Reagan Day Comments

I am so glad to see the faces of those of you who have made it tonight. We’ve come to raise money for a good cause. We’ve come to enjoy one another’s company. But while we enjoy one another’s fellowship and discuss current events, I hope we won’t forget to gratefully remember the man we pay tribute to tonight.

It’s hard to believe that once, not too long ago, there were many who believed that America’s best days were behind her. Now, it’s true that there are many today who still hold to that belief, but those that do this today do so in spite of what can be seen around them: We live in an America with a robust economy that has emerged as the world’s sole superpower, helping peoples in distant lands in their quest to throw off the shackles of totalitarianism and poverty.

But in those – thankfully – by-gone days, people felt that way because of what could be seen around them: Double-digit interest rates, Double-digit inflation, Near-double-digit unemployment. It was a time when the very President of the United States, at that time, spoke of a “malaise” that had settled upon the nation and even suggested that maybe we ought to set our collective sights a little lower as a nation.

Meanwhile, on the larger world stage, we were seeing aggressive communist expansion across the globe. The very land that my wife and I plan to travel to soon was run by a Marxist dictatorship, and the leader of that nation was crooning about how the Soviet ideology was on the rise and that the demise of capitalism was inevitable.

And it’s not hard to see why Mr. Brezhnev felt so confident. At that time, half a continent was serving as a virtual prison, symbolized by a wall erected to divide an ancient city, keeping those on the wrong side of that wall from enjoying the blessings of liberty that we believe is the birthright of every human. These people were locked in a land of tyranny with little hope of ever knowing any other kind of life in this world. Their captors kept them unable to help themselves, and it seemed that there was no one on the outside, including us, who could do anything about it.

Indeed, as part of the notion that we needed to set our sights and goals a little lower, the belief was that Soviet tyranny over a vast portion of the earth was an inevitable fact of life with which the peoples of the world’s free nations were just going to have to learn to live.

As I said, these facts about the way things were a short time ago are hard to believe nowadays, even for those of us who can remember this time in our history. And for the younger among us, well, it’s almost beyond credibility for many of them – present company excepted, of course. Maybe it’s a testimony to much of what is being taught – or not being taught – in our schools nowadays, but I have actually heard some of the younger within our society all but reject that things were ever that bleak. I remember distinctly a young man – in his twenties, mind you – who questioned how bad living under communism could really be.

But most of us remember those times. Yeah, some of us were younger, but we can all remember an America that just felt different than the America we live in today. We remember when good people wondered if the ideas behind America would really work. We remember a time when America felt old.

And then came the Gipper.

There is no small bit of irony in the fact that it was the oldest president in American history that made America feel young again. Many Americans who only came of age and began to pay attention to the world around us during or after “the age of Reagan” have known only a world where even our enemies know that the United States is the world’s leader among the family of nations, and the possessor of a spirit of faith and optimism toward which most other nations only aspire. We would all do well to learn or remember that it was not always so. Only then can we fully appreciate what Ronald Reagan did for the country and the world.

After the social unrest that began to ravage the nation in the sixties, the seventies in particular became a time in which even our constitutional institutions were viewed to be past the time of their usefulness. In the wake of a decade that saw defeat in Vietnam, scandal at the Watergate, and presidential paralysis in the face of the Iranian hostage crisis, there were those who were suggesting that it might be time to abandon our presidential system in favor of a parliamentary one. Government wasn’t able to solve the people’s problems and so, it was felt by many, the problems weren’t solvable in the system that the Founders established.

Ronald Reagan came to office proclaiming that the premise behind that idea was wrong. That we shouldn’t look to government to solve the problem. But rather than being an attack on our constitutional system, his message was a call to greatness – directed not at the American government, but at the American people. He reminded us that it was never the American government that made us great, it was the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and spirit of the American people that made us great. It was a reminder that there’s no limit to what we can accomplish when the government is properly limited and allows individuals, and with them the nation, to rise as far as their ambition and hard work will take them.

The fact is that, as has already been noted by others far more eloquent than I, the Reagan Revolution was nothing more than the American Revolution revisited. We as a nation had lost contact with the spirit and faith of those men who were absolutely determined that America would succeed. But Ronald Reagan never lost contact with that spirit and faith. It may be that his single greatest gift to the American people, the gift that made the successes we see today possible, was to put us back in touch with that spirit and faith.

And as he affected a change in the mindset of America, we saw the residual blessing of a change in the mindset of the rest of the world as well. We can now read of those dissidents in communist nations whose hopes and determinations to see the birth of liberty in their own nations were renewed when they learned of the American President who wouldn’t back down in the face of their oppressors. And once the American spirit and vast capacity for greatness was rekindled, our most formidable enemies trembled, shook, and then fell. Consequently, America is not the only place that is better for Ronald Reagan having been in it.

We should thank God for what Ronald Reagan did for not only the American people, but all people. As Mr. Reagan himself said, “We meant to change a nation, and instead we changed the world.”

Mr. Reagan is gone from us now. And, as time goes by, more and more of his colleagues who helped him affect his revolution will pass from the world stage as well. In their place, a new generation of leaders has picked up the torch they have handed down, no less committed to the conservative vision that leads to a better America, and forever indebted to the man we honor with this gathering. We are honored to have several members of that new generation of leaders with us tonight. Some big fights are on their hands, just a few months down the road. And I hope we will all commit ourselves to doing what we can to help them as they carry on the good fight.