Free Republic

The big Reagan Tribute keynote speech will be covered live on C-SPAN tonight beginning at 7:30 p.m. ET. The speaker will be President Reagan's "Karl Rove," his chief political strategist and pollster, Dick Wirthlin. Wirthlin is the author of the newly released best-seller, THE GREATEST COMMUNICATOR: What Ronald Reagan Taught Me about Politics, Leadership, and Life. In THE GREATEST COMMUNICATOR, Wirthlin reveals never-before-told stories about their epic 36 year friendship, a relationship that led to two of the biggest landslide presidential elections in American presidential history. Live C-SPAN coverage begins at 7:30 p.m. ET.

On Nov. 2, an elephant charged across the U.S. electoral map -- an elephant named Ronald Wilson Reagan. To be sure, President George W. Bush and his chief strategists, Karl Rove and Matthew Dowd, deserve enormous credit for engineering the first presidential campaign in 16 years to capture more than 50 per cent of the popular vote. But to understand the magnitude and method of their achievement, it is necessary to examine how two Reagan-induced forces -- a "rolling" realignment and values-based communications -- coalesced to help produce Mr. Bush's victory. In February of 1980, Mr. Reagan asked me to...

"In THE GREATEST COMMUNICATOR, Dick [Wirthlin] offers us a window into the secrets of Reagan's success...." —James Carville