Bruce Bartlett, who was a policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and also worked for the first President Bush, explains why Barack Obama is actually a Conservative. I don't completely buy this argument but I sure agree that he's accomplished a lot of things that Republicans would have thought made him The Greatest President Ever — greater than Reagan even — had they been done by a Republican. (To get some to that view, he'd also have had to have been a white Republican.)
If all a Republican president had accomplished was the deficit reduction charted in Bartlett's piece, the G.O.P. would have started clearing brush on Mount Rushmore to add another face. If that president had also presided over the killing of Osama bin Laden, they would have dynamited the four likenesses already there so they could make the new one bigger.