With the stock market cruising at all-time highs and the unemployment rate sitting at quaint levels, a fashionable new argument is making the rounds. Barack Obama is better at economic recovery than Ronald Reagan ever was. The numbers make the case. Dow Jones Industrial Average the day President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009 was [...]
I’m happy to be back with you in this annual event after missing last year’s meeting. I had some business in New Hampshire that wouldn’t wait. Three weeks ago here in our nation’s capital I told a group of conservative scholars that we are currently in the midst of a re-ordering of the political realities [...]
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI almost a year after the June 2004 death of Ronald Reagan. I don’t know if Ratzinger and Reagan ever met, though there’s a chance they did during one of Reagan’s visits to the Vatican to meet with Pope John Paul II, especially his first and most prominent visit, [...]
In 1980, that terrible year of stagflation, when Ronald Reagan was gaining the Republican nomination for president, dueling editorials appeared in the Wall Street Journal about “The Battle for Reagan’s Soul.” The first, by that title, came from neo-conservative sage Irving Kristol, who alerted readers that an effort was on by the establishment to capture [...]
It is hard not to laugh when my students think they are imitating or comprehending the zeitgeist of—whether to honor or mock—the 1980s. Though, in almost every way, it is impossible to fault them for this. The individual members of the incoming freshman class will have entered this world sometime in 1996 or 1997, a [...]
Born in the U.S.A., which turns 30 this week, is Bruce Springsteen’s best-selling album to date, and that should come as no surprise. Its songs—“I’m On Fire,” “Glory Days,” “Darlington County” and others—are FM radio staples, their foursquare drum, piano, base and guitar parts perfectly at home in either a Jersey Shore bar or an [...]
President Reagan was holding a meeting in the Cabinet Room on March 25, 1985, when Press Secretary Larry Speakes came over to me, as communications director, with a concern. The White House was about to issue a statement on the killing of Major Arthur Nicholson, a U.S. army officer serving in East Germany. Maj. Nicholson [...]
Ronald Reagan was indeed a giant among men, a true Man of the West, and conservatives should rightly and proudly claim him as one of their own. “Very soon, all too soon, your government will need not just extraordinary men—but men with greatness,” Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said during his visit to the U.S. Capitol [...]
Can public education in the United States be saved? Given the stranglehold of teachers’ unions over school districts and state legislatures, the constant meddling of an ideologically motivated federal Education Department, the sheer weight of bureaucracy, and the commitment to mediocrity? Perhaps not. But we all should keep in mind that things could be far [...]
“I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy, By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” —Walt Whitman [1] Ronald Reagan’s vision of America’s role in the world, especially as it was expressed in his presidential speeches, continues to resonate with many Americans. President George [...]
Remember when people were saying that the old Republican ideas, the venerable supply-side reforms that first made their mark in the Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s, were no longer relevant in terms of getting us out of our rut today, on account of their already having been made policy? It was only yesterday that [...]
Ronald Reagan's 1981 speech Today many Americans heard the inauguration speech of President Obama. Perhaps it would be beneficial to compare his speech to that of President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Which is more inspiring? Which speech better represents the aspirations of the citizens of the American Republic? Books on President Ronald Reagan [...]
William F. Buckley, Jr., Flying High: Remembering Barry Goldwater (Basic Books, 2008). Buckley’s book, Flying High, is much more a memoir of the conservative movement in the early 1960s than it is a biography of Goldwater. Indeed, without the subtitle and the book dust jacket bearing a picture of Goldwater campaigning in 1964, this might very well have [...]
I will admit, with only the slightest embarrassment, that the November elections depressed me mightily. As early as mid summer, I promised myself not to get worked up about the current state of politics. One candidate seemed frightful, and the other dreadfully dull. Neither vice presidential candidate did much for me, either, though a [...]