Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They’d all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
What unites Sanders, McCarthy, McGovern and Reagan is the unmistakable clarity of their moral convictions, their tendency to outrage, and their insistence that the United States needs to embark on a whole new path.
It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.
If the GOP wants to know why it lost the Reagan Democrats, it is because the GOP exported their jobs to Mexico and China.
Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They’d all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
It goes without saying that ‘Buncha Losers’ comedies speak to tough times. The massive unemployment of the Reagan years gave us ‘Taxi,’ ‘Cheers’ and the genre-defining ‘Night Court,’ a show you could never admit to watching without making people feel sorry for you.
‘Eureka’ was very bad timing. The early 1980s: Reagan and Thatcher were in, greed was good, and here was a film about the richest man in the world who still couldn’t be happy. Politically and sociologically, it was out of step.
I tease sometimes and say that the King holiday is a 20th-century miracle. Reagan even signed it, and he was completely opposed to the idea.
Mr. Gingrich has a number of elements in his record that could be criticized accurately. But to suggest that he was somehow anti-Reagan or to suggest that Reagan was anti-Gingrich is preposterously untrue.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.
President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages.
I actually have several busts of Ronald Reagan that have been presented to me.
Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched.
If you go back and look at President Reagan’s speeches, they bring you to tears almost.
I had a soft-spot in my heart for Ronald Reagan, if only because he was a sportswriter in his youth.
President Reagan, Jack Kemp and other advocates of supply-side economics understood that pro-growth tax, spending and economic policies were essential to America’s long-term economic and fiscal health.
President Trump has rebuilt the American military to an extent we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan.
We’re seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one, and that terrifies Washington, D.C.
Do you want to know what scares the Washington cartel? Actually, not remotely. I don’t scare them in the tiniest bit. What scares them is you. What scares them is that old Reagan coalition is coming back together, of conservatives.
So the Republican party of Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush is dead. It’s over. It doesn’t exist anymore.
The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.
When Ronald Reagan’s administration was exposed for having illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money covertly for the Contra rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, Reagan acknowledged that the evidence was damning – yet defended the principle behind the scheme.
Well, I think the reality is that as you study – when President Kennedy cut marginal tax rates, when Ronald Reagan cut marginal tax rates, when President Bush imposed those tax cuts, they actually generated economic growth. They expanded the economy. They expand tax revenues.
One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about everyone else.
When President Ronald Reagan asked me a stupid question once, I called him an idiot in public! I thought I was going to be arrested, but he laughed and appreciated me.
Whereas Jimmy Carter had aggressively pursued anti-merger activity – the imbecilic case against AT&T was prosecuted under President Carter – Mr. Reagan understood the virtue of allowing companies to exploit the synergies of mergers to gain efficiency and lower costs.
I still remember March 31, 1981, when a deeply disturbed John Hinckley Jr. took aim at President Ronald Reagan and fired shots that hospitalized the Commander-in-Chief and two others, and left his Press Secretary James Brady paralyzed for life.
Ronald Reagan’s era can be defined, number one in most people’s minds, by the Cold War and by the end of it – and by the strong principles he stood for.
The Reagan years showed us that expanding economic freedom should be the North Star – the guiding light – of U.S. policy, because it is the best way to achieve sustained and broad-based prosperity for all.
Don’t worry, America. We survived Jimmy Carter, and we will survive Barack Obama. Only one questions remains… who is the next Ronald Reagan?
Reagan proved deficits don’t matter.
We’re going to lose Social Security and Medicare if Republicans and Democrats do not come together and find a solution like Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill. I will be the Ronald Reagan if I can find a Tip O’Neill.
No politician was more maligned than Ronald Reagan.
So far as I’m concerned, Ronald Reagan was the best president. Nixon was the worst. Some of his policies were okay, but he disgraced the office.
I have been hung in effigy by the gay community for a long time, from when I was on President Reagan’s first AIDS commission.
Whatever you thought of his politics, Ronald Reagan was a great man, a courageous man. He took an assassin’s bullet and joked to the doctors as they desperately worked to save his life.
As his vice president for eight years, I learned more from Ronald Reagan than from anyone I encountered in all my years of public life.
Where Reagan channeled disenchantment with overweening government, Obama symbolized America’s transformation into a multiracial country.
I am a Reagan Republican: I believe in Free Market Capitalism; I believe in economic growth.
The FSG story starts to lose its fairy-tale aura when filthy lucre invades the sacred enclosure, as it did ubiquitously in the every-man-for-himself Reagan era.
When Ronald Reagan chose George H.W. Bush in 1980, it was a clear signal that he was running an inclusive campaign; that he welcomed the moderate and even liberal wings of the GOP – there was a liberal wing back then – into his campaign.
I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren’t really public servants.
Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He’s not the simple, folksy figure that he’s often portrayed as.
What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?
It’s time for a 21st-century retirement age. If 40 is the new 20 and 50 is the new 30, why shouldn’t 70 be the new 65? The last time Washington politicians tinkered ever so gingerly with the government-sanctioned retirement age, Ronald Reagan was in office and Generation X-ers were all in diapers.
Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.
I was a freshman in college in 1980, the year that Reagan was elected, and I went around badgering people to vote for him.
The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn’t do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.
I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. ‘Please don’t take away our precious Soviet Union! – We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!’
As chairman of the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, I continue to be inspired by President Reagan’s 1985 national address to the American people as he challenged them to join him in boldly reforming the broken, complex tax code.
I keep Reagan’s 11th Commandment that I don’t run down other Republicans.
Reagan’s emotional intelligence, his ability to suss out people’s longings and to channel them for political purposes, was better than just about any human being that ever lived.
Over the course of two terms, President Reagan revolutionized the Republican Party and changed the political atmosphere in a way still being felt today.
The Republican Party is either going to return to the party of fiscal responsibility and consistent conservative principles as it was under Ronald Reagan, or it will continue down the path of ‘sporadic moderation.’
To my mind, a president should care about all people, and he didn’t, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.
