Ronald Reagan

Making Sense: Welcome Back, Dad

kpaul.mallasch — Thu, 4 Sep 2008 20:10:18 -0700

By Michael Reagan

I’ve been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we’d never see his like again because he was one of a kind.

I was wrong!

Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.

And what a she!

In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dad’s indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media’s assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we haven’t heard since my Dad left the scene.

This was Ronald Reagan at his best -- the same Ronald Reagan who made the address known now solely as “The Speech,” which during the Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.

Last night was an extraordinary event. Widely seen beforehand as a make-or-break effort -- either an opportunity for Sarah Palin to show that she was the happy warrior that John McCain assured us she was, or a disaster that would dash McCain’s presidential hopes and send her back to Alaska, sadder but wiser.

Obviously un-intimidated by either the savage onslaught to which the left-leaning media had subjected her, or the incredible challenge she faced -- and oozing with confidence -- she strode defiantly to the podium and proved she was everything and even more than John McCain told us.

Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last night, however, was something much more than a just a woman accomplishing something no Republican woman has ever achieved. What we saw was a red-blooded American with that rare, God-given ability to rally her dispirited fellow Republicans and take up the daunting task of leading them -- and all her fellow Americans -- on a pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my father envisioned as our nation’s real destination.

In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her Democratic rivals and reveal them for what they are -- a pair of old-fashioned liberals making promises that cannot be kept without bankrupting the nation and reducing most Americans to the status of mendicants begging for their daily bread at the feet of an all-powerful government.

Most important, by comparing her own stunning record of achievement with his, she showed Barack Obama for the sham that he is, a man without any solid accomplishments beyond conspicuous self-aggrandizement.

Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of us live because that’s the way she lives. She shares our homespun values and our beliefs, and she glories in her status as a small-town woman who put her shoulder to the wheel and made life better for her neighbors.

Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest lifestyle reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic, ordinary American who made this country the greatest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth.

As hard as you might try, you won’t find that kind of plain-spoken, down-to-earth, self-reliant American in the upper ranks of the liberal-infested, elitist Democratic Party, or in the Obama campaign.

Sarah Palin didn’t go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban neighborhood leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within the ranks of one of the nation’s most corrupt political machines, never challenging it and going along to get along, like Barack Obama.

Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it, rising to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of government she served in on her way up the ladder.

Welcome back, Dad, even if you’re wearing a dress and bearing children this time around.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted” and other info at www.Reagan.com. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

©2008 Mike Reagan.

Making Sense: Ronald Reagan Would Back McCain

kpaul.mallasch — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 13:45:25 -0800

By Michael Reagan

In 1976 the Ford vs. Reagan campaign for the Republican presidential nomination got so heated it looked as if my father and Jerry Ford would never again talk to one another.

When it was over and Ford had won, what did Ronald Reagan do? He simply went all-out to help Ford win his re-election, as did I and as did my sister Maureen. My dad simply followed his rule of backing the Republican candidate no matter who he was.

Assuming that John McCain will be the Republican nominee, you can bet my father would be itching to get out on the campaign trail working to elect him even if he disagreed with him on a number of issues.

Unlike my father, a lot of conservatives stayed home in 1976, and we got four years of Jimmy Carter, whose main legacy was to drive the Shah of Iran from power and create the Islamic Republic of Iran with a bunch of wild-eyed mullahs running the show. He also gave us 20 percent inflation and long, long lines at the gas pumps. And don’t forget 440 days of Americans held hostage by the mullahs.

By staying home those conservatives made possible the future election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

We are still suffering from the legacy of James Earl Carter, thanks to the conservatives who refused to follow Ronald Reagan’s example and instead sulked at home while the nation was being handed over to the worst president in American history.

We were still in the middle of the Cold War in those days, and by staying home conservatives risked losing that war by allowing an incompetent leader to become commander in chief.

Four years later Ronald Reagan took over, the hostages were immediately released, and he went on to win the Cold War. Now we have another world-wide war going on with a hidden enemy sworn to kill us all, and the policy of the Democrats running for the presidency is to throw up their hands and withdraw from the battlefield, leaving it to the enemy -- and our fate in the hands of Osama bin Laden.

Is that what the let’s-stay-home-on-election-day conservatives want? Do they want the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama, as their president? Do they want the pseudo-Marist Barack Obama -- who reportedly has a photo of the murderous Castroite thug Che Guevara hanging in his Houston, Texas campaign headquarters -- hanging that photo in the Oval Office?

Do they want Hillary Clinton, the duplicitous former first lady, back in the White House enjoying all those furnishings she and her husband tried to swipe from the mansion?

Do they want a Democrat spending even more money that the government doesn’t have on scores of programs right out of Karl Marx’s playbook?

That’s exactly what they’ll get if they sit out the election and stay home on Election Day. That’s called biting off your nose to spite your face. Or even more to the point, political suicide.

Let me say this. There has been plenty of battling in the primaries, and I’ve been in the middle of the battle, but until now haven’t committed myself to any candidate, waiting until we had a nominee.

That’s over.

If John McCain is the nominee of the party, this Reagan will happily campaign with him. The alternative is unthinkable to anyone who loves this nation.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network, see www.Reagan.com for info. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted.” E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

Seeing the Reagan in Obama

kpaul.mallasch — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:16:01 -0800

By Bill Steigerwald

Martin Anderson has been watching a certain politician this primary season who reminds him a lot of his former boss.

"He's doing a brilliant job," says the Hoover Institution fellow who served as senior public policy adviser in Ronald Reagan's 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns.

"He is the only person out there that's talking like Reagan. In terms of his approach, and what he's doing, he's doing exactly what Reagan did and no one notices."

Anderson's not talking about John McCain or Mike Huckabee. He's talking about Barack Obama -- the only Democrat on Earth who can save America from four more torturous years of Clintonism.

Others have spotted resemblances between Sen. Obama's and President Reagan's superior oratorical and communication skills, though they are obviously opposite in style, delivery and message. But Anderson arguably knows the real Reagan better than anyone else alive.

Not only did he travel tens of thousands of miles with him on campaign trails, but since 2001 he's co-authored three books that used thousands of radio commentaries, letters and speeches Reagan wrote to prove that Reagan was never the empty suit he was said to be.

And as for those who still think Reagan was a passive player in the demise of the U.S.S.R., Anderson's current book project will soon show otherwise.

Anderson and his wife Annelise have been given access to classified minutes of more than 330 meetings of the high-powered National Security Council, which met in the 1980s to plot the defeat of the Soviets. Reagan was not only the chairman of those meetings, Anderson said on Super Tuesday, he "made all the decisions, ran the whole shop."

Getting back to Obama, Anderson said his campaign strategy also echoes what candidate Reagan did.

"Obama wants the Democrats but he also wants the people in the middle. He wants the Republicans. This is the reverse of Reagan. Reagan said, 'Look, I want the Republicans, but I'll take the ones in the middle and I want all the Democrats.'

"They're both saying, we are doing this not for the Republican Party or the Democrat Party but the whole country."

Meanwhile, as Obama has been trying to seduce independent and (very) liberal Republicans, the Reagan remnant has obviously failed to find a new hero to save the Republican Party.

The candidate who's said the nicest things about Reagan, Anderson said, is Obama. Obama caught hell from other Democrat candidates for saying Reagan had the vision-thing but even the hard left sees the Reagan in Obama.

Nation magazine writer Christopher Hayes, for example, believes Obama can do for left-liberalism what Reagan did for conservatism -- resurrect it and make it the country's political majority.

Of course, that dream will never happen, because if Obama bests Hillary -- which every American should pray happens -- he'll have to move from the left to the center.

It hardly matters who wins. Except for the war in Iraq, their politics are essentially the same big-government Democrat drivel. Neither President Obama nor President Clinton II could damage America any more than George W. Bush has.

But unlike Hillary -- who thinks she already knows everything and had her fling with Goldwater conservatism as a teen -- there's still hope for Obama to wise up.

After all, Reagan was once a Democrat.

Bill Steigerwald is a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. E-mail Bill at steigerwald@caglecartoons.com. ©Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, All Rights Reserved.

Republicans Reverence Reagan

kpaul.mallasch — Mon, 4 Feb 2008 02:40:49 -0800