Today is Ronald Reagan’s 99th birthday.
Hot Air provides a nice summary of what made Reagan unique:
Reagan is a great conservative hero for what he wasn’t as well as for what he was. In an era when people thought the entree to political leadership was a degree from an elite university and a lifetime spent currying favor and working within the establishment, Reagan was a small-town Midwesterner who’d gone to an obscure college and spent most of his adult life doing other things: a sportscaster, an actor, a pundit. He was well into middle age before he got into electoral politics.
This confounded his critics, who believed that the true measure of a 50-something man of accomplishment was a degree he’d gotten when he was 22.
He was, in short, pretty much like the rest of us – as Dinesh D’Souza noted, an ordinary man who became an extraordinary president.
He really had two great accomplishments. For starters, he had an uncommon gift for translating immensely high concepts – the economics of Hayek, the philosophy of the Federalists – into terminology that resonated with people who’d never sat through a political science seminar.
He also had a singular knack for envisioning a goal, and focusing on it with a genial ruthlessness that drew his supporters down the path, no matter how difficult, and outlasted his opponents, no matter how well entrenched.
Today, what Reagan said to Americans 20, 30 and 40 years ago still is relevant even if the current crop of politicians and the current president are trying to return to failed ideas of the past. Here is Ronald Reagan in the 1964 speech in support of Barry Goldwater that launched his political career:
Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.
And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.
- Ronald Reagan, October 27, 1964 – “A Time for Choosing”
And here is a famous moment in President Reagan’s successful effort to “leave communism on the ash heap of history”:
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