Morning in America

84 presidential elections ad for Ronald Reagan campaign.

Barack Obama is too much like a Jimmy Carter clone. Why would we want to put America through that again?

Tear Down This Wall

President Ronald Reagan
Remarks at the Brandenburg Gate
West Berlin, Germany
June 12, 1987

Government IS the Problem

President Reagan, inaugeration day 1981. He re-iterates his promise from the campaign, to reduce the size of government.

We Begin Bombing in Five Minutes

I still remember hearing about this the day it happened. The media was incredulous. I was ecstatic.

Reagan always did love a good joke at the Soviet's (and the media's) expense.

President Ronald Reagan, August 11, 1984

Reagan's Humor

When things are the way they are in a presidential election year, it really helps to have a good laugh now and then.

It also helps to remember what phenomenal leadership was like, and that it is possible to have it in Washington.

Here's to President Ronald Reagan, the greatest president of the Twentieth Century. Long may our memory of him live!

GOP should reflect on Reagan's Berlin Wall speech, 21 years later

BY STAR PARKER
FOUNDER & PRESIDENT
COALITION ON URBAN RENEWAL & EDUCATION

For conservatives and Republicans who are wondering what in the world happened to their party, we should recall June 12, 1987.

That day, exactly 21 years ago, President Ronald Reagan stood before the wall dividing East and West Berlin and directed his famous appeal to the leader of the then Soviet Union, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."

The rest, as they say, is history. Two and half years later, the wall was down and a new chapter begun.

It's always worth recalling Reagan's courageous act and words of that time. But we particularly should consider it now in light of today's Republican conundrums.

I turn to the well-known account by then-Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson about how it all came about.

The story of Reagan's Berlin speech, as recounted by Robinson, is about change and fighting the Washington establishment. Exactly the themes we're hearing almost every day now from our current presidential aspirants.

Robinson wrote the speech for President Reagan, including the famous "tear down this wall" line, and submitted it for review. The opposition to it from the administration's entire foreign policy establishment was uniform and adamant.

The National Security Council and the State Department were opposed, as was our highest-ranking diplomat in Germany. They felt it was too provocative and too unrealistic.

But, the president liked it.

After several drafts, at a meeting to review the speech, Robinson told Reagan that his words would be broadcast on the other side of the wall, in East Berlin. Robinson asked him if he had anything to say to those people.

"Well, there's the passage about tearing down the wall," Reagan said. "That wall has to come down. That's what I'd like to say."

Seven drafts later, the establishment was still trying to purge the speech. Reagan was on Air Force One, en route to Berlin, when there was a last attempt to block it. But the speech was delivered, including the historic line, which stayed in, according to Robinson, "solely because of Ronald Reagan."

Reagan's leadership established the Republican brand in the 1980s, which stayed in ascendancy throughout the 90s, even through Clinton's presidency, when Republicans captured the House.

Bill Clinton himself drew capital off this brand, running as a fiscally conservative "new Democrat." It was Clinton that told us that the "era of big government is over" and signed into law historic welfare reform in 1996, sent to him by the new Republican controlled Congress.

Now we've watched Republicans turn the Congress over to the Democratic Party and it appears likely that they will do the same with the White House.

The "liberal" label is no longer the political death ray it was in the 90s. Sen. Barack Obama's record is as left as you can get, yet it is doubtful that Republicans will defeat him by simply pointing this out.

New Gallup polling on party identification shows Republicans or those leaning Republican at 39 percent. For Democrats, the corresponding figure is 52 percent -- the biggest gap in party identification in years.

How has the Republican Party managed to thoroughly squander the commanding heights achieved under Reagan's leadership?

Unfortunately, courage and leadership are rare. Reagan understood and was committed to what this country is uniquely about -- traditional values and individual freedom.

Most come to Washington for careers, not to serve. With Reagan's departure, the risk-averse, career motivated establishment, which quaked at the idea of the president publicly challenging the Soviet Union, or taking principled stands on anything, began to take over.

Republican politicians have also lost touch with their own base. A Pew Research Center survey shows that Republicans are more religious now than they were 20 years ago. Today's Republican leadership refuses to acknowledge that the social agenda has increased in importance.

My office in Washington is in the Reagan Building, where a piece of the Berlin Wall is on display. It's a reminder of a great leader and how the Republican brand has been tarnished by many less principled and less committed.


Star Parker is president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal & Education and author of the new book White Ghetto: How Middle Class America Reflects Inner City Decay.

Prior to her involvement in social activism, Star Parker was a single welfare mother in Los Angeles, California. After receiving Christ, Star returned to college, received a BS degree in marketing and launched an urban Christian magazine. The 1992 Los Angeles riots destroyed her business, yet served as a springboard for her focus on faith and market-based alternatives to empower the lives of the poor.

Ronald Reagan on Adoption

A Ronald Reagan radio address from 1975 addresses the topics of abortion and adoption. This comes from a collection of audio commentaries titled "Reagan in His Own Voice."



I listened to a compilation of Reagan's radio addresses a few years ago, and I believe it was the set referenced in this video.

Good Lord Almighty, America needs someone like this again!

Reagan on Rushmore

John McCaslin's column at TownHall.com revives what many of us have been thinking about for years: adding Ronald Reagan to Mount Rushmore.

"Let's not just talk about putting Ronald Reagan on Rushmore, let's show it," says former ambassador Fred J. Eckert, a staunchly conservative former Republican congressman from New York. Mr. Eckert served two tours of duty as a U.S. ambassador under Mr. Reagan, and National Journal once ranked him as the member of Congress most supportive of the Gipper's agenda.

The piece contains a reference to a website where you can see a picture of what Mount Rushmore would look like, graced by the Gipper.

Reagan accomplished great things, things great enough to easily put him in the company of the other men on Mount Rushmore.

- Brought America back from an economic train wreck
- High inflation
- High unemployment
- High interest rates

- Brought America back from a time when we were politically and militarily disgraced by events such as the Iran hostage crisis, giving up the Panama Canal

- Restored confidence and morale in America with his positive outlook and pride-instilling pro-American policies

- Reduced astronomically high tax rates, unleashing an incredible economic boom

- Launched an unprecedented campaign to beat the Soviet Union militarily and economically, resulting in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet communism.

Presidents like Reagan usually only come along about once every 100 years. Reagan brought this nation back from the land of mediocrity and even the precipice of destruction. It would be hard to overstate Reagan's accomplishment in the life and health of the United States.

I'd love to see him on Mt. Rushmore.

Tearing Down the Wall

CNS News commemorates the 20th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's "Tear down this wall" speech, also pointing out that Reagan had been calling for the wall to come down for a long time:

Reagan is on record as having called for the Berlin Wall to be dismantled as early as May 1967, when as governor of California he appeared in a debate with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.).

"Reagan was way ahead of everyone," Kengor told Cybercast News Service in an interview. "Right from outset, he envisioned a world without the Soviet Union, when even his political allies on the right pre-supposed it would be around for a long time."

At the time, liberals in the media and everywhere else were aghast that Reagan would say such a thing to their secret idols in the Soviet Union.

I was in England when the Wall came down, and I remember the euphoria felt by Europeans during that time. On New Years Eve 1989 I was celebrating with some British friends, and as we partied in the streets, I don't think there's ever been a time when I was so thanked for being a U.S. serviceman, with dozens of complete strangers hugging me and girls kissing me and thanking me (and so many others) for being there in Europe to force this change.

I now have a chunk of that wall downstairs in my mementos, and there is a section of that wall near the Civic Center in Rapid City. They remind me and all of us of the brutality and failure of Marxism, and also of what can be accomplished when people resolutely stand against evil.

Ronald Reagan and Branson, Missouri

I visited the famous Branson, Missouri for the first time last week with my family.

As we drove around and observed the multitude of places to see music and other shows, with a "Strip" that is sometimes called a family-friendly version of Las Vegas, not to mention all the amusement attractions, I found myself wondering "Why Branson, MO?"

The reason I asked this is because while the town is easy to access from Kansas City with a divided 4-lane highway all the way, it's still off the beaten path. And from the south (i.e. from the Little Rock, Arkansas direction), you end up on several stretches of two-lane highway going through a lot of little towns. It's just a little town of 6,000 or so residents. So how did Branson, MO become such a famous place? I found the answer in the World's Largest Toy Museum in Branson.

As you make your way through this interesting museum full of toys (some recent, some I played with as a kid, and some that my grand-dad must have played with), you will eventually come to a little chapel-like area that has a half-hour video playing in a loop.

It tells the story of Harold Bell Wright; if you're like me, maybe you've never heard of him, or don't recall hearing of him. But he was a famous writer from the first half of the 20th Century. He wrote a book about the Ozarks called "The Shepherd of the Hills" in 1907. People began to visit the Branson area after reading the popular book, and "Branson" was born.

Being a great admirer of Ronald Reagan, I was pleased to learn of Branson's connection with the greatest president of the 20th Century. I read in "God and Ronald Reagan" about how as a boy Reagan had read Harold Bell Wright's "That Printer of Udell's" and how, based on Reagan's own statement, it seemed to play some role in Reagan's acceptance of Christianity. I had forgotten the author's name and the connection until visiting the toy museum.

There is a display near the beginning of the toy museum tour that tells this Reagan story and shows the letter Reagan wrote to Jean Wright in 1984.

I'd highly recommend Branson as a great place for family-friendly fun, and as an interesting connection for those of you who may admire Ronald Reagan as much as I do. The folks who run the World's Largest Toy Museum are some of the nicest people you'll ever run across, too.