Danson and George Wendt outside Boston's Bull and Finch Pub, which was used for exterior shots in the show. In the scene, Dukakis buys a newspaper and says a quick hello as he walks past Danson and Wendt, who are too surprised to say anything back. And then the opening credits music rolls.

* Nancy Reagan, Diff'rent Strokes (March 1983): O.K., so Nancy and Ronnie were actors before they entered politics, but still, the spectacle of a first lady playing a meaty role in a sitcom episode was rather extraordinary. Reagan's appearance dovetailed with her "Just Say No!" campaign. In the episode, Gary Coleman's Arnold writes an article for his school paper about drug use by his fellow students. His teacher doesn't believe him—but Nancy Reagan, who just so happens to be in New York and just so happens to hear about Arnold's story, does. So she visits the Drummond house and offers to accompany Arnold to school the next day, and at the school she uses her feminine charms to elicit confessions of drug experimentation from several of Arnold's classmates. Arnold's teacher immediately apologizes and the students rush to the front of the room to hug the first lady. Surprisingly, Reagan's visit didn't have much of a long-term effect on series co-stars Todd Bridges and Dana Plato.

* Tip O'Neill, Dave (1993): Ivan Reitman's comedy about a presidential look-alike who ends up running the country was the ultimate Washington insider's flick, with numerous walk-ons by politicians and Beltway media figures. Most notably, perhaps, it marked one of the final public appearances by former House Speaker Top O'Neill, who died the January after the film's release. In the movie, O'Neill, then 81 years old, is shown on the steps of the Capitol congratulating Frank Langella, who plays an adviser to the president, on the administration's sudden embrace of left-wing populism—which, little does O'Neill know, has come about because the look-alike Dave is now in charge of the country.

* Bill Bradley, The Cosby Show (February 1989): Then a second-term New Jersey senator, Dollar Bill turned in a memorable performance as Cliff's Teammate #1 in the episode "The Boys of Winter." The setup: Dr. Huxtable's wife, Claire, finds a videotape of Cliff and his fellow doctors being humiliated in a basketball game by a group of female lab technicians. Cliff's supposed doctor teammates are played by a group of aging basketball pros, including Walt Hazzard (who in real life had just been fired as the coach at UCLA), Dave DeBusschere and Bradley.

A fixture on the block, Le Bilboquet (don’t bother looking for a sign) is owned by Philippe Delgrange, a 52-year-old Frenchman who rose up through the ranks at Le Relais to open all 450 square feet of his own at 25 East 63rd Street in 1986. Over the years the tiny space has built up quite a following among celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, Tom Hanks, Stephen Spielberg and first daughter Barbara Bush, several thousand well- heeled locals and Euro-trash regulars, who smoke their Gitanes and engage in impromptu dancing out on the sidewalk. But Mr. Perelman, in his double-wide townhouse, is not one of them.

On July 29, the day that Mr. Delgrange’s license for a sidewalk café was approved by the city’s Department of Consumer Affairs, Mr. Perelman’s law firm, Friedman and Gotbaum LLP, filed a lengthy opposition to the application, alleging that the restaurant’s clientele, with all their late-night boisterous revelry, were a threat to the well-being of East 63rd Street’s quiet residents. References were made to the "unremitting and unrepentant attitude of the operator, which as in times past, set tables far out into the sidewalk, permitted motorcycles to be parked on the public sidewalk, permitted its patrons to sit and drink on the stoops of the neighboring homes and has resulted in numerous visits from the police to quell the noise and direct the removal of outdoor tables and chairs."

Elsewhere in the complaint, Mr. Perelman’s attorneys used Zagat’s restaurant guide to bolster their case. "We also observe, admittedly on a sardonic note, that even Le Bilboquet’s customers find the intolerable level of noise and attitude unique," referring as it does to the Zagat’s description which refers to the waitstaff as "noisy" and "rude." Shelly Friedman, Mr. Perelman’s lawyer, emphasized the legal point in a conversation with The Transom: "Do you know how many times the word ‘rude’ appears in Zagat’s? Once!"

Mr. Perelman went so far as to hire a private investigator, John Donovan, to monitor Bilboquet’s activities through video surveillance on July 22 as follows:

8.31 p.m. — Ten to fifteen people congregating in front of café

8.39 p.m. — Larger crowd drinking and congregating in front of café

8.56 p.m. — Crowd drinking in front of café

9.08 p.m. — Patrons now cover most of the public sidewalk

9.43 p.m. — Strolling couple has to maneuver to pass through the crowd

10.18 p.m. — Waiter serves drinks to patrons on the sidewalk

11.30 p.m. — Group continues to drink and café raises music volume

12.00 p.m. — Patrons continue to drink in front of café

12.52 a.m. — Surveillance ends

And Mr. Perelman has enlisted some allies of his own, including Andrew Stein, the former borough president of Manhattan, and Tosano Simonetti, former first deputy police commissioner, who have also filed letters of complaint. Granted, Mr. Simonetti currently works for Mr. Perelman as the head of security at his holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes, of which Mr. Stein is a consultant.

According to Mr. Perelman’s legal team, the community had not been apprised of Le Bilboquet’s intentions, the requisite letters never sent, and the notices never posted—therefore, despite the fact that Le Bilboquet already had their license, Community Board 8’s approval was retracted. So the boîte was forced back to square one. At a community-board hearing on Oct. 6, over a dozen fervent Bilboquettes came out in support, trumping the opposition, and a second hearing is scheduled for Oct. 13.

"The dog didn’t bark on time," quips Ken Fisher, one of Le Bilboquet’s consultants, explaining that Mr. Perelman’s opposition was too late and excessive. "In my mind, the biggest problem on that block is un-ticketed double parking!"

This isn’t the first time that the restaurant has feuded with its well-heeled neighbors. In 1988, Dina DeLuca made the film A Table and Two Chairs, a fictional account of the restaurant’s struggles with certain neighbors opposed to its outdoor seating. At the end of the movie, Le Bilboquet is forced to remove its chairs from the sidewalk. Currently, Mr. Delgrange’s wife, Isabelle, is filming her own sequel, wandering the restaurant with a movie camera and interviewing its customers and neighbors, hoping for a happier ending.

—Jessica Joffe

There He Goes Again

"Good evening. Thank you all for coming. I wish there were a few more of you," author Bob Colacello told the 22 people who’d gathered at the Barnes & Noble on 66th Street and Broadway on Oct. 6 to hear him talk about his book, Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House, 1911-1980.

As Mr. Colacello discussed his 608-page opus—the second volume of which will come out in 2006—a lady in the back was muttering, "Pfffhht!"

"I don’t like that man," she told The Transom, meaning Reagan. "He killed people in Latin America, and what Bush is doing now—Reagan started it. I’ll tell you what he is: a Constitutional killer."

Ronnie and Nancy began as an assignment in 1998 from Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who thought it was time to look at the Reagans again, from a personal point of view, as a couple, and to examine their social lives.

"Everybody said this couple was joined at the hip," he told his audience. "You can’t talk about one without the other. I think that’s been the big mistake of most Reagan biographies, especially Edmund Morris’ Dutch: He left Nancy Reagan out. This man was so dependent on this woman."

After some polite applause, Mr. Colacello signed a few books.

There was a much more enthusiastic reception the next night at Neue Galerie on East 86th Street, at a party thrown by Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, who invited a mix of political, media, social and art-world swells, among them Carroll Petrie, Happy Rockefeller, Richard Meier, Sandy Gallin, Nan Kempner, Phyllis George, Ahmet Ertegun, Aileen Mehle, Ross Bleckner, Agnes Gund and Arnold Scaasi, along with some younger socialites and Condé Nast writers.

It must have felt like old times as a strolling violinist played the Reagans’ favorite songs, among them "Our Love Is Here to Stay" and "California Here We Come." Mrs. Reagan approved the list and added a few tunes, including "When Irish Eyes are Smiling."

For the next two hours, Mr. Colacello signed books in a room filled with decadent German and Austrian art. "I was trying to think of the connection between Klimt and the Reagans," he said behind a Hans Hoffman desk. "And I finally figured it out: beautiful ball gowns."

"Reagan’s great," said Pat Hackett, who put together The Andy Warhol Diaries.

"Andy didn’t impose his will on anyone," Ms. Hackett said. "Andy loved Reagan as a movie star. He thought he was so handsome, and that was Andy’s ideal look. He loved Irish guys."

"Hail to the Chief" was playing now. Another detractor in the midst: Sandra Bernhard. "The Reagans were light, fanciful and airy compared to this era," she said.

Host Ronald Lauder recalled meeting Ronald Reagan at his mother Estée’s home in New York, right after he became governor of California.

"I remember meeting him and not really knowing who he was, exactly," he said. "I realized that there was such a strong quality about him. And I said to my mother, ‘Who is that?’ And—I’ll never forget it—she said: ‘That’s Ronald Reagan; he’s going to be President of the United States." He added that his mother had always told Nancy Reagan to wear red.

"I just think he was a hero," said theatrical producer Terry Allen Kramer. "I see him riding off in the sunset. He was the one guy that came from the media that made a great President."

Any comparisons to make with George W. Bush?

"I know I’m not allowed to say it, but I happen to like Bush and I’m all for him," she said. "I don’t think Bush can get his message across for one reason: He’s a bad public speaker. I think he should get up and say he’s a bad public speaker—‘and that doesn’t make me a bad President.’ I think everything was fine until the Iraq war. Also, being in the entertainment business, I have never heard such terrible Bush-bashing in my life than when I went out two weeks ago to open Moving Out in L.A. I couldn’t believe it. They just hate Bush. ‘Fascist!’"

Ms. Kramer said she was about to cry after having talked to Judith Miller, who was sentenced that day to no less than 18 months for refusing to reveal sources. "I can’t believe this is my country that I live in," she said.

Judith Miller, who covered the President as a junior reporter for The New York Times, seemed in good spirits despite the bad news she got that day.

"He was the most gentlemanly of Presidents," she said. "Once I was covering him, and a reporter dropped a pencil, and he interrupted the press conference and he went across and picked up the pencil and he said, ‘Here you are.’ And after that, there were no questions. He was fabulous—a great man to cover. All Presidents have their failings and weaknesses. As a man to cover, he was never dull; he was always interesting."

Anything Reaganesque about Bush?

"No. No. No," she said, laughing. "I’m not going to go there!"

It was getting to be dinner-party time. Leonard Lauder was standing by the front door as the guests exited.

He didn’t want to try to make any Bush comparisons.

"Much too early—I can’t," he said. "If you look at the history, looking at President Reagan at the end of his first term, we forget that he was in trouble, and that many people were saying the same negative things about him that they say about President Bush today. And yet he has emerged as one of our great Presidents."

"I think people are nostalgic," Mr. Colacello said a few days later from his Hamptons house. "I watched the last debate Friday night at a friend’s house in East Hampton, and almost everyone there was for Kerry. But there were a few undecided people. And I count myself among the undecided this time around—and the reason being, both of these guys are just so boring and so scripted. Kerry’s obviously more articulate, but ‘I have a plan’—what is the plan?

"It’s cooler to like Reagan now," he continued. "And it’s especially cooler to like Nancy Reagan." Then he recalled his good friend Agnes Gund berating him over dinner at Nobu only a few years ago. "She said, ‘You’re a Republican? How can someone intelligent and sophisticated like you, who worked for Andy Warhol, be a Republican?’ And I said, ‘Aggie, part of the reason I’m a Republican is because of a question like that.’ You know, New Yorkers like to think they’re not provincial, but they’re provincial in their own way."

—George Gurley

Maxed Out

It’s probably a good thing that Nicky Hilton married a money manager—husband Todd Meister has his work cut out for him. "Growing up, I was always borrowing cards from my parents, and I’d always, like, lose them. Then I’d get in a lot of trouble," said the Hershey-tressed heiress. It was Oct. 7, and American Express was launching its new IN:NYC card at the downtown space Skylight. The new no-fee card operates on a point system that grants V.I.P. access to concerts at Irving Plaza as well as New York "experiences." For instance, 50,000 points buys you an hour of D.J.-ing at the Whiskey with 10 V.I.P. passes for your friends and a free bottle of Cristal. As if to prove its point, AmEx had set up a special D.J. booth inside the party and commandeered Ms. Hilton, Nicole Ritchie, and The Sopranos’ Jamie-Lynn DiScala to each have a turn at the tables.

Ms. Ritchie, wearing a mustard halter gown that a friend had designed especially for her, kept turning around to flash the angel wings tattooed on her back. She said AmEx was her first and only credit card. "I’m a goooood customer of theirs," she said. "Once I was using my mom’s credit card and, like, went crazy with it, so she, like, made me pay for it!" she laughed. "I don’t really hesitate when I buy something—I’m like, ‘O.K., I need it!’ and I always buy it."

—Noelle Hancock

The Transom Also Hears That …

Don’t get too hooked on "Desperate Housewives." In the entertainment world, it’s that time again—when Hollywood screenwriters wrangle over a new contract with the studio bosses, and there’s a slim chance that the scribes could go on strike as they did back in 1988. After turning down a $32 million three-year offer in June, the Writers Guild of America (W.G.A.) is back and ready to negotiate with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, aiming for a wage increase and health-care deal similar to that recently achieved by the Directors Guild of America.

Most of the studios are ready to cut a deal—except for Disney’s Bob Iger, who runs ABC, say several sources. "Iger’s the only holdout," says one union member. "Disney often takes a hard line on unions. And [chairman Michael] Eisner is pressuring Iger to stand firm. If Disney refuses to go along, they’ll strike ABC."

The ensuing fireworks could pose problems for Mr. Iger, one of the favorites to take over from the embattled Mr. Eisner, who has promised to step down by 2006. And it’s a nightmare scenario for the network, which with Desperate Housewives and Lost, is experiencing its best season in years. "Iger is trapped—he’s Eisner’s boy, but if he listens to the big guy, he’ll become an industry pariah, the network would lose their new season, the best one they’ve had in a long time, and he’d ruin any chances of ever being C.E.O.," says an industry insider.

A spokesman for Disney did not return calls for comment. A press officer of the W.G.A. declined to comment.

—Marcus Baram

Meanwhile, with typical taste and restraint, the Bush-Cheney campaign has erected a "living memorial" to Ronald Reagan on its Web site. Such strained attempts to associate their candidate with his professed role model may prove less profitable than they expect. Placing him alongside Reagan isn't necessarily flattering to the incumbent, in terms of substance or style.

Both Presidents passed ill-advised and unfair tax cuts, but Reagan then raised taxes and closed corporate loopholes, which would be unimaginable for Mr. Bush. Both claimed to be opponents of bigger government, but Mr. Bush expanded federal entitlements and corporate welfare with his prescription drug bill. While both wielded American military power, Reagan did so without rupturing our traditional alliances, as Mr. Bush has so stupidly done. Indeed, this reckless, regressive Presidency has somehow made that one look cautious and prudent.

And although Mr. Bush resembles Reagan in his detachment from policy detail, the old actor's public performance and rhetorical skills far surpassed those of his aspiring heir. For conservatives, this contrast must be painful to contemplate.

Invidious comparisons aside, the Bush team may confront yet another problem if they are tempted to exploit Reagan's legacy. Her name is Nancy Reagan.

Officials who underestimated or ignored the former First Lady often learned they had made a bad mistake as their heads bounced down the White House driveway. They complained about her astrologer, her designer frocks, her epicene Manhattan friends and her expensive new porcelain. But she maintained an influence over her husband enjoyed by no other adviser.

The persona she projected in those days may not always have seemed attractive, but she usually exercised her extraordinary power in ways beneficial to her husband and, more importantly, to her country. Bright and tough, she showed little patience for the useless time-servers and right-wing extremists who had survived the transition from California. Despite her upbringing in a very conservative family, she was a political moderate in the Reagan milieu. Last year, she sensibly quashed the right-wing enthusiasm for replacing F.D.R.'s profile on the dime with her that of husband.

Now she's the object of tremendous national sympathy and admiration-and the spokeswoman for a cause that cuts directly against the President's "faith-based" aversion to scientific progress. She believes that embryonic stem-cell research may someday relieve the Alzheimer's disease that destroyed Reagan's mind, and in that conviction she possesses the kind of credibility that suffering can confer. (She wouldn't be the first conservative to learn deeper compassion from a terrible personal ordeal.)

Her friends predict that in the days to come, she will speak out with increasing frequency and determination on behalf of stem-cell research, which the President has hindered with federal restrictions and constraints on spending. Surely she remembers how he spurned her private pleas three years ago, when he was pondering that decision. She must know that the Bush administration's hostility to science goes well beyond the stem-cell issue, with its big, destructive cutbacks in funding for disease research.

According to press reports, Mrs. Reagan isn't expected to appear at the Republican convention next September (though it isn't clear whether she wasn't invited or declined to participate). No doubt she remains a Republican, at least nominally, and she may eventually deliver a pro forma endorsement of the President, despite her well-known coolness toward the Bush family. Yet she hardly shares the religious-right ideology that motivates this generation of Bush politicians.

And lately, in pursuit of her passion for medical research, she has displayed no reluctance to consort with Democrats. Among her closest friends is Casey Ribicoff, widow of Abraham Ribicoff, the late liberal Democratic Senator from Connecticut, who told The New York Times that Mrs. Reagan was infuriated by the President's stem-cell decision.

Last month she spoke publicly at a Beverly Hills benefit for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, where she received an award from the actor Michael J. Fox and a kiss on the cheek from singer James Taylor. Both entertainers happen to be staunch Democrats and supporters of John Kerry, an outspoken supporter of stem-cell technology.

"Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him," she said on that occasion. "Because of this, I'm determined to do whatever I can to save other families from this pain. I just don't see how we can turn our backs on this."

Let's hope that her husband's death brings some final relief to the grieving Nancy Reagan-and that she is as serious as she says about fighting for medical progress.

Guess who he was talking about. "We'd ask a question, and he might give a serious answer, but if he wanted to dodge it, he'd do a quip. We understood he sometimes used us as foils, but that's fair."

In the end, Mr. Donaldson said Ronald Reagan was great with TV cameras, but it was because he actually believed much of what he said. If the TV camera was a lie-detector test, well, the President had passed. But it didn't mean he was right.

"He believed that communism belonged in the ash heap of history, all right? He was right," said Mr. Donaldson. "And he also believed that people slept on the sidewalk, on grates in the dead of winter in Washington, because they wanted to-he believed that! Well, I don't think many other people believe that. But since he believed it, if you had given him a lie-detector test-'Do people sleep on grates in Washington in the dead of winter because they want to?'-he'd say, 'Yeeess.' And the needles would reflect that he was telling the truth. He saw the world through rose-colored glasses."

More than any other politician in the 20th century, Ronald Reagan knew what he was doing with the media. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was magnificent with a microphone, and John F. Kennedy looked as good as any President could ever hope to. But nobody had ever had the confidence of a pro before; Ronald Reagan had been paid to work on movie sets. He had watched directors. He had campaigned and spoken week after week in plant after plant for General Electric, put his family around a dinner table to sell the product, and he knew that exposing his soul wasn't necessarily selling it.

"For General Electric, here is Ronald Reagan!" began a 1956 episode of CBS's General Electric Theater .

In a tweed coat, skinny black tie and the Brylcreemed haircut he wore until he died on Saturday, June 5, at 93, the host leaned casually on a stage light, a man clearly in charge on a TV set. He was introducing a half-hour drama called "I'm a Fool," starring James Dean, the martyred teen icon. "Those of us who worked with Jimmy Dean carry an image of intense struggle for a goal beyond himself," he intoned. "And curiously enough, that's the story of the boy he portrays tonight."

Ronald Reagan's own portrayal at that moment-a man who applied G.E.'s slogan, "Progress is our most important product," to himself and his nation-was indistinguishable from the role he would play the rest of his life: the affable on-air personality, the same soothing visage who generally saved his tough talk for the Communists.

"He was a finished product in '62," said Chris Matthews, the former aide to House Speaker Tip O'Neill, whose prickly feelings about Mr. Reagan were well-known. Mr. Matthews is a host himself, of MSNBC's Hardball , to which he brings a less soothing tone than Mr. Reagan brought to G.E. Theater . "He was your host, Ronald Reagan. He played himself for eight years. He was No. 1 in the slot-until Bonanza came along."

Mr. Reagan hosted G.E. Theater from 1954 to 1962, and campaigned for the company from G.E. plant to G.E. plant, making the speeches that would give him the incomparable facility that launched him to the Presidency. By the time he made his huge leap and campaigned for Barry Goldwater with his breakthrough speech in 1964, his potential had finally become clear: Reagan was ready to turn his sunny TV essence-a bulkier version of Robert Young in Father Knows Best -into a political tool of the Republican Party.

"We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars," he said in "A Time for Choosing," the stump speech that transformed him from washed-up Warner Bros. exile to Barry Goldwater's successor in the conservative Republican movement. "Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation. They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right."

Ronald Reagan understood the media better than any politician of his age. He knew, and often said, that if a politician knew how to convey his sincerity, the camera was his friend. His ability to convey a belief in himself transmuted into the most powerful enveloping presence in television: the smile, the squint, the cocked head, each precise and beautiful in its way, charted precisely the man he wanted Americans to see.

For Ronald Reagan, knowing the camera was knowing himself.

"He knew the camera never lied," said Phil Dusenberry, the former chairman of ad agency BBD&O, who produced the "Morning in America" campaign ads in 1984 and also the 30-minute film in which Reagan gave his legendary "Boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech at Normandy. "He knew exactly [that] the camera would catch any false note, any false expression or whatever. And he knew this better than anyone, and he always came across as himself."

His professionalism was infinite, and he knew how to take direction. As Nancy Reagan wrote in Time this week, he had no ego. He would hit his points. His cowboy image-the one on the cover of both Time and Newsweek this week-was a beautiful thing. In 1966, a local reporter from KTIX in San Francisco wanted to do a segment on horseback with the candidate for governor of California. Lyn Nofziger, Mr. Reagan's press secretary, accompanied the reporter and was shocked to see his candidate in jaspers and English riding boots.

"When he changed into his riding clothes, he came out. And I looked at him-and he was not yet the governor-and I said, 'You can't do that,'" Mr. Nofziger recalled. "He said, 'This is the way I always ride.' I said, 'This is not the purpose of that. It's to get votes. They're going to think you look like a sissy!' He's a great cowboy, looking at him. He played a cowboy in movies.

"He believed if you were a slimeball, the camera would show it," Mr. Nofziger continued. "He had some specific rules. When you're being interviewed on a camera or making a speech, you look directly into the camera-you're not really looking at the camera, you're looking at some guy in his living room, at an individual. That's what made him so effective. He was tremendous at reading teleprompters. I have come out of speeches where he was reading teleprompters and people said, 'My goodness, how did he do that? He memorized that speech perfectly.' The camera was really one of his strong points."

"He was utterly comfortable," said Mike Wallace, the 60 Minutes correspondent and a longtime friend of Nancy Reagan. "But it had nothing to do with the camera. He was a guileless man. And that came across, which made the audience comfortable with him. But I don't think it was contrived. I never thought it was contrived in any way. He was comfortable."

If President Reagan had flummoxed the brilliant Edmund Morris, who, in his 1999 authorized biography Dutch , couldn't seem to find Ronald Reagan behind the TV hologram-and who'd felt forced to insert himself in fictional form into the pivotal moments of Reagan's life to find what he assumed must be there: the real, actual man leaning on the stage light after the show-maybe it was because he didn't have a camera rolling while he interviewed him. It was Ronald Reagan's considered awareness of the TV set-the teleprompter, the stage directions, the red recording light above the lens-that made him appear natural on the screen, said Mr. Dusenberry. He recalled setting Reagan up for TV ads in 1984 and offering him a few takes to get warmed up.

"I had written a commercial for him the night before and I knew he hadn't seen it, so I said to him, 'Mr. President, let me run this through the teleprompter for you, just so you can get familiar with the dialogue here,'" Mr. Dusenberry recalled. "And he said, 'Oh, let's live dangerously, let's just shoot it.' And we shot it, and he brought it in just half a second under the allotted time. It was a 60-second spot-not a flub, not a false inflection. It was just perfect. So he was the master of the technical aspects of this craft.

"And the rest of it, he just allowed himself to be himself, because he knew exactly what he was doing at all times, and what the camera was doing and whether we were making a move with the camera or what-he was just so aware of everything that was happening technically around him."

The result was a President so nimble in front of a camera that he could connect directly to America's sentimentality and gruff generosity, the emotions from which Jack Warner and Hal Wallis and Lew Wasserman had made an industry. "He could talk to America," said Mr. Matthews. "He knew that guy. He knew him, he talked to him. He had the ability to look at Americans-almost like a Santa Claus mask, someone was looking at you. He was able to relate, to connect to people individually on television. Which is a talent. I don't know if I have it or anybody else has it."

In 1984, Mr. Dusenberry produced "A New Beginning," a television ad that featured the footage of Reagan's speech at Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Mr. Dusenberry said that Heywood Gould, the screenwriter who wrote the 1978 film The Boys from Brazil , had been hired to write a treatment for the commercial, which was to be shown at the Republican National Convention. "It was Charlton Heston taking you on a tour of the White House," he recalled. "It was just awful. It had no emotion in it. I said, 'You've got to play to the emotions. That's the best part of this President, this emotional component, and his ability to make you feel something.'"

Not only that, they didn't need another actor to get that message across-even if it was the Republicans' second-favorite box-office idol. To tap into President Reagan's natural ability to tap into his own sentiments, they simply showed him pictures from his first term in office-with the cameras rolling.

"We sat him down in the Roosevelt Room in the White House, and we had the camera shooting over Mike Deaver's shoulder," Mr. Dusenberry recalled of Mr. Reagan's legendary image-maker, "passing him photographs of his first four years in office, of key moments in his Presidency, and asking him to just comment on what was going on in that particular event. We got so much fabulous stuff as a result. Mike would hand him a photograph of his meeting with Gorbachev, and he would then go on for 10 minutes about it, and we'd get such great stuff."

Reagan could improvise, too, which was the politico-thespian version of his forward pass à la Knute Rockne All American . He could turn any attack into a sitcom laugh. In 1983, Mr. Matthews recalled, the Democrats had acquired an advanced script of one of Reagan's speeches and planned to applaud the line, "We in the government should be the first to put people back to work." They arrived with scripts in their hands.

"When the Democrats applauded," said Mr. Matthews, "he just looked up, did a Jack Benny and said, 'There, all along I thought you were just reading the papers.' They were all just holding the scripts. But he made them look like a bunch of Claghorns just reading the newspapers. And they all laughed, and the public saw them all laugh and figured, 'These guys are just a bunch of Senator Snorts,' and they think it's funny.' 'There, all along I thought you were just reading the papers.' The papers! What is that uncanny ability to see the camera and talk to it and use everybody else as a prop? Amazing."

A bunch of old Reagan hands got together this spring, a couple of months into the new administration, and reminisced about their old boss, now 90 and lost to Alzheimer's. They also took some shots at the new President. They were, Peggy Noonan reports, "in private merrily irreverent."

They told jokes. What was President George W. Bush's answer to a question about Roe v. Wade ? "Ah think it was the most important decision George Washington made when he crossed the Delaware." They repeated the judgment offered by Ronald Reagan's son-that Mr. Bush's only accomplishment in life had been to stop being a drunk. When Mr. Bush failed to praise Mr. Reagan sufficiently at a ceremony for a new aircraft carrier, Ms. Noonan had this thought: "I bet he wonders if his listeners aren't thinking, Yes, Reagan was the man your old man wasn't. "

The theme of Ms. Noonan's new Reagan scrapbook, captured in its title, is that Mr. Reagan's sterling character was the key to the greatness of his Presidency. The book's unspoken but nevertheless plain subtext is the inadequacy of Bill Clinton's character. Her last book, The Case Against Hillary Clinton , gave a withering polemical assessment of both Clintons: "Together they stand for one thing: maximum and uninterrupted power for the Clintons," she wrote. "What they want is self-advancement, and what fuels them is a sense of self-importance."

But, just as the old Reaganites' harmless if unfunny merriment now has about it a faint odor of treason, the gravitational pull of history has redirected Ms. Noonan's argument from the past toward the future. The question you think about while reading Ms. Noonan's book has nothing to do with Mr. Clinton. It is whether Mr. Bush-a man Ms. Noonan once considered, with fine understatement, as not "especially gifted or full of promise"-has it in him to lead us now.

In "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin separated writers and thinkers into two camps-those who know one big thing (the hedgehogs) and those who know many things (the foxes). Dostoyevsky was a hedgehog; James Joyce was a fox. In this calculus, Mr. Reagan was a hedgehog, which in political terms means he was an ideologue. Mr. Clinton is a fox. Mr. Bush, one fears, belongs to neither category.

What was attractive about Mr. Reagan, aside from his avuncular affability, was his hedgehog's consistency of purpose. He favored smaller government and free markets, and he opposed communism. He said so, and he generally followed through. That sort of straightforwardness is rare in a politician, and Ms. Noonan is right to praise it.

Ms. Noonan, a former speechwriter for Mr. Reagan, is one of the great popular political writers of her generation. She sometimes displays astonishing rhetorical skill. Her writing is fluid, lively and varied, and rooted in an American idiom that runs back to at least Emerson. Occasionally you read a Noonan sentence twice, to appreciate how she sculpted it. Though some of her recent newspaper work has tended toward the sycophantic, the sentimental and the loopy, I expected a lot from this book.

It turns out to be little more than a mash note, something for the souvenir shop at the Reagan library. She has a crush on the old man. He used to collect anecdotes to support views he already held, and she does the same. She has pulled together countless stories of Mr. Reagan's authenticity, toughness and humanity, and she recounts them with a sing-song quality suitable to a fable or to Sunday school. They strike me as rather less reliable than Edmund Morris' biography of Mr. Reagan, Dutch , and Mr. Morris was making things up. In a way, Ms. Noonan admits as much. "I am still searching for an anecdote about Reagan that truly reflects badly on him," she writes. The problem is partly one of definition. People will, Ms. Noonan concedes, "tell you Reagan was lazy, or naive or a bore. But they never say he was low or unkind or dishonest or untrustworthy." Ms. Noonan, of course, would not be the one to suggest that the former category of character flaw helped protect Mr. Reagan from the latter, admittedly more serious kind.

When Character Was King is a pastiche: some straight, familiar biography, some firsthand reporting, quite a few fairly raw, uninteresting interviews and some long speeches, including one that drags on for eight pages. An entire chapter is devoted to the jokes Mr. Reagan used to tell. Ms. Noonan explains away their uniform lameness: "Wit penetrates, and humor envelops." Her old boss, she concedes, did not penetrate. The point seems to be that humor need not be funny if its social function is to share with the listener an amiable informal experience, a simulacrum of ease and intimacy. Reminds me of those Reader's Digest "Life in These United States" columns.

Ms. Noonan is desperate to show that Mr. Reagan was a thinker, an intellectual. She builds her case from the fundamentals, demonstrating first that he could read and write. She quotes some dreadful high-school juvenilia, and she tells us that his later work-radio talks, speeches-had "the smoothness of a simple stream." The evidence presented here makes the case for "simple." Aiming higher, she boasts about the books she saw on a visit to the now-vacant Reagan ranch-Allen Drury, Winston Churchill, Whittaker Chambers, Horatio Alger-and asserts that Mr. Reagan "read up here. He'd be out all day and come in at five, before dinner, and sit in his favorite chair in the porch room."

She blames Nancy Reagan for some of her husband's intellectual limitations. Mrs. Reagan "was not deep and did not pretend to be." She "was more like a Republican than a conservative." (Here is the difference, according to an unnamed friend of Ms. Noonan's: "Democrats respect books because they respect ideas. Conservatives respect books because they respect ideas. Republicans respect money.") There's something disquieting about the nastiness Ms. Noonan once directed at Hillary Clinton and now, in this new book, directs at Mrs. Reagan-something misogynistic and perhaps even self-loathing. She tells us that Mrs. Reagan was tense and "looked like an aging movie star. So you add tense to movie star and you get Evita." She tells us how much she admired an acid 1968 Joan Didion profile of Mrs. Reagan in the Saturday Evening Post ; it was "a startling piece, beautifully observed and quite deadly." Ms. Noonan had lunch with Mrs. Reagan last year, and she thought to raise the subject of the 30-year-old magazine article. "Things like the Joan Didion piece years ago really hurt you, didn't they?" she asked. To this faux sympathy, Mrs. Reagan replied, "Oh, she was mean." Then she added, "That was mean." Perhaps she was still thinking about Ms. Didion; perhaps not.

George W. Bush gave Ms. Noonan an interview for her book in June. She tried to draw him out about Ronald Reagan; she does the President no favors by reproducing, over several pages, his tentative, disconnected riffs. But Mr. Bush also talked about his famous meeting with Vladimir Putin and the criticism of the President's over-the-top enthusiasm for his new soulmate, the K.G.B. thug. Mr. Bush defended himself: "I have pretty good instincts," he told Ms. Noonan, "and I found a man who realizes his future lies with the West, not the East, that we share common security concerns, primarily Islamic fundamentalism."

That was, as I said, back in June, not long after Ms. Noonan's pals were having some fun at the President's expense.

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.

A bunch of old Reagan hands got together this spring, a couple of months into the new administration,and reminisced about their old boss, now 90 and lost to Alzheimer's. They also took some shots at the new President. They were, Peggy Noonan reports, "in private merrily irreverent."

They told jokes. What was President George W. Bush's answer to a question about Roe v. Wade ? "Ah think it was the most important decision George Washington made when he crossed the Delaware." They repeated the judgment offered by Ronald Reagan's son-that Mr. Bush's only accomplishment in life had been to stop being a drunk. When Mr. Bush failed to praise Mr. Reagan sufficiently at a ceremony for a new aircraft carrier, Ms. Noonan had this thought: "I bet he wonders if his listeners aren't thinking, Yes, Reagan was the man your old man wasn't. "

The theme of Ms. Noonan's new Reagan scrapbook, captured in its title, is that Mr. Reagan's sterling character was the key to the greatness of his Presidency. The book's unspoken but nevertheless plain subtext is the inadequacy of Bill Clinton's character. Her last book, The Case Against Hillary Clinton , gave a withering polemical assessment of both Clintons: "Together they stand for one thing: maximum and uninterrupted power for the Clintons," she wrote. "What they want is self-advancement, and what fuels them is a sense of self-importance."

But, just as the old Reaganites' harmless if unfunny merriment now has about it a faint odor of treason, the gravitational pull of history has redirected Ms. Noonan's argument from the past toward the future. The question you think about while reading Ms. Noonan's book has nothing to do with Mr. Clinton. It is whether Mr. Bush-a man Ms. Noonan once considered, with fine understatement, as not "especially gifted or full of promise"-has it in him to lead us now.

In "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin separated writers and thinkers into two camps-those who know one big thing (the hedgehogs) and those who know many things (the foxes). Dostoyevsky was a hedgehog; James Joyce was a fox. In this calculus, Mr. Reagan was a hedgehog, which in political terms means he was an ideologue. Mr. Clinton is a fox. Mr. Bush, one fears, belongs to neither category.

What was attractive about Mr. Reagan, aside from his avuncular affability, was his hedgehog's consistency of purpose. He favored smaller government and free markets, and he opposed communism. He said so, and he generally followed through. That sort of straightforwardness is rare in a politician, and Ms. Noonan is right to praise it.

Ms.Noonan,a former speechwriter for Mr. Reagan, is one of the great popular political writers of her generation. She sometimes displays astonishing rhetorical skill. Her writing is fluid, lively and varied, and rooted in an American idiom that runs back to at least Emerson. Occasionally you read a Noonan sentence twice, to appreciate how she sculpted it. Though some of her recent newspaper work has tended toward the sycophantic, the sentimental and the loopy, I expected a lot from this book.

It turns out to be little more than a mash note, something for the souvenir shop at the Reagan library. She has a crush on the old man. He used to collect anecdotes to support views he already held, and she does the same. She has pulled together countless stories of Mr. Reagan's authenticity, toughness and humanity, and she recounts them with a sing-song quality suitable to a fable or to Sunday school. They strike me as rather less reliable than Edmund Morris' biography of Mr. Reagan, Dutch , and Mr. Morris was making things up. In a way, Ms. Noonan admits as much. "I am still searching for an anecdote about Reagan that truly reflects badly on him," she writes. The problem is partly one of definition. People will, Ms. Noonan concedes, "tell you Reagan was lazy, or naive or a bore. But they never say he was low or unkind or dishonest or untrustworthy." Ms. Noonan, of course, would not be the one to suggest that the former category of character flaw helped protect Mr. Reagan from the latter, admittedly more serious kind.

When Character Was King is a pastiche: some straight, familiar biography, some firsthand reporting, quite a few fairly raw, uninteresting interviews and some long speeches, including one that drags on for eight pages. An entire chapter is devoted to the jokes Mr. Reagan used to tell. Ms. Noonan explains away their uniform lameness: "Wit penetrates, and humor envelops." Her old boss, she concedes, did not penetrate. The point seems to be that humor need not be funny if its social function is to share with the listener an amiable informal experience, a simulacrum of ease and intimacy. Reminds me of those Reader's Digest "Life in These United States" columns.

Ms. Noonan is desperate to show that Mr. Reagan was a thinker, an intellectual. She builds her case from the fundamentals, demonstrating first that he could read and write. She quotes some dreadful high-school juvenilia, and she tells us that his later work-radio talks, speeches-had "the smoothness of a simple stream." The evidence presented here makes the case for "simple." Aiming higher, she boasts about the books she saw on a visit to the now-vacant Reagan ranch-Allen Drury, Winston Churchill, Whittaker Chambers, Horatio Alger-and asserts that Mr. Reagan "read up here. He'd be out all day and come in at five, before dinner, and sit in his favorite chair in the porch room."

She blames Nancy Reagan for some of her husband's intellectual limitations. Mrs. Reagan "was not deep and did not pretend to be." She "was more like a Republican than a conservative." (Here is the difference, according to an unnamed friend of Ms. Noonan's: "Democrats respect books because they respect ideas. Conservatives respect books because they respect ideas. Republicans respect money.") There's something disquieting about the nastiness Ms. Noonan once directed at Hillary Clinton and now, in this new book, directs at Mrs. Reagan-something misogynistic and perhaps even self-loathing. She tells us that Mrs. Reagan was tense and "looked like an aging movie star. So you add tense to movie star and you get Evita." She tells us how much she admired an acid 1968 Joan Didion profile of Mrs. Reagan in the Saturday Evening Post ; it was "a startling piece, beautifully observed and quite deadly." Ms. Noonan had lunch with Mrs. Reagan last year, and she thought to raise the subject of the 30-year-old magazine article. "Things like the Joan Didion piece years ago really hurt you, didn't they?" she asked. To this faux sympathy, Mrs. Reagan replied, "Oh, she was mean." Then she added, "That was mean." Perhaps she was still thinking about Ms. Didion; perhaps not.

George W. Bush gave Ms. Noonan an interview for her book in June. She tried to draw him out about Ronald Reagan; she does the President no favors by reproducing, over several pages, his tentative, disconnected riffs. But Mr. Bush also talked about his famous meeting with Vladimir Putin and the criticism of the President's over-the-top enthusiasm for his new soulmate, the K.G.B. thug. Mr. Bush defended himself: "I have pretty good instincts," he told Ms. Noonan, "and I found a man who realizes his future lies with the West, not the East, that we share common security concerns, primarily Islamic fundamentalism."

That was, as I said, back in June, not long after Ms. Noonan's pals were having some fun at the President's expense.

Adam Liptak is a lawyer at The New York Times.