In the ’80s, Ronald Reagan inspired me to become politicized, because I grew up in that era when everything I cared about was under attack.
Nancy Reagan was a perfectionist, and I am not.
In my experience, I have learned that there is rarely the perfect man for the perfect job, but Reagan was born to play the role of president. He was an inspirational leader when the country really needed it.
President Reagan likes to say Uncle Sam is a kindly old man with a spine of steel, and that he is. But I want to see Uncle Sam as well with a mind and with a heart and with a soul and a conscience.
To his credit, Obama didn’t just come to Washington to be someone. Like Reagan, he came to Washington to do something – to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America’s deeply and historically individualist polity.
Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way – I would say a salutary way – and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.
You can’t have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.
I registered as a Republican when I turned 18 because of Ronald Reagan – he was the president at the time; I admired what he stood for. I respected him.
If Reagan had intelligence information that showed that the upheaval in Egypt is actually Democratic in spirit, then he would have, I believe, turned his back on Mubarak, even though there’s a long friendship between the United States and Egypt.
Every time we’ve had a pro-growth fundamental tax reform, be it under President Reagan, President Kennedy – you can even go all the way back to President Coolidge – we have seen paychecks increase, economic growth be ignited, and, actually, more revenues come into the government.
I became a Republican, before I knew what a Republican even was, because of Ronald Reagan.
I was part of that group of kids growing up in the ’80s under the Reagan regime, what I used to call ‘living in the shadow of Dr. Manhattan,’ where we would have dreams all the time that New York City was being destroyed, and that that wall of light and destruction was rolling out and would just devour our neighborhood.
Since Reagan there has been this tradition, which has become a cliche, of promising morning in America, this fake optimism, we’re the best, the city on the hill. In fact the great American task is self-scrutiny.
When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that’s when he crossed his final threshold.
Again and again as president, Reagan let it slip that he concurred with fundamentalists’ belief that the world would end in a fiery Armageddon. This did not hurt him politically. The kind of people offended by such talk had already largely abandoned the Republican Party.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.
My record shows that I have put my country first, and I follow the philosophy and traditions of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.
When you were a teenager in Colorado, the way to be a punk rocker was to rip on Reagan and Bush and what they were doing and talk about how everyone in Colorado’s a redneck with a gun and all this stuff.
President Reagan was the quintessential Happy Warrior, and no one loves, respects, and admires Reagan more than I do.
The Tea Party is a group that rejects deep thinking, it rejects the very complex analysis that is involved in public policy, it rejects the kind of textured decision-making that Ronald Reagan prided himself on.
I want to see the next Reagan. I want somebody who brings out the good in Americans and challenges us to aspire to that North Star, someone who wants to empower our families and individuals and communities and let them be free to achieve their dreams. That’s what’s going to make this country again.
I still subscribe to the theory that Ronald Reagan once pronounced: that I will never speak ill will of my fellow Republican.
Ronald Reagan said, ‘Trust, but verify.’ President Obama is ‘trust, but vilify.’ He trusts our enemies and vilifies everyone who disagrees with him.
Ronald Reagan was very successful.
I’m glad Reagan is president. Of course, I’m a professional comedian.
I have been a Republican since I came to this country, fleeing communism when I was eight years old and Ronald Reagan was president.
Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.
Under Reagan’s policies, inflation and nominal GNP growth shriveled much faster than predicted, throwing off government revenue estimates and resulting in budget deficits.
Reagan didn’t put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system.
President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.
Dan Rather pulling on a sweater and thereby winning a whole new chunk of the populace: That’s television. President Reagan’s press conferences: That’s television. Keith Jackson is television. So are Kermit the Frog, instant replay, and the Fiesta Bowl.
In 1980, a nation in need of change selected Ronald Reagan to restore the shine to a tarnished America.
During his runs for the GOP presidential nomination, Mitt Romney has done a good job of mimicking Reagan’s anti-government diatribes and ‘better days ahead’ rhetoric.
Vietnam and Iraq are part of the same national trauma and delusion; we folded the war up when Reagan became president and unpacked it with Bush.
If the United States had maintained its spending under Ronald Reagan, it is possible that the attacks of 9/11 – presaged by Islamic terror attacks on multiple American targets beginning with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 – would have been stopped.
Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, ‘The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let’s get the government out of the way.’ On the foreign policy side it was, ‘Communism is bad, and we’re going to defeat it.’
Ronald Reagan said that he sought a Star Wars defense only in order to share the technology with the tyrants of the U.S.S.R.
Throughout his life, Ronald Reagan believed America is capable of great things and its people could and would lead the way if left unburdened by taxation and regulation.
Reagan’s legacy is so powerful because he identified the state as the central issue in American politics.
As governor of California in 1970, Reagan endeared himself to millions of conservatives nationwide when he publicly rebuked the anti-war movement that was exploding on college campuses.
Ronald Reagan knew who he was. Barack Obama is still working through that equation politically.
At the same time, the Reagan Administration assured that the main elements of policymaking were in the hands of competent loyalists, thus assuring a successful launch and a highly successful first year.
Dwight Eisenhower presented a face of America that was heroic and resolute; Ronald Reagan represented a return to confidence and glamour after the weary Carter years.
It was widespread that the politics of Tea Party people would be foreign to Ronald Reagan and they would be seen by him as frivolous and uninformed.
I’m a conservative. I was an avid supporter of Ronald Reagan; I thought he was fabulous.
When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened ‘the Reagan.’
The neoconservatives of the 1970s, former liberals who became Nixon or Reagan backers, eventually accepted the ‘neocon’ description instead of calling themselves ‘The Real New Deal Democrats’ forever.
The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.
The inaugural of Ronald Reagan, with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And that was the greatest thing. Ronald Reagan and George Bush. That was – I still remember like it was yesterday.
When Ronald Reagan was elected I was on a bus traveling with a band in France. I wrote a little arrangement of The Star Spangled Banner in a minor key.
President Obama’s farewell speech soared, towered, dragged. True, it was longer than Reagan’s, Clinton’s and GWB’s speeches combined. If it got any longer, it would have qualified as a third term.
Presidents at the end of their second term – Reagan with the Iran-contra affair, Clinton with Monica Lewinsky – often find they are bedevilled by hostile Congressional investigations.
Presidents routinely testify in criminal cases. You know, George W. Bush did it with Valerie Plame. Bill Clinton did it three times with Ken Starr. Gerald Ford did it with respect to a testimony about a Charles Manson follower. And Ronald Reagan, I think, is perhaps the most important precedent.
I think that Ronald Reagan had it right, being against abortion except in certain limited, defined circumstances.
