Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.
When, in his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan famously said government is the problem, not the solution, he established the Republican mantra that has not changed in all the years since. It was a clever bit of rhetoric, but it has turned too many Republicans into economic simpletons.
Reagan was a pure liberation, free-and-fair election American.
Tax reform is the legislative challenge of a generation for America. It hasn’t been accomplished since 1986, when President Reagan and Congress delivered the most sweeping overhaul of our nation’s tax code in American history. 2017 is the year to change that and make history of our own.
Prediction is a mug’s game, but taking the side of water polluters has not been a winning political strategy for 50 years. Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II all undertook to weaken water regulations in the name of economic growth. They left office; the regulations remained.
Donald Trump understands the anxiety and aspirations of the American people like no leader since Reagan.
He may not have been a good actor, and I personally don’t think he was a good president, but I’ll tell you this: Ronald Reagan was a helluva character.
More than any other president, save perhaps John F Kennedy, whose father ran a film studio, and Ronald Reagan, a leading man and governor of California, Trump is on a buddy basis with media moguls, a speed dialer with the heads of studios and media conglomerates.
The Reagan years really were a bonanza for the rich; you didn’t imagine that.
Demeanor-wise, Reagan was a conservative, but a pragmatic conservative, and he found silver linings in things. He liked to be a mediator. He didn’t like to have enemies around him.
It has become commonplace to call Trump a reality TV star. That is said as an aspersion, the way Ronald Reagan was called an actor. But Reagan’s acting experience, his ability to talk to the camera and not yell to the hall, is what helped make him such a good politician. It is the same with Trump.
Ronald Reagan gave our party a bowling alley image as opposed to a country club image. We were talking to people who go bowling on Thursday night, and they were understanding what we were saying.
Whether history will view Ronald Reagan as a great president depends, more than anything else, on one question: how much credit does he deserve for the fact that the Cold War ended far earlier than almost anyone suspected – and on terms that Americans had fantasized about for 45 years?
Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on – that’s how much he revered the presidency.
My allegiance to the GOP was cemented during the 1980s, when I was in high school and college and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. For me, Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview.
I was always impressed by Betty Ford and what she went through and how full of integrity she was, and how brave. I think Mrs. Reagan was a role model of my mother’s generation, intelligent, very supportive of her husband. I am very different from my mom, but I admired her devotion.
Some of my Democratic friends don’t like it when I say that, but Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat and still a leader. He brought strong people around him, and he had a vision for where he wanted to take the country.
I believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was… a large Arctic region covered with ice.
When I was operating as one of President Reagan’s economic advisers, an early assignment was to analyze the federal government’s landholdings and make recommendations about what to do with them. This was a big job. These lands are vast, covering an area six times that of France.
Presidents Reagan and the first George Bush never used the vile language of some Trump supporters, but both blamed scarce resources and decaying communities on ‘welfare queens’ and black criminals like Willie Horton.
President Reagan’s one-liners were terrific.
We didn’t exist. Ronald Reagan didn’t say the word ‘AIDS’ until 1987. I’ve tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men’s Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.
We have struggled with terrorism for a long time. In the Reagan administration, I was a hawk on the subject. I said terrorism is a big problem, a different problem, and we have to take forceful action against it. Fortunately, Ronald Reagan agreed with me, but not many others did.
The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan.
My only thought about Margaret Thatcher is the same one I had about Ronald Reagan. I hated a lot of what they did, but once in a while a country just needs a change.
President Obama has lowered taxes more than he has raised them, and they are today lower than they were in President Reagan’s time. But you don’t hear conservatives crowing about that.
Ronald Reagan came in – he was a leader. Some of my Democratic friends don’t like it when I say that. He had a vision where he wanted to take the country, and things started moving again.
My mom had grown up in the South. Louisiana and Georgia. She had been deeply religious. Baptist, then Mormon. She had worked for the U.S. military. She had voted for Ronald Reagan and Bush Senior.
I don’t think Reagan is primarily funny, and I don’t think he’s primarily marvelous; he’s complicated.
As president, Reagan worked very well with Democrats to do big things. It is true that he worked to reduce the size of government and cut federal taxes and he eliminated many regulations, but he also raised taxes when necessary.
‘Family Ties,’ to me, was strictly ’80s. It was from the beginning of the ’80s until the end of the ’80s, and it was very specific to that time. Ronald Reagan was president.
If Reagan and John Paul II were linked by anything, it was a grand, ambitious, and generous idea of Western political civilization, one in which a democratic Europe would be integrated by multiple economic, political, and cultural links, and held together beneath an umbrella of American hegemony.
Reagan’s approach will achieve one of the basic goals of the conservative: Things remain basically the same. The rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, or even a little poorer.
I’m getting a little tired of everybody quoting Ronald Reagan.
Ron Reagan amazingly qualifies as an honest broker. I asked him if he was a mama’s boy and he said no, more of a papa’s boy. At the same time he was willing to say that his father had many shortcomings and needed to be held accountable.
I had the pleasure of knowing Ronald Reagan before he became Governor of California. He was a truly great human being and we usually spent our time together reminiscing about mutual friends.
It was my sister Maureen who was responsible for my becoming a Reagan.
I can remember – I don’t want to identify the individual – but a very prominent Democrat, who compared looking at Carter and then Reagan, and then Bush, and observed that many of the people around Carter were totally disloyal to him.
And so it was interesting for me to find myself very enamored of a Republican president, but Ronald Reagan was someone I thought captured the spirit of America.
I often quote Ronald Reagan, who is pretty close to my favorite President ever, I will have to say that, but one of my favorite remarks he ever made was that when you look at Federal programs, there is nothing so close to eternal life on Earth as a Federal Government program.
Under Reagan came the idea of putting your pension plan in the stock market, which wasn’t a guaranteed pension.
Ronald Reagan had a kind of shallow movie-star charisma – a combination of makeup and the skill of a good actor – but it wasn’t the real thing, and was something that he could turn off when the cameras weren’t running.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm his Soviet counterparts by saying that surely they’d both unite against an invasion from Mars.
Try, if you will, to imagine Dwight Eisenhower or JFK or Lyndon Johnson or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan chin-wagging with Jack Paar or Johnny Carson. Richard Nixon did, famously, go on ‘Laugh In’ in 1968, but as a candidate; and to his credit, he rued the day and hated every second of it.
President Reagan is now at rest. We mourn his passing, but we are grateful for the gifts he gave us: a safer world, strong economic base, and a renewed belief in America’s greatness.
I challenge anybody to say that I wouldn’t know how to approach foreign policy because, unlike some of the other people, I at least have a foreign policy philosophy, which is an extension of the Reagan philosophy. Peace through strength, and my philosophy is peace through strength and clarity.
We are a better Nation and the world is a safer place because of Ronald Reagan.
I was a Reagan backer. It was a shock for some people that I could agree with anything that man would say.
With his trademark courage and conviction, President Reagan led us out of the Cold War, spreading his vision of freedom, resulting in the release of millions of people from the yoke of communism.
Reagan’s enduring value as a conservative icon stems from his resolute preaching of the conservative gospel, in words that still warm the hearts of the most zealous conservatives. Yet Reagan’s value as a conservative model must begin with recognition of his flexibility in the pursuit of his conservative goals.
