President Reagan's Remarks to Harley-Davidson Employees

President Reagan's Remarks to Harley-Davidson Company employees in York, Pennsylvania on May 6, 1987.

Bill Signing Ceremony with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at Reagan Presidential Library

On Wednesday, July 28, 2010, Mrs. Ronald Reagan stood alongside Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library as the Governor held a ceremonial bill signing for SB 944 by Senator George Runner and AB 1911 by Assembly Republican Leader Martin Garrick honoring President Ronald Reagan for his life's accomplishments and his contributions to California.

President Reagan's News Conference of 1/29/81

The Reagan Foundation posted today a video of one of President Reagan's first news conferences, held just nine days after taking office. Aside from the nostalgia it evokes for the days when Presidents actually submitted themselves to vigorous questioning from the nation's media, it shows a President at the vortex of restoration and recovery after a bungling, incompetent, and damaging administration - a great model for our next President.

A Reagan Forum with GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt

Year-Long Celebration Planned to Mark President Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday

President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan during the Inauguration Day parade, January 20, 1981. (Wikimedia Commons photo)

Perhaps the most telling thing about the year-long celebration planned to mark President Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday is that it will not be funded by the American taxpayer. The 40th president would have turned 100 on Feb. 6, 2011.

Read the rest of this entry >>

Ronald Reagan's Timeless Message on Socialized Medicine

99th Birthday Celebration for President Reagan, Featuring the Honorable Elizabeth Dole

President Reagan Celebrates His Birthday at a Press Briefing on February 4, 1983

The questions and issues of that day sound so much like those of the present. Regrettably, today's leadership is so very different.

A Reagan Foundation Interview with Pat Buchanan

An interview with Pat Buchanan on September 13, 2009 at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.

George Schultz on 'Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Wall: Reflections from Yesterday, Lessons for Today'

From a conference at the Reagan Presidential Library on November 6, 2009.

Looking Back at the Fall of the Berlin Wall

From The Reagan Foundation

A Tour of the Reagan Library with Host Gary Sinise

The 25th Anniversary of President Reagan's 1984 Presidential Nominee Acceptance Speech

Today marks the 25th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan accepting the nomination of the Republican National Convention in Dallas. He would go on to win 49 of the 50 states and sweep 525 of 538 electoral votes. It was a campaign of "no pale pastels" and the conservative vision expressed in the great speech that follows, still resonates in the hearts of the American people because it is true and timeless.

Interview: Mike Huckabee at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation

Mike Huckabee visited the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation yesterday and was interviewed on the Reagan presidency and its legacy.

President Reagan's 1982 Commencement Address at Eureka College

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library has been releasing superb videos of their ongoing Reagan Forum, as well as historical videos of the late President.

In the following video, President Reagan gives the 1982 commencement address at his alma mater, Eureka College, fifty years after his own graduation. The speech, given early in his presidency and with all its references to the world situation of that day, is a testament to how dramatically Ronald Reagan changed the world.

President Reagan Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the Normandy Invasion

Thatcherite Wins Backing for Reagan Statue in London

From The Times
By Philippe Naughton

The former US ambassador apparently thought it a good idea. His replacement, when Barack Obama eventually names him, may not be so keen.

An interior designer from Chelsea who is a leading light in the Thatcherite Conservative Way Forward group has won approval for a statue of the great American conservative Ronald Reagan to be erected outside the US Embassy in London. The project was given the nod on Thursday night by Westminster City Council’s planning sub-committee in a break with its policy of allowing memorials only to people who have been dead for at least ten years. The former US President died in 2004 aged 93.

The 10ft bronze statue of the man hailed by Margaret Thatcher for winning the Cold War without firing a shot will be placed on a 6ft plinth of Portland stone outside the embassy building in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, near an existing statue of Dwight D Eisenhower, the war hero President, unveiled by Mrs Thatcher in 1989.

The architects behind the project, the same firm responsible for the statues of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square and the Queen Mother near Buckingham Palace, say that it was enthusiastically backed by the former ambassador, Robert Tuttle, who left office in February. It was also supported by the Ronald Reagan Foundation in California, which chose the sculptor Chas Fagan to create the statue.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the current inhabitants of the embassy — who are still waiting for President Obama to confirm Mr Tuttle’s replacement — appear less keen to have a larger-than-life statue of the darling of the American Right on their doorstep.

“This is not something that we have requested oractively tried to get brought about,” an embassy spokesman said yesterday. “We’re happy to have our presidents honoured but this statue was not a US Government initiative.” Asked whether the mission would take the statue with it when it leaves Grosvenor Square for its new head-quarters in Nine Elms, south of the Thames, he replied: “It’s not our statue.”

Read the rest of this entry >>

The Faith Behind Ronald Reagan’s Revolution

From Hawaii Reporter
By Daniel de Gracia, II

In 1977, Ronald Reagan after failing to win his party’s nomination and faced with a Democrat-controlled White House in the form of Jimmy Carter spoke of something he called the New Republican Party. “The American new conservative majority we represent is not based on abstract theorizing of the kind that turns off the American people,” Reagan said, “but on common sense, intelligence, reason, hard work, faith in God, and the guts to say ‘Yes there are things we do strongly believe in, that we are willing to live for, and yes, if necessary, to die for.’ That is not ideological purity. It is simply what built this country and kept it great.”

Three years later, that same Reagan would find himself standing before the 1980 Republican National Convention accepting the party’s nomination for President, saying, “I’ll confess that I’ve been a little afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest – I’m more afraid not to – that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer.” It was in that moment that Reagan turned a political convention into a prayer conference of thousands of souls joined together by faith. After that night, the rest was history: Reagan went on not only to win the White House, but to re-energize America through two terms and establish one of the greatest eras in the history of our nation.

Reagan understood that it takes faith to make a difference, and it was his faith that drove his revolution to success. Reagan knew that America was a country that was built on faith – starting with the Pilgrims in 1620 who came to the New World in search of religious freedom – and that every good, honest, and honorable law, policy, and doctrine begins with faith. This is why Reagan would go on to say, “The truth is, politics and morality are inseparable. And as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related. We need religion as a guide. We need it because we are imperfect, and our government needs the Church, because only those humble enough to admit they’re sinners can bring to democracy the tolerance it requires in order to survive.”

Reagan didn’t believe in God because polls indicated to him that it would make him more electable; he had faith in God because it was the right thing to do. Of this, Reagan says, “Without God, there is a coarsening of the society. And without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. If we ever forget that we’re one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under.”

I write this article because I believe that religious freedom is at stake in today’s America, and that faith in God is now seen as optional rather than necessary for not just change but the blessing of our people. We have become intolerant of men and women of faith, and we have come to the point where those who seek God are slandered and considered to be silly fools unfit for leadership.

Economic theories, government policies, and catchy political slogans do many things but they cannot unlock what faith opens, and that is love: love for God, love for our fellow man, love for our community, and love for our future. Love speaks to the heart, and the heart is the key to change. Reagan understood this principle, and because of that acceptance of love, he was not only a great leader, but a Great Communicator. How much we can stand to learn from Reagan today.

In closing, all freedom begins with religious freedom. This is why Paul and Silas, though they had been severely beaten and thrown in prison with their feet shackled could in the midnight hour open their mouths to sing praises to God Almighty – because though their bodies were bound, their spirits were free.

I encourage all men and women of faith all across this State to read an article recently published in the Honolulu Advertiser entitled “Righteousness unlocks all things” (http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090314/LIFE0701/903140307/1102) and having done so, take a moment out of their day today to pray for Hawaii, to pray for America, and to humble themselves that the blessing of God can open our hearts to once more have the faith to move forward in victory.

I hope you will come to the conclusion today that our politicians do not have the answers or the power to fix what is broken in Hawaii and America. Only faith in God can put us back on track and lead justice once more to victory.

Daniel de Gracia, II lives in Waipahu. Reach him at mailto:daniel.degracia@gmail.com

Do Conservatives Need to Get Beyond Reagan?

From Imprimis
By Rush Limbaugh

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on December 4, 2008, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., on the occasion of the ninth annual Hillsdale College Churchill Dinner.

THERE ARE ongoing discussions and debates among conservatives about the kind of president Barack Obama will prove to be, and about how they should react to him. But there is a larger and more important debate going on within conservatism—a debate about what conservatism is. Remarkably, we are hearing from a lot of people who are thought to be conservatives that conservatives need to "get beyond Reagan." After all, these people say, "The Reagan era is over." And the liberal media love to print their articles and broadcast their pronouncements to this effect. My response is, well, yes, the Reagan era is over in the sense that it has been 20 years since Reagan was president. But the funny thing is, I never heard the liberals saying that because the era of FDR was over-it ended in 1945-that they needed to "get beyond FDR." They didn't say that 35 years later when Reagan was first elected, or when he was reelected in 1984. They didn't say that when the liberals lost Congress in the 1994 election. Nor did they say it after the 2000 or 2004 elections. Instead, they kept arguing and fighting for the ideas they believe in. And now Mr. Obama is plausibly promising to revive the era of FDR.

So why are some so-called conservatives today arguing that we need to "get beyond Reagan," by which they mean that we need to abandon the ideas that Reagan stood for? To understand the roots of this argument, I think we only need to look back to the years when Reagan first emerged onto the national scene. There was a lot of resentment at that time among many of the elites in the Republican Party because Reagan hadn't gone to the right schools, he didn't come from the right part of the country, he had been an actor rather than a lawyer, he was a bumbling dunce, he was an extremist who was too far outside the mainstream to win, and so on. People have been making these kinds of arguments for a long time. They were saying that conservatives needed to get beyond Reagan even before the Reagan era began. A few of them are the same people. Many of them are new. But what they have in common is that none of them agree with the principles that Reagan stood for. And I would argue that this means that they are not conservatives.

Today the get-beyond-Reagan arguments are often put in so-called pragmatic terms of needing to create blocs of voters who will support the Republican Party. And in order to accomplish this, all that conservatives have to do, these self-proclaimed smart people say,iis embrace the idea of big government, because that's what the American people want and because only so-called big-government conservatives will be able to create blocs of voters by spending money to do them favors. But in answer to this, one has to ask the question-and I'm being a real pragmatist myself here-what's left for government to spend these days? It's already bailing people out right and left with taxpayer money that the government doesn't have. The spigot has been turned on under President Bush. The Obama administration, we can presume, is going to be even more generous in terms of bailouts. But honestly, when we look at auto executives being grilled on TV by liberal members of Congress about their irresponsibility, can we take it seriously? Has anyone ever been as irresponsible with money—and in their case other people's money—than these very same self-righteous members of Congress?

As history has amply demonstrated, down the line the kind of central planning that Mr. Bush has begun and that Mr. Obama plans to escalate isn't going to work. Although it may succeed in increasing the control of government over people's lives—which is how many liberals these days seem to define prosperity—it will fail miserably in restoring economic health to America. So in fact, during a time of economic trouble like this when liberals are in charge of both elected branches of government, conservatives have a golden opportunity to reintroduce to the American people the free market ideas and policies that have made our country the greatest and most prosperous country in human history.

My first point, then, is that there is no pragmatic reason today for conservatives to abandon the ideas of Reagan. It is worth remembering, after all, that despite the warnings of Republican "pragmatists" in the economically bleak 1970s that Reagan was too far outside the mainstream ever to be successful politically, Reagan won the presidency in two landslides-and that in 1994, his party took over the House of Representatives, for the first time in 40 years, using Reagan-like arguments.

But there is a second and more important point to be made in response to the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan. The main idea that animated Reagan wasn't anti-communism or supply side economics. Reagan's main idea was the main idea of the American founding—the idea of individual liberty—and the policies that he supported, both internationally and domestically, grew from that. America was founded on the idea that our individual freedoms derive from God, not from government, and that government should protect those freedoms and never violate them. Reagan argued, and history has shown, that America does best when it is true to its original idea. It does best when its people are left free to work in their individual self-interest—not meant in the sense of being selfish, but in the sense that they are left free to work to improve their own lives and the lives of their families, and for the good of their communities and of the nation at large. The biggest problem with the argument that conservatives should get beyond Reagan, then, is that the idea of individual liberty will never go out of style as long as America exists. To argue that the Reagan era is over is to argue that the era of freedom is over. And to argue that conservatives should abandon Reagan's principles is to argue that they should stop being conservatives.

There is no such thing, at least in America, as "big-government conservatism." A government that abides by the Constitution and protects our God-given freedoms is by definition limited. Rather than carving out blocs of voters by surrendering their principles, conservatives need to continue to tell the American people as a whole that the ideas of individual liberty and limited government are right and that the policies that come from those ideas work best to produce prosperity. Conservatives don't need to reinvent themselves. They need the courage to be once again who they were.

Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address

"In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."