Reagan, reformation and the GOP

The Federal Government has proven they cannot fix anything. Even our national defense expenditure, a Constitutional requirement, is full of graft, redundancy, waste and riddled with political favors. A scorecard would hopefully open the eyes of the independents and so-called moderate Democrats.

Excerpt: "Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer, and they’ve had almost 30 years of it, shouldn’t we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help?”

Reagan had a framework for governance based on freedom and the individual over the state. He was a populist who was suspicious of any concentration of power, whether corporate, union or governmental. He knew concentrated power was unhealthy as it inevitably led to corruption and the diminution of personal freedoms. Obama and his enthusiastic band of contemporary elitists understand the argument, which is why they embrace government over people. They understand this is about power.

We have a Department of Energy created by President Jimmy Carter, whose purpose was to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. Billions of dollars later, the United States is more dependent than ever on foreign oil. We have a Department of Education, again courtesy of Carter, whose purpose was to raise academic standards. Take a wild guess on the success of this bureaucracy. If walls imprisoning people can be torn down, then so, too, can more than useless and wasteful bureaucracies.

What mattered for Reagan then — and should matter now for the recovering but not yet recovered Republican Party — is that his was a lifetime of thought and conviction that grew steadily into those principles that mattered both at home and abroad. He then had the courage to state them and keep on stating them for 16 years, from 1964 until 1980, and then live out those convictions as president. During the 1980 primaries, he made open appeals to Democrats and independents to cross over and join his “community of shared values,” which was maddening to the entrenched country clubbers of the GOP but which laid the basis for the new political movement.

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