Where Oh Where Is Ron?

If Ronald Reagan were elected in the 2008 election he could use this portion of his first inaugural address almost verbatim... which is sad considering he would be a Republican president following a Republican president. But I guess that is the difference between being Republican and being Conservative:



For many reasons I really miss Ron. In recalling what Lady Thatcher said in her 1997 address to the Heritage Foundation about President Reagan I remember why:

Right from the beginning, Ronald Reagan set out to challenge everything that the liberal political elite of America accepted and sought to propagate. They believed that America was doomed to decline: He believed it was destined for further greatness. They imagined that sooner or later there would be convergence between the free Western system and the socialist Eastern system, and that some kind of social democratic outcome was inevitable. He, by contrast, considered that socialism was a patent failure which should be cast onto the trash heap of history. They thought that the problem with America was the American people, though they didn’t quite put it like that. He thought that the problem with America was the American government, and he did put it just like that.

The political elite were prepared to kowtow to the counterculture that grew up on American campuses, fed by a mixture of high-brow dogma and low-brow self-indulgence. Governor Reagan would have none of it...