Reagan Quotes by Edwin Meese, Rory Bremner, Rand Paul, Ana Navarro, Tomas Borge, Joe Strummer and many others.
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.
Maybe we like our politicians to appear like bumbling oafs. It certainly never did Ronald Reagan or George Bush any harm. The Italians still seem enamoured of Silvio Berlusconi – a man whose entry into a room is less likely to be greeted with the Italian national anthem than by the Benny Hill theme tune.
My dad was one of only four congressmen who supported Reagan.
I have been a Republican since I came to this country, fleeing communism when I was eight years old and Ronald Reagan was president.
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.
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.
We don’t have a lot of Reagan-type leaders in our party. Remember Ronald Reagan Democrats? I want a Republican that can attract Democrats.
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.
As we celebrate President Reagan’s remarkable career and historic legacy, we also celebrate a man of strong character, deep conviction, unforgettable charm, and wonderful wit.
We need independents, we need the GOP, we need Reagan Democrats.
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.
What we can borrow from Ronald Reagan… is that great sense of optimism. He led by building on the strengths of America, not running America down.
One of my little girls is named Reagan. Her first words were, ‘Mr. Larry, tear down this crib.’ That was her first words, it was very sweet. My first words were, ‘Are you going to finish that sandwich?’
The American Revolution was sparked by a series of taxes and tariffs on tea. More recently, the Thatcher and Reagan ‘revolutions’ were rooted in overturning the status quo – excessive taxation – to empower the individual and encourage a free society and prosperous economy.
When I read Frank Miller’s ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, I think it’s a wonderful record of the Reagan era. I think it’s amazing. This is the time I lived in.
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.
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.
I think that Ronald Reagan had it right, being against abortion except in certain limited, defined circumstances.
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?
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.
I am a Reagan Republican.
To his lasting credit, President Reagan never wavered. He recognized the strategic importance of staying the course, both in terms of denying Moscow the military hegemony it sought in Western Europe and of restoring the will, cohesiveness, and security of the NATO alliance, so badly frayed during the turbulent 1970s.
I’ve been to Reagan National Airport. I tell people it was named after me.
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.
I went to theater school at Northwestern, and I was quite conservative. Reagan at the time seemed quite revolutionary, or at least a rock star: He was radical and kind of punk rock.
When my father, Ronald Reagan, was running for president in 1980, my mother, Nancy, traveled with him on the campaign trail, but she did not give speeches or even many interviews. She never stood in front of a group of reporters and expounded on her views and opinions.
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.
All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming, but I’m not so certain he was nice. It’s hard for me to think of anyone as ‘nice’ when I hear him say ‘The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.’
There’s a reason why, when Reagan became president, he started getting rid of regulations, and we had a booming economy.
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.
If the GOP wants to know why it lost the Reagan Democrats, it is because the GOP exported their jobs to Mexico and China.
Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan’s true legacy, as I noted in ‘The Nation’ back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force.
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.
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.
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.
When terrorists blew up the Marine barracks in Lebanon, Reagan was frustrated and furious, as Bush was after 9/11. But he didn’t stick us in a war in the Middle East with no exit.
Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.
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 am not a politician; I’ve never run for anything in my life. I’m an economist. I’m a broadcaster. I’ve been an adviser. I worked for Ronald Reagan.
Haitian rice farmers are quite efficient, but they can’t compete with U.S. agribusiness that relies on a huge government subsidy, thanks to Ronald Reagan’s free market enthusiasms.
A lot of people call horror movies ‘campy,’ and I can certainly see why they think that they are, but being a product of the 80s, I didn’t notice that they were campy – I came from a campy generation. I mean, Ronald Reagan is campy. But I don’t think they’re campy.
President Reagan was elected on the promise of getting government off the backs of the people and now he demands that government wrap itself around the waists of the people.
The Chavez-Obama pictures will join a postmodern photo array that includes Donald Rumsfeld gifting Saddam Hussein with spurs from President Reagan.
At the end of their first years, there are few people who would have predicted that Truman would be elected in 1948 or that Reagan would get a second term. It’s always premature to make some kind of categorical judgment after the first year in office.
Donald Trump understands the anxiety and aspirations of the American people like no leader since Reagan.
The highlight of my career was being at the inaugural gala of Ronald Reagan, and I owe that to Mr. Sinatra.
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.
When he hung up on Nancy Reagan, that’s when he crossed his final threshold.
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!’
I was so proud to have the Reagan name and to be Ronald Reagan’s son. What a great honor.
Angela Davis’s legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights.
The reason inflation was brought down to manageable levels, by the time of Ronald Reagan’s re-election, was directly attributable to Jimmy Carter’s very courageous act, hiring a Federal Reserve chair, with the charge to induce a recession. That recession was probably the reason he didn’t win a second term.
Those who remember Washington’s cold war culture in the 1980s will recall the shocked reactions to Reagan’s intervention. People interested in foreign policy were astonished when in 1985 he met alone at Geneva – alone, not a single strategic thinker at his elbow! – with the Soviet Communist master Gorbachev.
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.
The Tea Party loves Reagan because he said exactly what they want to hear.
Conservative statesmen from Alexander Hamilton to Ronald Reagan sometimes supported protectionism, and at other times, they leaned toward lowering barriers. But they always understood that trade policy was merely a tool for building a strong and independent country with a prosperous middle class.
I finally learned to accept that I can’t make radio play blues any more than I could get Reagan out of the White House.
All Americans and freedom-loving people around the world owe President Reagan our deepest gratitude for his strong, principled leadership that ended the Cold War and brought freedom to millions of people.
You are Mrs. Reagan because Mr. Reagan loves you with all his heart.
In Ronald Reagan’s case, he always bore with him this extraordinary ability to radiate confidence, optimism, clarity, a blitheness of spirit, in what other people saw as chaos. And after the 1970s, that was catnip.
Every year when I put away my winter clothes and get out my summer clothes, they fit. And I haven’t been on a diet since the Reagan administration.
Our love of Hollywood-style glamour helped elect two presidents: JFK and Reagan, who fulfilled the prophecy that a country so enamored of actors would eventually make one their president.
Reagan’s defense buildup and SDI, so ridiculed at the time, pressed Gorbachev, while his economy was collapsing, to make arms deals and improve relations with the West, which contributed to the unraveling of his empire.
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.
Ronald Reagan was so self-contained and impenetrable that his official biographer was practically driven mad trying to figure him out.
Reagan was no neocon.
We are all living in a world shaped by Reagan and his ideology of small ‘l’ liberalism.
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.
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.
After 2003, we lowered taxes across the board. And by 2004, revenue to the federal government grew. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan cut taxes dramatically. And by the end of the decade, revenue coming in the federal government had doubled.
I stood respectfully as Ronald Reagan was sworn in to his second term though I disagreed with him on many issues. I stood as well for the inauguration of George W. Bush’s second term though I thought his war in Iraq was a tragic mistake.
The central con of the political coalition assembled by Ronald Reagan and maintained by his successors was that government was a common enemy.
When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.
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.
As a seven-year-old, I had definite opinions on Ronald Reagan.
I tell people all the time that I was born and raised in Ronald Reagan’s America.
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.
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.
By supporting Reagan, evangelicals were not supporting womanizing or divorce, but they were endorsing Reagan’s policies.
The Spending Control Act. It would recreate President Reagan’s grace commission to have a bipartisan commission on how we reduce spending.
I watched Reagan turn around the country by lowering taxes and controlling spending, and I’m applying the same principles.
The ur-conservatives of the 1950s – William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and all the rest – were revolting not against a liberal administration but against the moderate conservatism of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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.
Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.
There was a time when the Republican Party could discuss possible reforms to our gun laws: Ronald Reagan himself endorsed the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban that passed in 1994.
What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?
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.
My big subject as a historian is how Americans divide themselves. What are the divisions that structure our political lives. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were perfect foils for that story.
Ronald Reagan was the best Ronald Reagan ever, and Ronald Reagan was a cool guy. You’re not Ronald Reagan. You can’t run as him; you can’t relive his career. You can’t just have somebody else’s career. You have to be you.
I mean, people need to remember without the grassroots, Ronald Reagan probably doesn’t become president of the United States of America and he worked the grassroots on a regular basis during his political career and especially between the years of 1976 and 1980 after the loss in Kansas City.
I was a freshman in college in 1980, the year that Reagan was elected, and I went around badgering people to vote for him.
Ronald Reagan would never go into the Oval Office without his jacket on – that’s how much he revered the presidency.
Ronald Reagan knew who he was. Barack Obama is still working through that equation politically.
I was involved in the ‘reformicon’ effort in 2013-2014, which was explicitly, ‘We can’t just Xerox Reagan.’ In the spirit of Reagan, actually, we could rethink things – maybe we need to think more about job-training programs, earned income tax credit, adjust the tax code.
Reagan was the most important American political figure of the latter half of the 20th century. No one was more central to his emergence and success than Bill Buckley.
The genius of guys like Lincoln and Reagan and FDR – the great communicator leaders – is that they’re actually educators, so they understand when they use a phrase that they have to explain it, because, by definition, you won’t understand it or they wouldn’t need to be using it.
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.
‘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.
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.
They say imitation is the best form of flattery. That is particularly the case if you’re a U.S. presidential candidate and pundits are likening you to a conservative giant like Ronald Reagan.
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.
Mad or glad, Mr. Reagan is head over heels in love with Mrs. Reagan and can’t even imagine a world without her – He loves her.
Though it was never a goal in life, it has occurred to me that I’ve met six presidents of the United States. OK, I met four of them before they became president, including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, No. 43.
Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.
Ronald Reagan is clearly to television what Franklin Roosevelt was to radio.
I’m trying to uphold what was true about conservatism. I consider myself a Reagan conservative.
I began my journalistic career on the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in. That’s the day I showed up for work at ‘The New Republic’ magazine.
Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They’d all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.
Ronald Reagan said, ‘Trust, but verify.’ President Obama is ‘trust, but vilify.’ He trusts our enemies and vilifies everyone who disagrees with him.
Reagan did not wait out the Soviets; he beat them.
It was my sister Maureen who was responsible for my becoming a Reagan.
The world is undoubtedly a safer, freer place because Thatcher – like Reagan – refused to back down when it came to defending freedom.
You know my father as governor, as president, but I knew him as dad. I was so proud to have the Reagan name and to be Ronald Reagan’s son.
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.
I am a Reagan Republican: I believe in Free Market Capitalism; I believe in economic growth.
While many of us never knew Ronald Reagan personally, we felt close to him because we shared his lighthearted sense of humor, admired his uncommon virtue, and were moved by his remarkable wisdom.
I’m here to tell you the coffee was hot, the orange juice was cold, New York’s still there and Reagan National is back.
Almost all first ladies have had tremendous power on personnel issues, whether the public realized it or not, whether it was Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan or whoever.
Ronald Reagan offered us an international vision divided between the free world and the evil empire. Even if this was a cartoonish view, it helped us make sense of everything from Star Wars to industrial policy.
We are a better Nation and the world is a safer place because of Ronald Reagan.
After 25 quarters of so-called recovery under Obama, it has increased a total of only 14.3 percent. Compare this to earlier periods. After the JFK tax cuts of the early 1960s, the economy grew in total by roughly 40 percent. After the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s, the economy grew by a total of 34 percent.
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.
Whether one admired or was repulsed by the positions he took on matters foreign and domestic, it is undeniable that Reagan’s ability to project anger was highly attractive to his most passionate supporters on the far right – and crucial to his political success.
Ronald Reagan was the Governor of California. He had earned the right to be considered for President of the United States. You learn a lot about a person by the way they have served. None of this applies to Trump. There’s no disclosure with him. I just think the man is a very troubled, emotional mess.
One of President Reagan’s first and wisest initiatives was to effectively shutdown the anti-trust division of the Justice Department.
In Ronald Reagan’s chaotic childhood, the imagination was armor. There is nothing unusual about that; transcending the doubts, hesitations, and fears swirling around you by casting yourself internally as the hero of your own adventure story is a characteristic psychic defense mechanism of the Boy Who Disappears.
Our borders have got to be secured. You know, when President Reagan, who was one of my idols, granted amnesty to about three million illegal immigrants, it was based on the fact that the borders would be secured. That didn’t happen. It didn’t happen during the Bush administration.
News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.
There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan.
As Ronald Reagan demonstrated, it is still possible to progress if not from a log cabin at least from obscurity to the White House. It is also rare.
Looking back as an historian, I find myself having great respect for Ronald Reagan’s consistency: his absolute conviction that the Soviet Union – the only competing world empire at the time – was bound to collapse!
In the Reagan administration, a great speech was just the first step in a long process. In the Obama administration, it’s the only step.
The modern era of continuity planning began under President Ronald Reagan.
I don’t think anybody is – no one could compare to Ronald Reagan, because he was the right man at the right time.
Ronald Reagan’s well documented final battles with Alzheimer’s disease were fought with the same conviction and courage that his many public battles were fought.
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.
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.
A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a ‘Dear Murph’ letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan’s father in a film.
People have the wrong idea that God will forgive Reagan. They say he didn’t know what he was doing. It’s true he didn’t know a lot of what was going on, but he was directly responsible.
Evangelicals overwhelmingly voted for Ronald Reagan – not because he was the most religious candidate, but he possessed the quality evangelicals felt like was most important, and that is leadership.
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.
President Reagan always gave the credit to the American people and American ideals. He treated his job as a valuable temporary loan from the American people, a loan that should be respected and returned with dutiful appreciation.
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.
Reagan conspired in the underestimation of his own ability.
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.
Reagan’s legacy is so powerful because he identified the state as the central issue in American politics.
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.
Ronald Reagan’s vision of smaller government, less taxes, and a strong national defense has led to a prosperous America. As president, he rebuilt our military and reinvigorated our confidence in ourselves.
I worked at the White House in the early Reagan administration at a time when the deficit rocket really started to take off.
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 guess the Reagan era is defined as the ‘I want it all for me, and screw everybody else’ era.
The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t qualified to be governor, let alone president.
Where Reagan channeled disenchantment with overweening government, Obama symbolized America’s transformation into a multiracial country.
President Reagan was a leader at a time when the American people most needed leadership. He outlined a vision that captured the imagination of the free world, a vision that toppled the Communist empire and freed countless millions.
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.
President Reagan, expanding on President Lincoln’s phrase, referred to America as ‘the last, best hope of man on Earth.’ But this last, best hope is beginning to fade.
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.’
President Reagan has no enemies in the Phillipines.
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.
Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the early 1980s. Each of these periods of tax cuts was remarkably successful as measured by virtually any public policy metric.
I think the best president – because he changed the whole mood of the country, the whole economy of the country, and stood up to Communism… that was continuing its causes around the world, and backed them off and caused them to collapse – and that was Ronald Reagan.
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.
The villains will come along. There were plenty in the Carter administration, and there will be plenty with Reagan.
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.
It is important that we take full advantage of the RSC’s size, character and the passion of its members to advance our conservative agenda in order to restore America to the ‘shining city on a hill’ that Ronald Reagan envisioned.
I’ve been truly blessed. I’ve been a fly on the wall of history. I’ve been just so many lucky places just by chance and serendipity, and obviously a huge portion of that serendipity had to do with my relationship with the real president, Ronald Reagan.
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.
My job is being ‘Mrs. Ronald Reagan.’
President Reagan stood for conservative principles in a way that brought people together.
Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all used temporarily targeted tariffs on specific industries.
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.
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.
For the record, our democracy is revered around the world. And free elections are the best way on Earth to choose our leaders. This is how we elected John F. Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; two George Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama. It has worked for decades.
I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was… an arctic wilderness.
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.
I feel bound to respect Ronald Reagan, as every American should – not least because he chose a career of public service when he could have made a lot more money doing something else, and not least because he took genuine risks for peace.
George W. Bush, though a president’s son, is cast as Reagan’s heir even more than his father’s.
I became a Republican, before I knew what a Republican even was, because of Ronald Reagan.
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.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.
I believe in Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment, thou shall not speak unfavorably of another Republican.
Reagan’s dead, and he was a lousy President.
Two famous happy warriors – Reagan and his political soulmate, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – knew they were fighting their own ideological and external wars. But they did so with the sunny dispositions and positive outlooks of those who knew they were on the right side of history.
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.
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.
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.
Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan had tremendous influence on generations of American because, even if people disagreed with them, they admired them because they made very strong commitments to things they believed in.
The problem with some of our noisier exponents of ‘American exceptionalism’ is that they lack Reagan’s moral maturity.
If you study how Ronald Reagan won first the 1980 election and then in 1984, what Reagan did is what Trump is going to do, and that is pull in a tremendous amount of blue-collar workers who have felt abandoned by the Democrats.
Reagan didn’t socialize with the press. He spent his evenings with Nancy, watching TV with dinner trays. But he knew that to transcend, you can’t condescend.
I would consider myself a Reagan Republican.
Ronald Reagan never did much to make abortion illegal. He did, however, deliver videotaped greetings, fulsome in praise for his hosts, to antiabortion rallies on the Mall.
From John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, presidents have rhetorically opened the door to the frontier for us, and each time, we have turned away to fight over destinations, technologies, and timing.
Spine transplants are what we really need to take Reagan on.
Two presidents pursued human rights policies that were serious and effective: Reagan and George W. Bush. They understood that American support for human rights activists is a moral imperative for us and also makes the world safer for us.
The first time I began to really think about politics was in fifth grade, during President Reagan’s first term.
Ronald Reagan believed in America as the shining city on the hill – Morning in America. But Donald Trump has a much different vision of American greatness, of nationalism – a much darker view, I think, of the world.
Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
During the Reagan years, government shut down eight different times under a Democrat Congress. The president and Congress worked together and got things straightened out. Under the Carter years, again a Democrat Congress, the government shut down five times.
You can’t have a discussion about politics without mentioning Ronald Reagan.
I just have that sense this is the reason we got Sandra Day O’Connor on the Court in the first place is because Ronald Reagan was running for President.
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.
Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years – and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.
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.
‘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.
I actually think that Republican administrations are better for music. The Reagan era was such a great era for punk and indie rock.
Politics changes music most of the time. Ronald Reagan – you can kind of say that he made hip-hop what it was by the embargoes that he set. Certain things that he did created N.W.A in a way. Politics has always done that.
While Democrats may never adopt the policies of Ronald Reagan, they should follow his golden rule of politics closely. Reagan adamantly instructed his party members to never publicly criticize another Republican.
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 refused to demonize his foes. Instead he charmed them, with a few exceptions, including Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House and the embodiment of the liberalism Reagan sought to reverse.
President Reagan’s one-liners were terrific.
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.
The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and ’80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.
There’s also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.
It’s time for conservative Americans to do what Reagan did.
I grew up admiring Ronald Reagan and Vice President Bush, and if I were old enough, I would have voted for 41. I was glad he won.
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.
I’m getting a little tired of everybody quoting Ronald Reagan.
The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.
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.
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.
Truly landmark pieces of legislation – including the Social Security Act, Medicare, and the Kennedy and Reagan tax reductions – historically have garnered strong support from both parties. The ACA did not.
He used humor more effectively than any president since Abraham Lincoln. Reagan was not an especially warm person, but he appeared to be. Many people disliked his policies, but almost no one disliked him.
I think that Obama is very cool. And I think he’s clever, and I think he can be witty. But I don’t think he’s funny in either the way that Reagan was funny – or John McCain and Dick Cheney are both funny in that ruthless, kind of mean way.
Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the twentieth century.
The early favorite for the GOP nomination and ‘natural’ heir to Reagan was Vice President George H.W. Bush. But Bush was an imperfect fit for the party’s base.
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.
I didn’t realize until high school that the man wearing a cowboy hat on the poster in our garage was actually Ronald Reagan, so my parents just – it was how we were, I grew up on five acres of land in Flagstaff, Arizona and we really just lived a conservative lifestyle.
I remember those great days when we were at $176 million before the Reagan Revolution came to town.
Ronald Reagan helped me become a Republican.
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.
I was a big fan of Ronald Reagan. He was the first president I got to vote for.
With Ed Wood, it was this sort of blending of Ronald Reagan, the Tin Man from ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ and Casey Kasem.
Ronald Reagan will be remembered for leading the United States during a time of tremendous international transition – the demise of the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall coming down, and the end of the Cold War.
In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.
Reagan wrote out many of his radio commentaries and newspaper articles as well as many of his own speeches. He wrote poetry, short stories, and letters. Trump, in his own hand, writes 140-character tweets.
I was friends with President Ronald Reagan and he once said to me, ‘I don’t know how anybody can serve in public office without being an actor.’
Ronald Reagan succeeded in bringing down the Iron Curtain by showing strength and resolutely standing up to the Soviet Union. President Trump needs to be similarly resolute towards Putin.
Once the religious right got their beachhead in the Republican Party in 1980, they expanded it. Even Barry Goldwater was extremely hostile to the religious right, but Reagan catered to them. The religious right then expanded their base and that drove the moderates out.
Actually, my wine was served at the White House twice. Reagan must have been asleep when he ordered it.
Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their G’s and saying things in a folksy sort of way that’s meant to capture the hearts of people. And it’s all fraud; it’s all stagecraft. And people are falling for a great deal of elite behavior in this country packaged as if it’s proletariat behavior.
The rule for effective governance is simple. It is one Ronald Reagan knew by heart. And one that he successfully employed with Social Security and the Cold War. When there is a problem, you fix it. That is the job you have been sent to do and you cannot wait for someone else to do it for you.
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.
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.
President Reagan, of course, did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security.
I actually have several busts of Ronald Reagan that have been presented to me.
President Ronald Reagan used to speak of the Soviet constitution, and he noted that it purported to grant wonderful rights of all sorts to people. But those rights were empty promises, because that system did not have an independent judiciary to uphold the rule of law and enforce those rights.
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.’
President Trump has rebuilt the American military to an extent we haven’t seen since Ronald Reagan.
Reagan used to say that ‘we’re a country with a government.’ Well, now we’re a government with a country, and we’re making everybody else that way, too.
Nothing could make me forget what the Reagan years had actually been like.
As a candidate, Obama projected himself as a new Reagan, above narrow party politics. He wanted to please all but has ended up annoying many.
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.
To my mind, a president should care about all people, and he didn’t, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.
When Reagan was elected, I felt that the Agency had gone much more into the service of a political tendency in the country with which I had already felt very strong disagreement.
We all obviously need others to look up to, and be inspirational to us. Ford did a great job as far as putting the presidency back where it belonged, getting the trust back after Nixon. And President Reagan has been one of the most influential presidents.
Ronald Reagan in foreign affairs, I think, was someone who had certain, very general ideas, general propositions by which he lives: To combat communism, to build up the American military power to assure our national security against any conceivable threat.
Since Ronald Reagan we have had this assumption in the United States that the Republicans are the party of the military, the Republicans are the party of patriotism, the Republicans are the party of American values.
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.
Reagan has very significant things to teach us – positive lessons and quite negative lessons.
It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.
Movement Conservatism was a fringe force from the 1950s until the 1980s, when voters elected Movement Conservative Ronald Reagan to the White House. But even then, their control of the Republican Party was not a given.
Ronald Reagan, when he was campaigning for President, said that he would break relations with Communist China and re-establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But when he got into office, he pursued a very different policy of engagement with China and of increasing trade and business ties with China.
I wanted to be a senator from Illinois. I was obsessed with politics. My dad was friends with a lot of local politicians, so I would hang out with them on Election Day and hand out buttons. Somehow, even though they were opposite, I loved Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. I thought they were the coolest guys!
I think Ronald Reagan was one of the great presidents, period, not just recently. I thought he had the demeanor. I thought he had the bearing. I thought he had the thought process.
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 remember the ’80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.
So I would say Reagan was the best, and certainly Clinton the worst.
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’s legacy is deeply misunderstood because there are political actors in America who, for several reasons, have privately held agendas that they want to sell to the American public in the most appealing way possible. They often find the best way to do that is to package their product with the Reagan brand.
I like Ronald Reagan, who didn’t play crass politics, and he just articulated and delivered on broad themes that were needed. Free markets meant free markets. Deregulation. Lower tax rates. Strong national defense. And he was credible and believable.
I believe that Reagan’s a radical on arms control.
Like Reagan, President Trump strives for good relations with all nations, including Russia. But no nation, including Russia, should doubt the president’s commitment to defending the United States and our allies.
Make America Great Again was a political slogan. It was used before, I believe Ronald Reagan used it before. It was about making America great and rallying America. Unfortunately, I would say 10 percent of the population that voted for President Trump has a different view. They have embraced it as ‘Make America White Again.’
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.
In the event of the death of a current or former President, like the recent death of President Ronald Reagan, the flag should be flown at half-staff for thirty days from the day of the death.
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.
John Lewis Gaddis is not only the favorite historian of the Reagan administration, but he’s regarded as the dean of Cold War scholarship, the leading figure in the American Cold War scholarship, a professor at Yale.
It is essential for politicians to make a connection with us, as Franklin Roosevelt did, as Teddy Roosevelt did, as John F. Kennedy did, as Ronald Reagan did.
The Hollywood of Frank Capra’s era, when Reagan became a minor star, sold the world an image of American pith and patriotism in many ways as defining as the moon landing or the A-bomb.
I’m a Reagan Republican, which means I don’t speak ill of other Republicans.
We have to be very cognizant of the fact that 90 percent of the electronic media in this country is owned, operated, programmed, and controlled by conservatives. They made a concerted effort during and before the Reagan years that they were going to get the microphone.
In the 1980s, Democrats enthusiastically helped President Reagan pass his tax reforms, which made the tax system fairer and more efficient in addition to reducing rates.
We’re seeing conservatives and evangelicals and libertarian and Reagan Democrats all coming together as one, and that terrifies Washington, D.C.
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.
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.
Whatever you think about his intelligence, what’s unquestionable is that Reagan had extraordinary emotional intelligence. He could sense the temperature of a room, and tell them a story and make them feel good. And that’s more fun, right? It’s more fun to feel good than feel bad. That’s part of our human state.
Ronald Reagan was very successful.
In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children’s children.
A troubled economy is always the sitting president’s fault. It was when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, when Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush, and when Barack Obama defeated John McCain by running against George W. Bush.
Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.
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?
It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’
At the height of the Cold War, when Ronald Reagan was president, the Soviets and their allies and satellites did not shirk human rights debates with the West. They had their arguments ready.
In the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.
During Ronald Reagan’s administration, ’60 Minutes’ ran a segment about the difference between Reagan’s rhetoric and Reagan’s actions. The show thought it had produced a hard-hitting piece; Reagan’s team called up ’60 Minutes’ to thank them for the 15-minute commercial.
Reagan is the Republican FDR, an exemplar of presidential greatness.
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 George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a strong conservative, ran to continue the third term of Ronald Reagan, continue the Ronald Reagan revolution. Then he raised taxes and in ’92 ran as an establishment moderate – same candidate, two very different campaigns.
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.
The words spoken by the leader of the free world can expand the frontiers of freedom or shrink them. When Ronald Reagan called on Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’, a surge of confidence rose that would ultimately breach the bounds of the evil empire.
Several things about Reagan are unusual in a public man. He was not a typical politician at all, but a private man in public life.
In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.
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.
In 1980, in 1984, millions of middle-class Democrats became Reagan Democrats, and more of them drifted toward the Republicans with Bush in 1988.
Sinatra had a lot of mood swings, but he was wonderful to my wife Barbara and to me. He made no bones about who he liked and who he loved, and he had this great charisma. When he walked into a room, it stopped. I’ve only seen that happen with Ronald Reagan.
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.
President Reagan preached ‘trickle down economics’ but naively did not reckon on the fact that the wealthy would only care about getting more for themselves instead of caring about helping those with less.
I have three favorite politicians: Reagan, Truman, and Bobby Kennedy – Bobby for showing remarkable political courage despite being loathed by many on both sides.
Everyone seemed to want a piece of Ronald Reagan. It was maddening.
I’ll confess that, from an early age, I was a huge fan of President Reagan because my parents bought me an enormous stuffed monkey that they named President Reagan – yes, I get it now.
Everything is about looking for happiness and God. That was a sentiment shared by my dear friend Ronald Reagan.
Don’t worry, America. We survived Jimmy Carter, and we will survive Barack Obama. Only one questions remains… who is the next Ronald Reagan?
Ronald Reagan became, you know, not only a Republican but a pretty conservative Republican – not the most. But a pretty conservative Republican. And he’s somebody that I actually knew and liked. And he liked me. And I worked with him and helped him.
The values that I hold are consistent with the party of Lincoln, the party of Reagan, and the party of Trump, of the Republican Party, and so I’m honored to stand with the president.
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.
You’ll notice that Nancy Reagan never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.
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.
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.
The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.
The American pledge not to negotiate with terrorists has been honored more in the breach than the observance from the moment President Ronald Reagan made it.
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.
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.
Mr. Reagan spent World War II, the global conflict fought and won by his generation, making training films in Hollywood.
President Reagan achieved such successes because when you sat in a room with him, there could be over 1,000 people in the room, yet you felt like there was only the two of you, and his wonderful wit would put you at ease. That was a tremendous gift.
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.
One of the things I learned in editing ‘The Reagan Diaries’ is to never say what Reagan would do, because he surprised people.
I’m glad Reagan is president. Of course, I’m a professional comedian.
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.
I first met Kim Dae Jung when he was a Korean dissident whose life was threatened by the military regime ruling in Seoul. I was Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, and Kim was directed to me because the East Asia Bureau at the State Department had long shunned him.
Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan each suffered through his second four years. FDR was checkmated by Congress and the Supreme Court. Ike was dogged by Sputnik and reckless charges that the United States suffered from a Missile Gap. Reagan had to wend his way through Iran-Contra.
Nixon had this remarkably effective, deeply intense will to power. Reagan and I have a will to ideas.
We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.
‘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.
While only about half of the voters feel they know very much about Reagan or what he stands for, the Republicans who do have a very positive perception of him.
Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.
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.
Ronald Reagan, of course, was a Republican governor of California who went through a painful defeat in the 1976 presidential race before winning four years later.
I am involved with politics today because of the inspiration I received from Ronald Reagan.
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.
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not – and more often than liberals – about most of the important issues of the day.
Reagan never cottoned to dictators. He was pure in this notion in a true belief that democracy was the best solution in the world because it spoke to people’s hopes and dreams and aspirations, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of speech.
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both had exceptional natural abilities. Nelson Rockefeller was very good statewide but never gained national traction.
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 reason Ronald Reagan gets slammed for having so badly exacerbated the problem of deficit spending is that he so plainly deserves it.
When Chelsea was 9 months old, I was defeated for reelection in the Reagan landslide. And I became overnight, I think, the youngest former governor in the history of the country. We only had two-year terms back then.
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.
If you go back and look at President Reagan’s speeches, they bring you to tears almost.
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’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.
I helped Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp develop supply-side economics.
The first thing that I really understood politically and was old enough to get was the failed assassination attempt on Reagan.
The only thing that would really make my mother angry would be if I liked horror movies or violence or Ronald Reagan. And very violent films were a way for me to rebel. You have to rebel against your parents.
The U.S. – the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that’s hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan.
The first news event I understood as a small child was the loss of the space shuttle Challenger, which President Reagan eloquently mourned from the Oval that evening.
It took Jimmy Carter to give us Ronald Reagan.
Under Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., there was a rewriting of the basic rules of capitalism. These two governments changed the rules governing labour bargaining, weakening trade unions, and they weakened anti-trust enforcement, allowing more monopolies to be created.
People in my hometown voted for President Reagan – for many, like my grandpa, he was their first Republican – because he promised that tax cuts would bring higher wages and new jobs. It seemed he was right, so we voted for the next Republican promising tax cuts and job creation, George W. Bush. He wasn’t right.
Reagan was the conservative Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
I was a Reagan backer. It was a shock for some people that I could agree with anything that man would say.
I talked to Reagan for about six hours all told. and Reagan was willing to go along with it. He didn’t look at his watch, and he didn’t allow his campaign aides to cut it off.
Over the course of two terms, President Reagan revolutionized the Republican Party and changed the political atmosphere in a way still being felt today.
Often dismissed or underestimated by political opponents, President Reagan had the most valuable weapon in the political arsenal: a bond with the people.
Washington couldn’t tell a lie, Nixon couldn’t tell the truth, and Reagan couldn’t tell the difference.
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.
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.
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.
If you look at the very best presidents, the most effective presidents, they were always decent salespeople. Ronald Reagan was an extremely effective salesman, very tuned to the people he was selling to, very clear in what he was selling, very resilient and buoyant.
I don’t have heroes, exactly, but I do have people I hold in high respect. Ronald Reagan, for example, stood for ideals that I value: integrity, patriotism and a fundamental belief in goodness and capabilities of mankind.
Under Ronald Reagan, hatred of the liberal media took on a storybook quality. Reagan had honed his political skills as a spokesman for General Electric.
It wasn’t like anybody said, ‘Oh, Ronald Reagan will have a landslide in 1980.’ In fact, you look back at the Dukakis numbers, the Perot numbers, there was always this presumption that the Republican was going to lose. Not just that the Democrat would win, but that the Republican was going to lose.
I changed to Republican when Reagan became president because I wanted to see a change to years of Democrat-run Senate. And I voted Republican until Obama. I think he’s terrific.
Carter’s hopes died when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and he ended up having to reverse policy and launch the military buildup that Reagan continued. Mr. Obama would be forced back into a war on terror if terrorist groups pull off enough damaging or frightening attacks to force this issue to the fore.
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.
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.
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.
One of the great changes wrought by the increased public awareness of Alzheimer’s – and thank you, Nancy Reagan, you wonderful tough old dame, you – is that people in the early stages of the disease are now speaking out while they still have the capacity to do so.
The Reagan Administration, generally regarded as having conducted the most successful Transition of modern times, had managed during the election campaign to build bridges to the Democrats in some areas, notably foreign and national security policy.
Donald Trump is producing the kind of shoot-the-moon economic recovery that we last saw under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He’s copied a lot of the Reagan playbook: Deregulate, cut taxes, promote American energy.
The first reports of AIDS closely followed the inauguration of President Ronald Reagan, whose ‘family values’ agenda and alliance with Christian conservatives associated AIDS with deviance and sin.
In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.
I think the Reagan people are superb marketers. Their whole approach to polling, to television, to the symbolism and the rest approaches genius.
We all should be concerned if our kids don’t know who Sandra Day O’Connor, John Adams, and Ronald Reagan are.
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.
Again, President Reagan was sort of an amiable presence out at the ranch by the last 6 months of his presidency. He had no effect on national policy at all.
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.
I keep Reagan’s 11th Commandment that I don’t run down other Republicans.
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.
I was a graduate student in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan called for the construction of a new space station. I knew then that I wanted to apply for the astronaut program, and this was an exciting development.
I became a huge Reagan admirer.
He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn’t. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.
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.
