Judging by the nonstop lovefest put on by the mainstream electronic and print media during the week after Reagan's death, it's also hard not to conclude that journalists are another largely liberal cohort that has been won over to the positive assessment. To be sure, there have been the almost obligatory mentions of failings, misdeeds, and controversies--above all, the Iran-contra scandal and Reagan's initial denial of wrongdoing. There have also been reminders of the inattention to the spreading AIDS epidemic, the widening economic inequalities that accompanied the go-go boom of the 1980s, and, of course, the soaring budget deficit and a near tripling of the national debt. The contradictions have been noted as well, including a federal government that expanded despite Reagan's promise to make it shrink.

But the failings and shortcomings come across, by and large, as blemishes only slightly diminishing the large triumphs--restored national confidence, a nascent industrial and economic boom, and the winning of the Cold War. The voices of the commentariat, liberal as well as conservative, largely opt for a longer and more adulatory view. "Time sifts the petty from the grand," writes liberal commentator Richard Cohen, effectively comparing Reagan's grand accomplishment to Abraham Lincoln's preservation of the Union. And even the blemishes often receive sympathetic revisionist readings. Andrew Sullivan, the gay conservative pundit, notes on his weblog that, after all, "the Reagan presidency spent some $5.7 billion on HIV in its two terms." Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., opining in Time magazine, speculates that Reaganism may be a "transient episode in the stream of American history." But an equally liberal stalwart, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, sees something more consequential in Reagan's ability "to steal the optimism associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt from the Democratic Party."

Yet perhaps more surprising than the expanding positive consensus is the way longtime Reagan partisans and admirers have come to more fully appreciate the complexity--and even, in some ways, the pragmatic foxiness--of their beloved hedgehog. After all, many conservatives, particularly of the brainy variety, once privately shared the perplexity and wonder of former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, who said confidentially of his boss, "He knows so little but accomplishes so much." It could be said that such admirers have tended to underestimate the hedgehog species in general, as Berlin himself did. Most intellectuals, policy wonks included, instinctively favor foxes: They value flexibility, adaptiveness, quickness, pragmatism, the "modern" intellectual virtues. But in truth, great hedgehogs may simply be wilier than most foxlike intellectuals give them credit for.

Scholarly reconsiderations of Reagan's career have begun to reveal how wily and original a thinker he was, particularly when it came to the Cold War struggle against communism. Peter Schweizer, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and author of the 2002 book Reagan's War, is one of many analysts who assail the notion that Reagan was a Hollywood-groomed mouthpiece for right-wing ideologues and string-pullers. Long before he reached the White House, Reagan began to map out a strategy that went beyond all previous thinking about containment of the Soviet Union. "Containment was strategically a defensive, or reactive, doctrine," says Schweizer. "What Reagan did was to take the offensive."

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