Posted on 11/08/2006 6:41:22 AM PST by Hostage
Remarks of the Honorable Ronald Reagan At the 31st Republican National Convention August 19, 1976
This speech was delivered impromptu at the Republican National Convention at the urging of President Gerald Ford.
Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mrs. Ford, Mr. Vice President, Mr. Vice President to be--(Applause and laughter)--the distinguished guests here, and you ladies and gentlemen: I am going to say fellow Republicans here, but also those who are watching from a distance, all of those millions of Democrats and Independents who I know are looking for a cause around which to rally and which I believe we can give them. (Applause)
Mr. President, before you arrived tonight, these wonderful people here when we came in gave Nancy and myself a welcome. That, plus this, and plus your kindness and generosity in honoring us by bringing us down here will give us a memory that will live in our hearts forever. (Applause)
Watching on television these last few nights, and I have seen you also with the warmth that you greeted Nancy, and you also filled my heart with joy when you did that. (Applause)
May I just say some words. There are cynics who say that a party platform is something that no one bothers to read and it doesn't very often amount to much. Whether it is different this time than it has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors, with no pastel shades. (Applause)
We have just heard a call to arms based on that platform, and a call to us to really be successful in communicating and reveal to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party, which is nothing but a revamp and a reissue and a running of a late, late show of the thing that we have been hearing from them for the last 40 years. (Applause)
If I could just take a moment; I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial. It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and the issues today. I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.
Then as I tried to write--let your own minds turn to that task. You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don't know what kind of a world they will be living in.
And suddenly I thought to myself if I write of the problems, they will be the domestic problems the President spoke of here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule in this country, the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.
And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in.
And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here. Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction"?
And if we failed, they probably won't get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won't be allowed to talk of that or read of it.
This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.
We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President. (Applause)
If he embraces conservatism, which he can (look at his past record and not just our disagreements with him--which other cnadidate has such mainstream appeal while also supporting the WOT and Iraq?), he will deserve to win. Evidence shows he knows he has to try to win us over. Despite the rhetoric tossed at him here, he can do that, too.
He has a long way to go to convince me his words are real and not just rhetoric.
McCain is not the way to go unfortunately because of his daft positions and initiations of the past. He just doesn't cut the mustard.
Unless he can somehow show a complete catharsis that is beyond all doubt sincere, he will achieve nothing other that to bask in the glow of a media that would love to put him up against the Clintons in 2008.
He would have to apologize with the upmost candor about his political positions of the past. This he will never do. He's too proud.
Ronald Reagan could apologize when he knew he had been wrong such as with HIV and amnesty. One reason why we loved him so is that he was fallibly human and contrite like a member of our family.
What we have now in the GOP are a bunch of political hacks that go with the flow of big dollars because anything else is viewed as risky. Globalism won last night.
Sanctorum, Weldon, Hayward, Talent and so many others, all gone because there was no articulate party platform for them to stand on. GWB and Frist maintained a weak platform for conservatives to stand on, with positions that were not refreshing or connecting us to an invigorating perspective of current events.
Well said. I don't agree with all of it, but it shows we're already trying to learn from our mistakes. Will the candidates in 2008 listen? We're in exactly the place we were before Reagan's 1980 victory. All we need now is, um, Reagan.
Well we would do better to articulate a platform such as Newt did in 1994 and before. Waiting for another RR could be a long time. He left us a blueprint for connecting to people, we just need to follow it.
What would Reagan have done with today's media? Well, first I can remember RR having weekly if not daily press conferences where he would meet liberal press members head on. He had a way of letting the liberals choose the place and time of a fight and then he would turn the tables on them.
McCain on the other hand smiles, nods his head in lemming fashion when he is under the media spotlight. He waffles on issues or becomes muddled e.g. "well we will have to take another look at that particular issue and the set of circumstances blah blah blab..."
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