A tear is crawling down President Reagan’s cheek in the cover illustration in the forthcoming issue of Time magazine. The story, written by Karen Tumulty and run out under the headline “How the Right Went Wrong,” seems to be that the tide that Reagan declared, in 1985, was moving irresistibly in the direction of the conservatives is no longer moving in their direction at all. We must say, we share a number of complaints about the Republican Congress — it spent too much, failed to reform Social Security, and the like. But we’re far from the opinion that the “Right Went Wrong,” and if one cites Time’s dispatch as evidence, the basis on which the conservative movement is being declared at an end will strike many as bizarre.

Time sketches Senator McCain’s first try for the presidency, for example, as a relative liberal demarche. “On his second try,” Time reports, “McCain seems to have become much of what he used to fight against. The deficit hawk who had opposed Bush’s tax cuts voted to extend them. The apostate who counted the Rev. Jerry Falwell among the ‘agents of intolerance’ seven years ago delivered the commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty University last May.” How this is evidence that we are abandoning Reagan is beyond us. Part of Reagan’s achievement was teaching precisely that the goal of balancing the budget was not fiscal reform but changing tax and monetary policy to increase supply-side incentives was the Reagan breakthrough.

By that measure, the Republicans are in good hands, none more so than those of the president we’ve got. Time would have us believe that Mayor Giuliani’s concession that he differs with the right on some social issues — and not, incidentally, by all that much — puts him in a different camp from that of Reagan. Mr. Giuliani, however, has been running on a body of ideas encapsulated in his declaration that the GOP is the “Party of Freedom.” Tax cuts, vouchers, strong foreign policy. How much more Reaganesque can one get? Governor Romney, too. Compare all this to the Democrats, the party of high taxes, retreat in the Middle East, and social engineering. And it’s hard for anyone who knows who cheered for Reagan in the 1980s not to comprehend where Reagan would be today. And it’s impossible to imagine him weeping.