Why Can't Republicans Explain Economics Like Reagan Did?

It is but one of many questions about today's Republican party and how Ronald Reagan did transform basic GOP thinking on issue after issue.
But one thing that eludes those seeking office is what is a fundamental difference between conservative economic policy vs. liberal/left economic policy.
This piece by Henry Olsen at The Corner on National Review Online seeks to remind today's GOP that a big reason why people who might be aligned with conservative economics but find those explaining it not so engaged with the average American, working man and woman.
As Mr. Olsen noted that Mr. Reagan made clear that all of America was involved in the concept of job creation. Essentially, Mr. Reagan made clear that he probably would not dismiss, out of hand, the labor union-backed efforts to get fast-food workers a "living" wage of about $15 an hour. He would use the opportunity to point out how the worker is as important as the entrepreneur.
What I see, and yes have been part of, is that most conservatives see the entrepreneur as the hero and the worker as some kind of lout. After all, the entrepreneur is putting his or her money on the line. The worker should be glad to have the job. Mitt Romney blew his whole campaign by saying the infamous 47% line at a private fund raiser that was videotaped by an intrepid lefty truth-sqauder.
Note to GOP candidates for office. Assume that nothing, not even a private fund raiser is private. Don't say anything that you would not say in any other campaign appearance.
I admit that while Mr. Romney had a correct point, it did kind of sort of play right into the hands of the class warfare warriors. I mean, Mr. Reagan talked about Welfare Queens. Yet with a negative, there was the positive with Mr. Reagan.
What the left has done with success is create the impression that they are always on the side of the worker. Maybe they pay lip service to the small businessman/woman. But when one looks at the modern Democrat party, they are in the hip pocket of the hip, lefty billionaire businessmen/women. Yet the Republican party is to this day seen as the party of the rich. Again, compare Mr. Romney and Mr. Reagan in articulating the basic economic message.
If you don't get that, here is the one time Mr. Reagan even discussed the entrepreneur in a speech in the 1980s as president:

We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we’re in a time when there are not heroes, they just don’t know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they’re on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They’re individuals and families whose taxes support the government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet, but deep. Their values sustain our national life.
Now, I have used the words “they” and “their” in speaking of these heroes. I could say “you” and “your,” because I’m addressing the heroes of whom I speak — you, the citizens of this blessed land.

There was no 47% reference I read. There was no us vs. them that the left promotes. There was nothing along the lines of class welfare.
What Mr. Reagan was saying is that anyone can be and should aspire to be that entrepreneur. But that the worker is as much of value as the entrepreneur.
Thus, what Republican today does that?
It appears that Sen. Mitch McConnell was sort of trying to do that in a speech at an American Enterprise Institute, AEI, conference last week.
I know, I know.
Why would I quote something from this RINO*? He is not a conservative at all! He is part of the problem.
Well, I think that Sen. McConnell fits the He's been in Washington too long category. But in my theory of the broken clock, which is right twice a day, Sen. McConnell stumbled into some truth.
This is the highlight of what he said. And a warning, he does take a swipe at Ayn Rand. But not really if you open up and read what he said:

And yet, I think it must also be admitted that in our rush to defend the American entrepreneur from the daily depredations of an administration that seems to view any profit-making enterprise with deep suspicion — that we have often lost sight of the fact that our average voter is not John Galt. It’s a good impulse, to be sure. But for most Americans, whose daily concerns revolve around aging parents, long commutes, shrinking budgets, and obscenely high tuition bills, these hymns to entrepreneurialism are, as a practical matter, largely irrelevant. And the audience for them is probably a lot smaller than we think. So I do think we’d do well as a party to get down to the basics. As Mona Charen recently put it, ‘Less talk of job creators and more talk of job-earners would be welcome.’”

I think that Sen. McConnell is correct. The average voter is not John Galt. Sure, they may get a lot of his overall point, but they don't want to get government that completely out of one's life. And many understand that a government that gets so big can take away a lot of what we come to know as rights and or basic forms or norms of everyday life.
I recommend reading Mr. Olsen's article in National Affairs that I have linked as a brief history primer and a good road map to getting the Republican party on track to explain what makes conservative economic policy superior to liberal/left economic policy.
Basic Republican governing philosophy is simple.
Government is necessary. But it should be a little and limited as possible. It should be bottom-up and not top down. Government is best starting at the local level, cities, counties and states. The federal government should be as limited as possible. It should not be concerned with Podunk, Iowa as much as New York City.
Mr. Olsen is onto something here. And another actual politician, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, also gets it.
That the GOP must be a party that working class voters and women can and should be a part of.
Hello?!
That is what we call today the Reagan Democrats. Most of those voters are already Republicans today.
But, what does the consultant class that dominates the current GOP think about those voters? Eh, not so much. Thus they push so-called comprehensive immigration "reform". They do not care to really explain how allowing many low-income workers to become Americans will help them. Hint: It won't.
When Mr. Reagan dealt with immigration reform, he at least had the stones to say it was amnesty and it was when the economy was in the middle of a full-steam recovery.
Reagan Democrats are out there for the picking. They will become good Republicans and already have a lot of conservatism already in their bones. They are the ones that sign up to join whatever branch of the armed forces. They are the ones that are traditional in outlook. Many are church-goers and temple-goers and mosque-goers. They do make for the best workers anywhere.
And they go beyond race. Anyone can be and is right now a Reagan Democrat that would love to look at the Republican party. But they don't look at the party because they have rightful misgivings about it. And no, it's not because of their stand on immigration policy.
It is because most of those that want to look at the GOP and are still Democrats and or "independent" still think that the party is the environs of the eeeeevvvvviiiiilllll, filthy, stinking RICH folks.
Of course I can show how untrue that is, but why use that? Because most of those people will not believe it. That at this point, much of corporate America is in the hip pocket of the Democrat party. It does not matter.
One needs to speak to the people in a way that Mr. Reagan did. And one of the reasons is that at one time, Mr. Reagan was a Democrat. He was at a time that Democrats were more like Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy. That they spoke of a better America for all and not for a fill-in-the-group of the moment.
Of course it would be hard to find a lot of former Democrats that become Republicans and can explain a simple fact the way that Ronald Reagan did. And yes, how the United States is a great nation and that the sky's-the-limit, not a time of restraint and or malaise. And yes, that there are rights and wrongs in the United States.
So it does come down to people like Mr. Santorum to talk to the regular folks and say to them, yes, there is a place for you in the Republican party. Yes, I understand the economic anxiety you feel. Yes, the tax structure is out of touch with how every day people live. Yes, the United States has lost it's moral way. Yes, the United States is the greatest nation in the world and I am not ashamed of it.
It is because people like Mr. Santorum and Mr. Reagan believe those ideas. And yes, even Sen. McConnell finally treaded to that understanding.
Here is the thing.
The Republican party will expand beyond the White middle class when it can articulate that those ideas are not just the purview of Whites but of all Americans. We can not have one of the wealthiest men run for president and essentially write off 47% of the potential voting public as government freeloaders. And on that point, Mr. Romney had it somewhat correct. But it can not be done flippantly or off the cuff.
I don't know if Mr. Santorum is the one to carry the Reagan mantle in 2016. He currently has a great position being out of government for making the conservative case to a wide audience. Some like Sen. Marco Rubio have the opportunity as well.
But if we do not reach out to the next generation of Reagan Democrats effectively and in governing, the conservative cause and the Republican party will truly be on the margins of political life in the United States.

A Visit With Abraham Lincoln And Ronald Reagan

Yesterday for my birthday, before you ask I turned 49 years old, Mrs. RVFTLC treated your humble blogger to a visit to the Reagan Library and we also took in the temporary exhibit on the 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.
FTR, I think that all presidential libraries are worth a visit no matter your politics. It is important to see the way that they saw the world during their tenure as president. As well as where they were from and how they eventually became president.
Of course I believe that Ronald Reagan was the best president of my lifetime. And it had been five years since the last visit I took at the Reagan Library.
Wisely, the powers that be have updated the touring area of the library. With the addition of the Air Force One plane that Mr. Reagan flew during his presidency, they updated and moved some of the displays around.
One thing that I highly recommend is to pay the extra $7 dollars for the audio/video guide cam. It is Mr. and Mrs. Reagan telling some of the events near and dear to them. But it is an iPod and you can take photos and videos of the visit. Once done, you take the iPod back to the visitor center and then you will get an e-mail of the photos of video within a day. We got ours by midnight last night.
What made the Lincoln exhibit was that it was full of historical artifacts, but blended some of the settings for the wildly successful Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln. What I realized is how Mr. Spielberg and those that worked under him took great care to be as accurate as possible in what sets looked like. But what was more amazing is the fact that, sadly, Abraham Lincoln would probably never be elected president in this modern age.
Let's face it, Mr. Lincoln was no looker. He was tall, six feet, four inches, lanky and a brooding looking fellow. That beard that is now iconic would be seen as making him look old. The fact that he was in the right on keeping the United States just that, united states, would probably not be seen in the best light. And emancipating the slaves? Well that was a huge cause of the War Between the States, also known as the Civil War. And there were those other ideas like Homesteading, allowing the railroads to build a link from the East coast to the West coast, having economic policies that would allow more people to rise up to a middle class, that would not be seen as good to many people.
But maybe it is projecting too much of 1860s America to 2013 America. It really is hard to take a leader of that time and figure out how he would be today.
Not the case with Mr. Reagan.
In the library is an interactive area in which there is a video of Mr. Reagan's breakout speech for then Republican presidential candidate, Sen. Barry M. Goldwater called A Time For Choosing. Here is The Speech, as it became known, from You Tube:

The irony of watching The Speech and seeing the interactive is how some of the issues, especially the size of government and the debilitating effects of the then burgeoning Welfare State, is no different from the debate that we are having today. One could replace the battle between the West and the Communist East with the West and Radical Islam and get to the same strongly similar analysis Mr. Reagan provided 49 years ago in 1964.
The Speech is was eventually catapulted Mr. Reagan to eventually become the governor of California and eventually President of the United States.
I think that there is one striking similarity between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Reagan.
Both men spoke what seemed to be unpopular truths at their times and yet history has proven them to be right.
That is what makes going to presidential libraries so interesting. To see what things were like when those people were at the apex of their political power. To see all about the world in their time. Not just the politics but the popular culture, what was on the minds of the people then compared to today.
I would recommend taking in the Reagan Library and especially the Lincoln exhibit over the summer.

You Know, There May Not Have Been The Supreme Court Vote On Same Sex Marriage The Way It Was Yesterday If Robert Bork Was Confirmed In 1986

I know, I know, a   l   o     n      g  headline, but a very important historical point about the current make-up of the supreme court and how had one vote been different way back when, this outcome on same-sex marriage may not have happened.
Let's take a trip in the Wayback Machine to 1986 when then President Reagan had a supreme court vacancy.
Mr. Reagan decided to nominate a very capable person by the name of Robert Bork to fill that vacancy.
Who is Robert Bork you may ask?
At the time he was nominated to fill the vacancy, he was a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He was nominated and confirmed by the senate in 1982.
Forward six years later and Judge Bork was asked to fill the vacancy due to the retirement of then Justice Lewis Powell.
So far, seems OK. I mean, the president no matter who or she is has a right to nominate who they see fit to be on the highest court in the land.
NO, NO, NO!!!
Not to the left.
Only they have the right to nominate who they want and everyone should just fall in line and glowingly approve.
Even before Mr. Reagan nominated Judge Bork, senate Democrat liberals decided to oppose any nominee to the supreme court that would actually turn the court to an originalist direction.
And Judge Bork was in the cross hairs of people like the late Sen. Ted BURP! Kennedy and his ilk.
Right from the beginning.
Sen. BURP! Kennedy took to the senate floor to denounce Judge Bork in unbelievable hostility, hypocrisy and hatred. This is what the lady killer from Massachusetts had to say about Judge Bork from Wikipedia:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy ... President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

Unfrickingreal.
Of course I would have loved to know his Blood Alcohol Count when he delivered this stem winder of hate.
It was a coordinated assault on Judge Bork that Team Reagan never saw coming and never recovered. It was a beginning of television ads from such Hollywood stalwarts as Gregory Peck urging people to call their senators and have them vote against Judge Bork.
Thus Judge Bork was voted down in the senate, 42-58. And of course with six RINO's* to help make it bipartisan, you know. They were John Chafee, John Warner, Robert Stafford, Bob Packwood, Arlen Specter, and Lowell Weicker. RINOs one and all.
As an aside, a couple of names do pop out.
John Chafee, was the daddy of the current governor of Rhode Island, Lincoln Chafee. Hey, at least the son no longer has a pretense that he is a Republican. He ran for and is an independent. But according to reports is going to dance over to the Dems when he runs for reelection.
And of course Arlen Specter. Such a RINO that he went over to the Dems when he thought he would be treated like a king. Only to see actual Democrat voters want a real Democrat when he tried to run for reelection in 2010.
Back to point.
Now with Judge Bork out of the way, Team Reagan needed to go to the bench. And they had to be careful. And they were not.
Mr. Reagan nominated one Douglas Ginsburg to the vacancy.
One problem.
Unlike one William Jefferson Blythe Clinton, Judge Ginsburg did inhale the wacky tabaccy. Mary Jane. Weed. The Devil's Weed.
That's right. Judge Ginsburg did imbibe in the herbolic refreshment known as marijuana. And it was not just in college.
You see, back then marijuana was kind of still seen as not a good thing. Especially in politics and in the judiciary.
Now what?
Well, Team Reagan knew that they had to nominate a non-ideological candidate with an impeccable personal record.
And that, my friends, is how we ended up with one Anthony Kennedy, a little-known judge from the notoriously left-wing United States Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Yes, we on the right can and do blame the lady killer from Massachusetts, Sen. Ted BURP! Kennedy and his fellow travellers for derailing the nomination of Judge Bork. And by extension, I will blame him and his ilk for approving the infliction of Justice Kennedy on the supreme court.
Why does this matter?
It does not really, per se. But it should have taught Republicans something.
The left, they play hard-ass ball. They play to win. They do not care how they do it. Yes, I will write it. They see it as perfectly OK to lie, cheat and steal to pursue their agenda. When it came time for Ronald Reagan to leave a conservative imprint on the supreme court, they made sure THAT would not happen.
Because that could never happen. Liberalism must be allowed to march unimpeded.
The lesson that way to many Republicans don't get is that you can not work with these people. They never, ever give up until they get what they want. The liberal idea of bipartisan is agree with us. And if not, well give you a little window dressing. But really, agree with us and help us push through the liberal agenda.
Even one Sen. Marco Rubio has fallen into this trap with the so-called "comprehensive" immigration bill.
That is why many of us love guys like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Tim Scott (R-SC). Governors like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana or Rick Perry in Texas. There are others, but these are people tired of being rolled time and time again by the left and their fellow-travelling Republicans that have no testicles.
Now, I don't care what you think about same-sex marriage, again per se. But it was a divided court that ruled on the issue. And with little clarity only inviting more legal challenges.
And leading that was Anthony Kennedy, a third-stringer adjudicating like one.
That is why it is important to know how we got to this time in American history.

Another Reason Why Gay "Rights" Advocates Set Back Their Cause

You know, I know that the gay community is not anymore monolithic than any other group.
But the following shows why for every step that homosexual rights advocates take toward gaining acceptance, things like this show the immature, and just plain childish approach not becoming of a movement that wants to take itself seriously.
Apparently our Dear Leader, President Obama, invited a slew of homosexual rights advocates to the White House for reception celebrating Gay "Pride" month.
And a couple of the advocates could not control themselves.
Like the children that they are, a couple of these homosexual rights advocates decided to stand in front of the portrait of President Ronald Reagan and proceed to give him the bird.
And the Dear Leader, President Obama thinks that he is so persecuted.
The two suspects, Matthew Hart and Zoe Strauss, were moved to such a mature expression about Mr. Reagan because of an old canard. Well, let me show you the words of Mr. Strauss:

"Yeah, f– Reagan. Ronald Reagan has blood on his hands. The man was in the White House as AIDS exploded, and he was happy to see plenty of gay men and queer people die. He was a murderous fool, and I have no problem saying so. Don’t invite me back. I don’t care.”

Really?! Yeah, I am certain that Mr. Reagan was rubbing his hands together with glee, maybe saying something like "Well, another faggot died from, what is it called? Oh yeah, AIDS." Hey, maybe Mr. Reagan had a list of all the homosexuals that died from AIDS.
That is the canard.
That Ronald Reagan did not care about the outbreak of AIDS. That somehow, he and his administration did not care about AIDS because it affected overwhelmingly homosexual men.
No, Mr. Reagan was concerned like all of us about AIDS.
Like so many people at the time, there was such a limited knowledge about the disease.
But I want to cite this column from Deroy Murdock from a 2003 issue of National Review concerning Mr. Reagan and his response to AIDS.
One thing that is important to note about AIDS. That it was not even identified as what it was until 1982. And roughly $8,000,000 was part of the federal budget in research and the like concerning the disease. By 1984, federal funding for research and a possible vaccine and or cure rose a staggering 694% to $103,000,000. By the time Mr. Reagan left office, the federal government was spending $2,232,000,000.
But, Mr. Reagan did not care about the epidemic.
What a lot of people do not realize about Mr. Reagan is that he came out against a controversial propostiton in 1978 that would have barred open and "activist" homosexuals from teaching in the public schools. It was his opposition that led to the measure's crushing defeat.
I guess Mr. Hart and Miss Strauss must have forgotten about that. Maybe if he was for the measure, it would have passed. And many teachers would have probably been fired. And many may have not even been homosexuals themselves.
Mr. Reagan had a live and let live attitude about homosexuals. After all, the man was in Hollywood all those years. And I am certain that he and everyone else knew who was and who was not a homosexual.
But one should never have expected Mr. Reagan to push the homosexual left agenda. And he did not. And that is why these two dim bulbs will not "forgive" him for "letting" all those homosexuals die in the early days of the epidemic.
But to suggest that Mr. Reagan was openly hostile to homosexuals is wrong. He was not hostile and probably knew quite a few in his day.
So, what does it gain for these two to give the portrait of Mr. Reagan the bird? Nothing. But it once again spotlights the worst in the activist community and what makes many people that may be more like Mr. Reagan, live and let live, have doubts about their maturity. Politically and socially.
And the response from the White House? Rather pathetic if you ask me. Here is Shin Innoye's tepid comment:

“While the White House does not control the conduct of guests at receptions, we certainly expect that all attendees conduct themselves in a respectful manner.  Most all do. These individuals clearly did not. Behavior like this doesn’t belong anywhere, least of all in the White House.”

My question is that this is not something that happened out of plain sight. These two could not have been walking on their own around the White House and flipping off the former president's portrait. There HAD to be other people around if not high level White House personnel. So, where these two shown the door? And if not, why not?
While I, as a conservative, am told constantly how we are the problem in regard to discourse in politics today, what about these two dirt bags? What about the total disrespect that they showed to Mr. Reagan? Actually, to all the presidents that have served this nation? Maybe Mr. Reagan was their wrath, but what about the one that comes by in the future and feel like maybe flipping off Franklin Delano Roosevelt's portrait? You know, the one that ushered in the socialist era in the United States. Oh, I can go on and on.
Here is the thing.
If these activists want to be taken seriously, hey act like it! Be like the rest of us and show some respect. You do not have to like any president's policies, but you don't lower yourself and your cause by doing such a douchebrain thing like these two did. And by not doing anything about it, Team Dear Leader tacitly approves of such behavior.
None of us should tolerate any behavior like this. Left or right.
And if homosexual rights advocates want to ingratiate themselves with middle America, they need to purge douchebrains like this from their ranks.

A Real Leader Vs. A Faux Leader

Today when I got home from the day job, the latest issue of The Weekly Standard was in my mailbox and the cover story was The Real Reagan by Fred Barnes.
After reading it not once but twice, what struck me was that Ronald Reagan was truly a real leader. He really did not care so much about the nuts-and-bolts of minutia of the job of being president. But he understood so much about the issues of the day. And much more than he ever let on.
It stands in stark contrast to a faux leader, the Dear Leader, President Barack H. Obama. One never really vetted. One that we have never seen his college transcripts. I mean, after all, unlike Mr. Reagan, the Dear Leader, President Obama, went to Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard law school. And he "wrote" a book before he actually became anything.
Yet as Mr. Barnes points out in the article, Mr. Reagan was portrayed in this manner:

These anecdotes (referring to a story about a movie)  may not appear to be terribly significant. But they’re more revealing than I thought at the time, for they undermine the profile of Reagan created by the media, the permanent Washington establishment, political insiders, many Democrats, some Republicans, and even a few members of Reagan’s White House staff. Their idea of Reagan—a bumbling, likable lightweight blessed with good luck and clever aides—wasn’t the Reagan that I encountered. It wasn’t the real Reagan.

Mr. Reagan we have come to find out was really a kind of smart guy after all. Not bad a dude that went to a Christian college, Eureka College in the middle-of-nowhere Illinois.
For instance, Mr. Reagan wrote himself every radio commentary that he delivered while a syndicated commentator in the late 1970s between presidential campaigns. That is something many, including your humble blogger, had no idea. But the book Reagan In His Own Hand shows an engaged person that wrote all the commentaries long form and wrote is the operative word. And courtesy of Mr. Barnes, here are some of the topics he dealt with during that time: Namibia, ocean mining, Cambodia, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, treaties, the B-1 bomber, missile defense, national security strategy, intelligence, Chile, visas, Vladimir Bukovsky, human rights, the Helsinki Accords, Cuba, Rhodesia, the Panama Canal, Guantánamo, Leonid Brezhnev, foreign aid, Palestine, Jamaica, and the United Nations.
But remember folks, Mr. Reagan was but an amiable dunce. He just got lucky.
Where was all of that from the Dear Leader, President Obama? How do we know anything about him? What he really has thought on the major issues of the day? I mean, yeah it is great that he "wrote" not one but two self-serving books before he did anything. But again, why was he not thoroughly vetted the way someone like Mr. Reagan was?
And why is it, even to this day, that Mr. Reagan seemed to be the only one interested in defeating Soviet communism?
As governor of California in 1972, Mr Reagan said that Soviet communism would soon be confined to “dustbin of history.” And he said the same thing 10 years later as president. And the establishment thought to a man and woman that Mr. Reagan was dreaming. If not a little daft. Too bad that by 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. That East and West Germany would be one with the West winning out.
Where is that kind of leadership from the Dear Leader, President Obama?
Understand that the Dear Leader, President Obama, ran as something that he clearly was not.
A mushy moderate.
Since becoming the president, Mr. Obama has driven home the fact that he is the most left-wing president since Lyndon, nope, Lynchin' Baines Johnson. And for sure even more to the left than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
On issue after issue, Mr. Obama is almost at odd with the very people that elected him in the first place.
A leader has to sometimes make adjustments, even if he or she does not want to.
So yes, Mr. Reagan did raise taxes while president. But in the end, he enacted the largest tax reform to date. So many of us conservatives can forgive the tax hikes because in the end tax reform was a better deal for the nation as a whole.
Where is that kind of leadership from the Dear Leader, President Obama?
I know many will say with so-called health care "reform".
The problem is that the majority of the American people did not want the "reform" that was being sold to them. Unless you can bring a majority to that, then it looks like it was bad from the beginning.
What I see from the Dear Leader, President Obama, is an iron fist instead of the velvet glove.
And most important of any leader is to have the people believing in themselves.
Ronald Reagan did that.
Barack Obama does not do that.
And thus the difference between Ronald Reagan, a true leader, and Barack Obama, a faux leader, is crystal clear.
One can only hope that Mitt Romney is more Ronald Reagan than Barack Obama.

You Know Who Was A Crazy Social Conservative? How About Ronald Reagan?!

Yep, that is correct my friends.
Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Ronaldus Maximus as Rush Limbaugh refers to the man that was our 40th president.
Ahh, but you would not know that Mr. Reagan was indeed a social conservative. I mean, he was the full-spectrum conservative before the term was cool.
Ronald Reagan was a fiscal conservative, national defense/foreign policy conservative and yes, a social conservative.
Today, many of the same members of the leftywhore media establishment that spent eight years trying desperately to bring down the Great Man are yearning for the Reagan Years.
And they are revising the history to make their case.
One of the charges is that Mr. Reagan did not do enough to advance the social conservative cause.
Maybe on the surface that is true. I suppose in hindsight Mr. Reagan could have done more.
Yet just discussing issues that no one else would was a start that in many ways continues with the actuality of changing people minds on given issues.
Take abortion.
When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, the dreaded Roe v. Wade decision that took abortion laws away from the states and uniformally made allowing unfettered access to abortion the law of the land was seven years old. By all accounts, the people of the United States did not seem to think that it was a bad thing. After all, it is not that abortions were not done before the decision. But in most states it was illegal or so heavily regulated that it was hard for a woman to attain one.
Yet in the 1980 Republican party platform, it began an unended streak that the GOP is the party committed to ending abortion on demand. That the party would seek a constitutional amendment to overturn Roe v. Wade. And who wanted that part of the party manifesto?
That crazy so con, RWR, that's who.
And so funny how because of that, Mr. Reagan lost the election.
NO, hold the phone!
I'm sorry, despite that as the official policy of the GOP, Mr. Reagan won a 44-state landslide.
Another thing that the crazy so con, Reagan did would baffle most today.
In 1983, the economy barely showing signs of life, unemployment still high and the tax cuts that Mr. Reagan won in 1981 in jeopardy, Mr. Reagan submitted this essay on abortion that appeared in the Human Life Review. This amazing essay was written entirely by Mr. Reagan.
But please, rest assured that it was all lip-service according to leftywhore media clowns that covered Mr. Reagan back in the day.
In this article by Penny Starr she cites such luminaries as Walter Shapiro saying such things as this:

RAZ: "[Reagan] wasn't really a culture warrior, was he?"

SHAPIRO: "I mean, he -- it is telling that every year he addressed the National Right to Life anti-abortion march in Washington by telephone, even though they were half-a-mile from the White House, because he didn't want the visuals of being perceived as that much of a cultural warrior. And abortion was as legal when Ronald Reagan left office as it was when he came into office."

Yeah see, Mr. Reagan should have been front and center at the March For Life. Yessir.
No. Because Mr. Reagan did not want the issue to be about him but the focus of what people were there for. To end the abomination known as Roe v Wade.
That, my friends, is the sign of a smart, savvy politician.
And here is by just speaking on the issue the nation is moving in a direction that the majority of Americans want to see Roe v. Wade overturned.
Somewhere in the high 70 to low 80% of Americans in any given poll were for the Roe v. Wade decision during Mr. Reagan's two terms in office. Yes, it was still the law of the land before, during and when Mr. Reagan left Washington, D. C. in 1989.
Yet today support has dropped in poll after poll to the low to mid 50% range. Some polls have actually shown a majority want to see Roe v. Wade overturned entirely. And now many states are passing laws that do restrict unfettered access to abortion. One other aspect that has helped is technology. That technology kind of sort of makes it hard to say that a baby is just a blob. A fetus.
But that change would not have started if it were not for that crazy so con, Ronald Reagan.
Another aspect of the left infiltrating the GOP and trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the United States constitution met its end thanks to Mr. Reagan. Once the amendment failed to be ratified by two-thirds of the state legislatures by 1984, the GOP never mentioned support for the odeious amendment again. The Republican party as always been the party of women, yet with the help of the ever compliant leftywhore media, one would never know it.
Or how about this gem again from the 1980 GOP platform on families:

The family is the foundation of our social order. It is the school of democracy. Its daily lessons—cooperation, tolerance, mutual concern, responsibility, industry—are fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic. But the Democrats have shunted the family aside. They have given its power to the bureaucracy, its jurisdiction to the courts, and its resources to government grantors. For the first time in our history, there is real concern that the family may not survive.

Government may be strong enough to destroy families, but it can never replace them.

Unlike the Democrats, we do not advocate new federal bureaucracies with ominous power to shape a national family order. Rather, we insist that all that all domestic policies, from child care and schooling to Social Security and the tax code, must be formulated with the family in mind.

No "It Takes A Village" there!
And to further the point about families is this from the same document:

In view of the continuing efforts of the present (Carter) Administration to define and influence the family through such federally funded conferences as the White House Conference on Families, we express our support for legislation protecting and defending the traditional American family against the ongoing erosion of its base in our society.

Today, a Republican candidate for President, Rick Santorum, addresses many of these same issues and he is totally demonized. And told to keep quiet and get with it. All your traditional values talk is so old-fashioned.
Yet it did not stop one Ronald Reagan from speaking about these issues. And all he did was win the presidency in two landslide elections. And change the face of American politics long after he left the White House.
And one way Mr. Reagan changed things was the willingness to talk about some very uncomfortable social issues.
Ronald Reagan was the original crazy social conservative. Crazy like a fox!