The Great Communicator is needed now more than ever
By Christopher Holton
Special to World Tribune.comMonday, June 7, 2004
President Reagan, oh but we need you now
I knew this day was coming. I thought that because my hero. President Ronald Reagan, had been out of the public eye for years due to that terrible disease known as Alzheimer's his passing would somehow be easier.
I was wrong.
I was sitting at a baseball game when I got an email bulletin from Fox News announcing President Reagan's death. It took my breath away. My eyes misted up. I informed my 16 year old son and several people around us overheard.
One, my cousin, who I have rarely heard talk of politics, said something that hit me like a 90mph fastball: “We'd have been better off if they just had made him king and kept him after his term was up.”
Reagan was my idol. I was fortunate enough to have been in the military during his administration. We used to call him Uncle Ron. We loved that man. We knew even then that he was something truly special, not just another president. We'd have marched through hell for Reagan.
When my second daughter was born the middle name we selected for her was Reagan.
Reagan was both ahead of his time and the right man at the right time in the right place. No one will ever be able to convince me he did not bring down the Iron Curtain.
But boy could we use him now. Right now America faces a foe every bit as formidable and perhaps even more evil than communism: Jihadism. This was a foe that Reagan only knew superficially through the prizm of the Cold War. He was certainly not perfect. Reagan let Iranian backed Jihadists kill and kidnap Americans all too often in the 1980s, without appropriate retaliation and that certainly contributed to the emboldened foes we face today. But the larger foe of the era was defeated because Reagan pursued communism with a persistance and clarity we have not seen since.
I feel certain that Reagan would deal similarly with the Jihadists today. While much of the nation today is bewildered largely by the current administration's inability to communicate a consistent vision on this war, my guess is Reagan would never have sanctioned the PC title of “war on terrorism.”
No, Reagan would point us to an enemy we could shoot at--and then he would give us the tools and personnel needed to defeat the foe.
All the while he would constantly remind us of why we were fighting with a moral clarity and sense of conviction that is sadly missing today.
Rest in peace President Reagan, but I sure wish you were here to lead us now
Reagans Silver Glow (Things started to change on November 4, 1980. ) 11/4/2005 | Paul Beston
Posted on 11/03/2005 9:10:15 PM PST by nickcarraway
Even back in November 1980, a time that seems so far removed from our technological age, political campaigns knew things long before the voters did. Both Ronald Reagan's and Jimmy Carter's insiders understood a day or so before the election that the President was done for. Weekend polling told Patrick Caddell what he needed to know, and he passed the word along to Carter. Reagan was going to become the next president.
For all the American people knew, the race was still essentially a toss-up, though it had seemed to be moving slightly in Reagan's direction. The week before, the two candidates faced off in their only debate. History remembers that night for two Reagan lines that have become part of our political vocabulary, for good or ill: "There you go again," which must be the most overhyped political one-liner of all time; and "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" which largely deserves the stature it attained, as one of the great framing devices any politician has used.
But Reagan was much more than one-liners. The reason those sound bites resonated so much in the 1980 debate was that they came in the context of his all-around strong performance, outclassing Carter not just in quips but in content, command, and presence. The lines were just ribbons on a box.
For voters, the debate performance seemed to put to rest the fear the media and the opposition had been drumming up about Reagan as a reckless cowboy who would "push the button." That was always founded in politics, not reality. Even as a mere 14-year-old at the time, I'd sensed immediately that Reagan was not dangerous, but that he was tough.
I'd first heard him speak in July, 1980, when I sat on the floor of my family's living room in Illinois, watching him accept the Republican presidential nomination in Detroit. My father sat behind me in his reading chair, holding the newspaper up as he was wont to do, but mostly peering over it at the TV, the way he did on those rare occasions when what was being broadcast was better than what he was reading.
The man on the screen was sublime. I'd never heard anyone talk that way before, not at my youthful age, in the waning months of the worst presidency of the American century. It didn't seem, in Jimmy Carter's America, that politicians could say things like:
The major issue of this campaign is the direct political, personal and moral responsibility of Democratic Party leadership....They say that the United States has had its day in the sun; that our nation has passed its zenith. They expect you to tell your children that the American people no longer have the will to cope with their problems; that the future will be one of sacrifice and few opportunities.
My fellow citizens, I utterly reject that view. The American people, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standard of living, are not going to accept the notion that we can only make a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves. Those who believe we can have no business leading the nation.
I will not stand by and watch this great country destroy itself under mediocre leadership that drifts from one crisis to the next, eroding our national will and purpose...
Reagan was inspiring that night, but he was also, at points, just short of angry and irritable. That phrase -- "I utterly reject that view!" -- was delivered with a pursed lip expression he rarely wore in public. He must have been some kind of magician, though, because he seemed to be talking directly to both me and Jimmy Carter. He didn't sound like a madman. If anything, he sounded like my father, the most sensible man I knew.
On election night, the newscasts had barely gotten started when they were announcing that Carter was going to concede, a gesture grounded in empirical logic -- the election was lost -- but also in Carter's customarily disastrous political judgment. Getting on television and conceding the election before the polls had closed on the West Coast was a perfect expression of the wreckage that he had brought to his country and his party. Even today, Democrats fume about it, and with good reason. For myself, I was grateful to President Peanut for conceding before my bedtime. I could never watch the second half of Monday Night Football, but at least I knew who our next president was.
I remember Carter coming into the hall of his election headquarters to make his concession speech, wearing that hapless, hangdog look on his face, an expression that is etched into my memories of growing up. I did pity him. The poor man, I thought, he tried his best. And I thought then that he was a good man, though 25 years later I'm not so sure.
So Carter would go. And with him would go the "crisis of confidence," which he had both inflicted and reflected; the willful refusal to distinguish friends from enemies; the "shock" at the presence of evil in the world; the hectoring self-righteousness and spiritual emptiness; the paralysis in taking action, like a father unwilling to defend his sons in a fight. God help this country if another man like him comes along anytime soon. A great country's Carters should be spaced out by at least a century.
I remember less about Reagan's victory speech. Having won, he had less need of oration beyond expressing his thanks and his confidence in the future, a note he would never stop sounding. The important thing was that we would be seeing much more of Reagan and much less of Carter. Eventually, Carter would develop a shadow ex-presidency every bit as sanctimonious and wrong-headed as his real one, but that is another story. Reagan would serve two terms, change history, and leave Washington with the gratitude of his countrymen ringing in his ears. He had no need for shadows, and the monuments are going up. "Thank God," my father said to someone on the telephone that night. Our phone kept ringing.
"And so," one of the newscasters intoned as Reagan departed the victory stage, "it is over." It was. And then something else began.