ON MONDAY AFTERNOON the 70-year-old leader of the free world made some brave, relaxed jokes while a bullet lay a few inches from his heart. The practical effect may be a proud surge of support and sympathy that could in the next few months enable President Reagan to push through the congress and the special-interest groups almost any policies he wants.

This is the one good outcome of the horrid affair. Most Americans this week can enjoy the exhilaration of treating a president with simple and unifying affection after 15 years of too often treating three of his four predecessors with sophisticated and divisive contempt. Ever since the botches in Vietnam and Watergate inclined America to retreat from an over-imperial presidency, it has sat snared under an overmocked and ineffective one. Those who have longed to see coherent policy-making in America start moving again can now set off marching behind a genial, ambling, conservative folk-hero on a white horse. Let liberals join the rally. It will on balance be better if most of President Reagan’s present policies can be confidently strengthened rather than cautiously trimmed. And it will be better if Mr Reagan’s team, too, starts cohering a little more firmly round what it wants.

In domestic affairs it seemed likely even before Monday’s pistol shot that congress would allow Mr Reagan most of the expenditure cuts and freer-market reforms that he had dared to propose, so he should now quickly bung in also the more controversial but better ones (more deregulatory, more pro-nuclear-energy, more anti-grandpa) that he previously did not quite dare to. Abroad, ruder Reaganism has not (pace Mr Carter’s former speechmakers) mongered war, it did not provoke vengeful Iranian mistreatment of the hostages (when the president-elect made threats at Christmas, the Iranians hurried to free the hostages before his inauguration day), it did not bring harderliners on to Moscow’s politburo. It did not speed Russia’s invasion of Poland. It has so far helped to do the reverse.