Posted on 02/06/2010 4:18:08 PM PST by factmart
Welcome Back Dad By Michael Reagan September 4, 2008
I've been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was one of a kind.
(Excerpt) Read more at reagan.com ...
Welcome Back Dad By Michael Reagan September 4, 2008
I've been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was one of a kind.
I was wrong!
Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.
And what a she!
In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dad's indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media's assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we haven't heard since my Dad left the scene.
This was Ronald Reagan at his best -- the same Ronald Reagan who made the address known now solely as "The Speech," which during the Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.
Last night was an extraordinary event. Widely seen beforehand as a make-or-break effort -- either an opportunity for Sarah Palin to show that she was the happy warrior that John McCain assured us she was, or a disaster that would dash McCain's presidential hopes and send her back to Alaska, sadder but wiser.
Obviously un-intimidated by either the savage onslaught to which the left-leaning media had subjected her, or the incredible challenge she faced -- and oozing with confidence -- she strode defiantly to the podium and proved she was everything and even more than John McCain told us.
Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last night, however, was something much more than a just a woman accomplishing something no Republican woman has ever achieved. What we saw was a red-blooded American with that rare, God-given ability to rally her dispirited fellow Republicans and take up the daunting task of leading them -- and all her fellow Americans -- on a pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my father envisioned as our nation's real destination.
In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her Democratic rivals and reveal them for what they are -- a pair of old-fashioned liberals making promises that cannot be kept without bankrupting the nation and reducing most Americans to the status of mendicants begging for their daily bread at the feet of an all-powerful government.
Most important, by comparing her own stunning record of achievement with his, she showed Barack Obama for the sham that he is, a man without any solid accomplishments beyond conspicuous self-aggrandizement.
Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of us live because that's the way she lives. She shares our homespun values and our beliefs, and she glories in her status as a small-town woman who put her shoulder to the wheel and made life better for her neighbors.
Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest lifestyle reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic, ordinary American who made this country the greatest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth.
As hard as you might try, you won't find that kind of plain-spoken, down-to-earth, self-reliant American in the upper ranks of the liberal-infested, elitist Democratic Party, or in the Obama campaign.
Sarah Palin didn't go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban neighborhood leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within the ranks of one of the nation's most corrupt political machines, never challenging it and going along to get along, like Barack Obama.
Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it, rising to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of government she served in on her way up the ladder.
Welcome back, Dad, even if you're wearing a dress and bearing children this time around.
Say Whaaa?
I agree with the analogy, just not the terms. There will never be another Reagan.
Sarah is Sarah let her be who she is.
That was one of the most, maybe even THE most, stunning speech I’ve ever seen! I remember how absolutely blown away I was by the content and delivery.
Way better than the total BS zero blabbers about.
AMEN!! Congratulations to Mike for making the biggest endorsement and compliment possible in the Universe of
SARAH!! Mike is Ronald’s Real SON!! and only SON!!
That was my take on her too.
When McCain picked her, John Fund wrote, “Whie they were looking for the new Reagan, conservatives may have found the new Thatcher.”
I agree. I some other real conservative doesn’t step up to the plate in the next couple months, we need to get behind Palin for 2012. Please, no more dividing among a half dozen candidates and no more coy maybe I’ll run if you really want me candidates.
I like Sarah Palin, but I think while writing this article 18 months ago, Michael Reagan was either smoking or sniffing something he shouldn’t have been ingesting.
Yeah I saw that, still ... I don’t think you want to do this.
It’s fine to say she is adapting the Reagan mantel, but I just think stories like this are off base. I want the Reagan memory to remain fresh and not transferred.
I know he means well ...
Sarah Palin's ideas about our govt. pretty much echo mine regardles of whom she is being trashed for supporting..........
She's got my vote if needed.........
i will always have the highest love and respect for President Reagan and i like michael reagan, but in my opinion this was a little over the top.
The communists have never stopped their revolution nor can we ever stop the patriotic, conservative Reagan Revolution—the only meaningful counter to Marxism. Sarah Palin is the heir apparent to the Reagan mantle. She comes to the role naturally and even involuntarily. She doesn’t need note cards or a teleprompter. She’s it. The real deal. Michael Reagan knows it and all of us who worked for President Reagan’s elections know it.
dittos ... Reagan was Reagan, let Sarah be Sarah.
She is welcome to follow in Reagan’s footsteps, but she needs to find her own way — I hope she does.
I note Sarah seems to be getting better and better each time I see her.
Since I obviously missed it the first time around, I'm glad it was reposted.........That's the beauty of FR.
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