President Obama had a few historians at the White House for a couple of dinners. I was lucky enough to be one of those asked, and he was very interested in Ronald Reagan, and I came away feeling that.
Unlike the Reagan and Bush Administrations, with but one exception, the Clinton administration failed to reach out to Republicans in creating a new team, and eventually paid a political price.
This is a true story. The day after Reagan won, I was walking into the courthouse when someone said that they’d bet Reagan would appoint me U.S. attorney.
My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that.
Obama learned from Ronald Reagan that it helps to strike an optimistic tone. But genuine optimism deriving from American exceptionalism, it turns out, does not come naturally to him.
I remember those great days when we were at $176 million before the Reagan Revolution came to town.
When most presidents get in, they move to the center because they realize that this is a centrist country – even Reagan.
The more the American people see the sharp differences between Mr. Reagan and me and the visions we have of our future, the better off the American people will be.
Futurism is another American myth: whether Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan or Obama, American presidents all come into office with a new program, and the conviction that the country is going to be better than ever.
The highlight of my career was being at the inaugural gala of Ronald Reagan, and I owe that to Mr. Sinatra.
Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it’s the heartland of America. It’s a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it’s beginning to pass.
Then came the hostage crisis during which Carter did nothing to rattle the ayatollahs who hung tough until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, when they suddenly backed down.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president for his first term in 1980, he received strong support from the so-called Sagebrush Rebels. The Rebels wanted lands owned by the federal government to be transferred to state governments.
The first term of the Clinton administration was very jolly. Everybody was running around meeting people and of course, in the second term, everyone went down the black hole, which also happened at the end of the Reagan administration.
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.
If we have George W. Bush as president, we’re going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.
For example, I spent a lot of time with Reagan, both before he ran for governor and when he was running for president. As a print reporter without the cameras, I was able to really test the quality of their minds and their knowledge base.
Walter Mondale was dissuaded from running for the Senate from Minnesota in 1990, in part out of fear that his 49-state loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984 had reduced his standing.
Certainly Nancy Reagan had an extraordinary effect on her husband. I’m truly not sure that, say, Laura Bush had that much effect on the Bush administration. She certainly, you know, seems to be a nice person who I think the public likes. But I can’t really put my finger on any huge impact she’s had.
During the Reagan Administration, so much attention was devoted to fighting Marxism in Nicaragua and El Salvador that Washington lost sight of longer-term challenges in other countries.
Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn’t leave the Republican Party; it left me.
Presidents have a right to certain prerogatives, including the expectation of a certain deference. He’s the president; this is history. But we seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off.
It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan.
I could run for Congress. Why not? Good heavens, if Ronald Reagan can be president, I ought to make a great secretary of the treasury.
Reagan won because he was real. He believed in America. He told people he was gonna make it great again coming out of a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter and Watergate before that.
Global political conditions make a direct American intervention difficult, but President Reagan’s messianic and visceral attitude toward the Nicaraguan revolution could mean it will happen as an act of desperation.
We always have to remember that we, the Italians, have always cooperated with the U.S., and with Reagan and Carter and Nixon and Clinton, Bush and Obama. And Trump, Trump is the American-elected president. So, cooperation is there.
I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was… an arctic wilderness.
‘Crumbling’ Down’ is a very political song that I wrote with my childhood friend George Green. Reagan was president – he was deregulating everything, and the walls were crumbling down on the poor.
With Ronald Reagan in the White House, somebody had to look out for those who were not so fortunate. That’s where I came in.
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated some significant arms reduction deals with the then-Soviet Union, he was considered a real hero, someone who was advocating for peace.
In the course of his ongoing crusade for Medicaid expansion, Ohio governor John Kasich has suggested that Ronald Reagan, Saint Peter, and God Himself all would support his plan to accept Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion.
We got two examples in recent history from this country. One in the ’80s under President Reagan. One under President Clinton and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the ’90s. We had nearly 5 percent growth rate in each of those decades. We can do it again for sure.
My wife, Dixie, is evangelical Christian. We met in the Reagan White House, when she was a student intern. We’re members of the Horizon Christian Fellowship Church.
Politically at that time, with Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the White House, it wasn’t looking too great for the Left. And we were always on the left.
JFK and Reagan’s growth model included tax cuts and a steady dollar. Trump has taken a gigantic step toward restoring prosperity with his tax-cut-centered fiscal policy.
Reagan did not have to rely on or cope with talk radio, Fox News, Breitbart, or any of the other trolls that now dominate conservative politics.
Trump is the opposite of everything Reagan was.
As we begin this debate, I am confident that we will hear the supporters of this bill argue in the name of Ronald Reagan that this research is consistent with his long-held views about the sanctity of life.
Does anybody remember, back in the depths of the recession of 1981-82, how President Reagan kept his chin up and exhorted American businesses to work hard and produce an economic recovery?
Most politicians – those people who live, eat and breathe politics – like to sit around and talk about politics and tell political war stories. Reagan didn’t do that. His war stories were movie war stories and Hollywood war stories. He loved that.
My constituents feel betrayed by the promise that Reagan made, that if we grant amnesty, we’ll then secure the border. We obviously didn’t do that.
Reagan won the Cold War by first restoring America’s economy and military and then staring down an economically weakened Soviet Union. He knew defeating Russia couldn’t be accomplished without laying the groundwork.
Nothing is going to change the fact that I believe Ronald Reagan is the greatest president in my lifetime – may well be the greatest president this nation ever had.
Reagan is the subject of ongoing political debate, and a lot of liberals don’t want to take Reagan any more seriously than they did when he was president. I understand why they don’t, but they should.
I watched Reagan turn around the country by lowering taxes and controlling spending, and I’m applying the same principles.
So that was Reagan’s political problem. As a rancher in California, he was an environmentalist himself. But the President of the United States doesn’t control everything that happens in Washington.
As presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama have recognized, the real question is whether regulations, whether new or old, are justified. That requires a careful analysis of their costs and their benefits.
PBS was not a left-wing ideology. I mean, Air America was, but PBS was not. But anybody who tells the truth is now branded and marginalized. The devolution of the American press began in 1986 when Ronald Reagan abolished the fairness doctrine.
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did more to liberate people by defeating the Soviet Union and freeing eastern Europe than the Obamas, the Clintons, and Kerrys of this world ever have. They were all on the wrong side of that debate.
Leaders are for calling people to their better angels, for helping guide them to a kind of sterner, more mature sense of what we need to do. To me, Reagan’s brand of leadership was what I call ‘a liturgy of absolution.’ He absolved Americans almost in a priestly role to contend with sin. Who wouldn’t want that?
