Making Sense

Forget Republican comebacks in 2014 or 2016.

Unless it gets its head and its heart straight, the party might never win the popular vote or the White House again.

The GOP today is not my father’s party.

And until the hierarchy of the GOP stops talking about how great Ronald Reagan was and starts embracing what he really stood for, the party of conservatism is destined for the ash heap of history.

Ronald Reagan was somebody who believed in inclusion, not exclusion. He found a way to reach out to all voting groups, which is why he was the last Republican presidential candidate to win the Hispanic vote.

The GOP in 2012 reminds me of the state of disarray it was in during the mid-1960s.

It was so bad for Republicans in California then that they held a special convention and invited the state’s Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, Jesse Unruh, to come and tell them what was wrong with them.

Unruh came and was blunt: The GOP had no vision and no message for voters, because they didn’t know who they were or what they stood for.

Those pre-Ronald Reagan Republicans got the message. They left that convention, turned their fortunes around, and ended up with Ronald Reagan in the governor’s chair.

Today’s national GOP needs the same kind of turnaround, and the process starts with fixing the party’s inclusion problem with Hispanic, black and Asian voters.

Last week I spoke to a room of 400 conservatives. The only blacks in the room were serving us breakfast. There were only a couple Hispanics — in Florida.

That’s not inclusive. Republicans have got to find a way to reach out to these communities.

I told those conservatives in Florida a story about a young man who as a child came to the United States illegally with his parents in the early 1980s.

He became an American citizen in 1986 when my father signed into law the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which granted amnesty to 3 million illegal residents and made them citizens.

When he turned 18, to thank the United Stares for allowing him to become a citizen, he joined the Navy to serve his new country.

When the USS Ronald Reagan was home porting in San Diego, he volunteered to serve on the ship named after the president who allowed him to become a citizen. Now he mentors 275 sailors on that aircraft carrier and is working on his master’s degree.

There are a thousand stories like that that nobody wants to tell when Republicans talk about immigration.

The GOP has got to find a message of inclusion instead of “Get the hell out of my country.” That’s what Hispanics and other immigrants hear from the Republican Party — “Get out.”

We have to attract immigrants to the GOP, not repel them. We have to do it with more than words every two or four years. And we can’t do what Mitt Romney did.

He came to California, held a fundraiser, grabbed his money and left. He did nothing to get out the vote or reach out to the Hispanic community.

Romney wasn’t going to carry California. But we lost three good incumbents in close congressional races in the state on Nov. 6 — Mary Bono Mack, Dan Lundgren and Brian Bilbray.

Why did we lose those seats? Because only 29 percent of registered voters in California are Republican. And why is that? Because the GOP lacks a vision. Because it lacks a message.

If the GOP is to survive and get this country back on track, it has to regain its Reaganesque vision and make its message more caring and welcoming to immigrants.

The Republican Party has to reach out to the Hispanic, black, Asian and other communities and become involved with them — and do it every day from now on.

Until that happens, the GOP is going to have lots more Thanksgivings with less and less to give thanks for.

—–Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

Democrats have been blaming George W. Bush for the last four years.

Now I think it’s time for Republicans to start blaming George W. for the next four years.

For a week we’ve been pinning last week’s debacle on everything from Mitt Romney’s moderation to low Republican turnout.

But the most important Republican who didn’t turn out to support Romney this fall was George W. Bush.

You can make an honest argument that G.W. was as much to blame as anyone else for our being unable to defeat an incompetent incumbent of historic proportions.

For four years Barack Obama has blamed the Great Recession on G.W. and used his presidency as his excuse for why the economy is taking so long to get fixed.

And where’s G.W. been? MIA or AWOL, take your pick.

He didn’t show up at the GOP convention. He didn’t become an enthusiastic surrogate for Romney in a handful of swing states where a few hundred thousand more Republican voters could have changed history. He didn’t stump for senatorial candidates in contested states such as Virginia and Montana.

G.W., the ex-cheerleader, was nowhere to be seen or heard during Romney’s campaign. What’s worse, he didn’t even defend his own economic record. He let the conservatives on talk radio and at Fox News do it.

The trouble is talk radio and Fox only reach about 20 million people during a week – and most of them are already in the conservative Republican choir.

Last I checked, 121 million Americans voted on Election Day. That left us Republicans with 101 million people who still needed to hear our message about who’s really to blame for the broken economy of 2008 to 2012.

We griped and moaned and pointed to Obama, but the mainstream liberal media were too busy protecting their hero to fairly tell our side of the story.

The only way conservatives can get the national news media to deliver our message to the American people is to go over the media’s heads. And the only people who can do that consistently are ex-presidents of the USA.

Bill Clinton became Obama’s best propaganda weapon. When Clinton claimed that no one, not even a super-genius like him, could have solved the economic problem G.W. Bush left Obama within four years, every voter in America heard it.

Even Jimmy Carter was hauled out of mothballs to help the Democrat cause.

The 2012 campaign was all about “the economy, stupid.” Obama blamed G.W. and Republicans. Plus, he had Clinton and Carter bashing G.W.’s record with their bully sticks every day and countering Romney’s arguments that Obama was to blame.

We should have had G.W. standing up and saying, “This is bull. I’m tired of this. This is what I did or did not do with the economy as president. The real culprits are Dodd & Frank and four years of Obama’s failed policies.”

Instead G.W. stayed quiet, even on the issue of Benghazi. Because he refused to show up and defend himself and his record, the Republican Party had to take arrows for him and we lost our second presidential election in a row.

The question I’d like to ask my fellow conservative Republicans is, if G.W. isn’t willing to stand up for his own presidency, why the heck should we?

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

Wait until next year — 2016, that is.

That’s what disappointed Republican spinners kept saying Tuesday night as they watched Mitt Romney’s hopes crash and burn in swing state after swing state.

How many times did I hear a Republican talk about how their party’s deep bench of future all-stars will return it to power in Washington in four years?

But all the Ryans, Rubios, Bushes, Haleys and Christies in America can’t put the GOP — or the country — back together again.

The GOP is a wreck — and not just in California, where the party’s registration is now below 30 percent.

Look how easily the Republican Party managed to turn what should have been a sure victory over an incompetent and dangerous incumbent into an embarrassing defeat.

First they tore each other to shreds in a bitter primary, smearing their eventual nominee in debates as a rich, uncaring profiteer who put working people out on the street and shipped their jobs overseas.

Then, while Obama’s ads in the battleground states reinforced the Republican-made caricature of Mitt, the Romney campaign did just about everything wrong.

It squandered the GOP convention and tried to make their candidate into “Mitt the Moderate.” Team Romney also shunned their natural allies in talk radio and didn’t reach out for help from conservatives like me.

I would have been glad to help the Romney campaign in Ohio or Pennsylvania, where I worked for my father in 1980. I offered, but the phone never rang. It didn’t ring for Bill O’Reilly or for the other major radio and TV talk shows, either.

But Team Romney’s biggest mistake was playing prevent defense after his big victory in the first debate. It was a terrible, fatal blunder.

Instead of hammering away at the horror of Obamacare, the cover-up in Benghazi and President Eye-Candy’s four years of failure, Romney ran the last five weeks hoping the clock would run out before Obama could recover.

But you don’t play prevent defense when you are running in second place in Ohio, Virginia, Florida — and Tuesday’s results proved it.

Hurricane Sandy struck Mitt a final blow, giving Obama the chance to look presidential and making Mitt disappear from the media for four days.

But give credit to Obama’s Chicago Gang. They ran a much better campaign — on the ground and in the air. They got out the vote and Obama got out his message of class envy and federal entitlements for all, without any trouble from his toadies in the media.

Now bigger deficits, higher taxes and a stagnant economy lie ahead for as far as the eye can see. And socialized medicine — which my father warned was coming to America 50 years ago — is going to soon become a reality via Obamacare.

Team Romney blew an easy win because it had a poor game plan. But it also lost because the Republican Party is all talk and no guts when it comes to fighting for real conservatism — Ronald Reagan conservatism.

GOP bigwigs constantly praise my father. For years they’ve used him to suck true conservatives into the party, but they’ve never really embraced Reaganism or its ideals.

They didn’t in the 1980s and they still don’t today. They only talk about him. The party bosses don’t really think like him.

Most of those Republican candidates who lost Tuesday played the same game of pretend. “I’m like Ronald Reagan!” “No, I’m like Ronald Reagan!”

But most of them aren’t like my father. They weren’t waving the “bold colors” of real conservatism he talked about in 1975. The banners of the losers — like Mitt’s — were colored in “pale pastels.”

The GOP needs a new playbook. Unless it starts embracing my father’s conservative ideals instead of just paying lip service to them, the so-called “Party of Ronald Reagan” may never win another national election.

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

This is the story of two very different American presidents and how they each answered their emergency Libyan phone calls.

First, the story of Ronald Reagan. When he got a call about trouble with Libya it was in August of 1981 and I happened to be having dinner with him and Nancy in Los Angeles.

We had just finished eating and were having coffee when Ed Meese phoned. Meese was my father’s top policy adviser, and there was a serious military crisis brewing in the Mediterranean.

At the time, the United States Navy was conducting war exercises in international waters in the Gulf of Sidra off the Libyan coast.

Since 1973 Moammar Gadhafi had claimed the gulf was part of Libya’s territorial waters and had “drawn a line” in the water that no one could cross.

The United States ignored the claim, which clearly violated international law, and during naval maneuvers in 1973 and again in the fall of 1980 our reconnaissance planes were fired on by Libyan fighter planes.

Jimmy Carter had cancelled American war games in the Gulf of Sidra because he didn’t want to upset Gadhafi. But when my father took office he ordered them to be resumed.

Ed Meese told my father over the phone that Gadhafi was sending out fighters that were locking onto our planes with their radar. There was worry that one of the Libyan jets would fire on one of our airplanes.

Meese asked my father what we should do if our planes were fired upon.

“Ed, fire back,” he said.

“What if they fire at our planes and run?”

“Chase them,” my father said.

“What happens if they fire on our boys and not only fire and run, they fly back into their own airspace?”

“Ed, if they fire on our boys, you chase them all the way back to their hangars if necessary, but you shoot them down.”

“Fine, Mr. President. Should I call you and wake you if necessary?”

“No,” my father said. “Only call me if our boys are shot down.”

The next morning we woke up to find two Libyan Su-22 fighter planes destroyed because a missile had been fired at one of our F-14 Tomcats. Meese never called my father to tell him because our boys were not shot down.

When his emergency phone call came in, Ronald Reagan answered it like a commander in chief.

When President Obama’s call came in telling him our consulate in Benghazi was under attack by terrorists, he put American lives on hold.

He didn’t send in the Marines or scramble jets. He was too busy trying to be eye-candy on “The View” or making his appointment for his fund-raiser in Vegas.

That’s the difference between two presidents — one strong, one weak. One who answered the call, one who did not.

And you can add a third president to this story. As weak as he was, Jimmy Carter at least tried to rescue the hostages in Tehran. Barack Obama did not even try to save our brave men in Benghazi.

I tell that story about how my father dealt with his Libyan crisis to show you the stark difference between him and our sorry excuse for a commander in chief who wants four more years in office.

We all understand that next week’s election will come down to “the economy, stupid” for many people. But we should never forget how a president should answer the call when American lives are on the line.

—–Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

During Monday night’s debate nearly 60 million of us got a good look at why Barack Obama has not been able to accomplish anything in four years.

It’s his patronizing, me-me personality.

Did you see how condescending he was toward Mitt Romney, not to mention downright rude at times?

Obama’s more-presidential-than-thou attitude, which he did little to hide or dial back at the debate, should have reminded us of what happened in the first two weeks of his administration.

Remember when he met with congressional leaders and said he wanted to come up with a bipartisan solution for the country’s economic mess?

It began with a spirit of compromise and mutual respect. But at one point, when Obama became displeased at the Republicans’ ideas for a recovery plan, he turned to House Minority Whip Eric Cantor and arrogantly said, “Elections have consequences and Eric, I won.”

The president spoke condescendingly to Cantor, and guess what? Nothing got accomplished in Washington. For nearly four years.

But Obama’s arrogant, condescending attitude to those mere mortals who are not rock-star politicians (or “eye-candy” for the women who watch “The View”) didn’t start with his presidency. It’s how he acted when he was a community organizer and it’s how he’s acted at every stage of his political life since then.

He doesn’t look at people and speak with people. He speaks down to people. And when you do that, you rarely succeed in getting anything done in politics or anywhere else.

Even Obama’s friends in Congress won’t cooperate with him. They’re tired of being talked down to, too. Democrats have not given him one positive vote for any budget he has put forward.

Compare Barack Obama to Mitt Romney’s way of working with people. Mitt’s been successful at everything he’s tried. It’s because he speaks with people. He embraces people. He works with people. He doesn’t patronize or speak down to them.

Ronald Reagan, in order to get all the things done in Washington that he did, also knew how to treat people. He embraced people — both his friends and his enemies. He never talked down to anyone in his life.

My father also knew something about sharing credit that our Me-Me President clearly doesn’t understand.

My father had a plaque on his desk that read, “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

Ronald Reagan knew that when you’re in Washington everyone wants to take credit for anything and everything that gets done. Not being willing to share the credit is another reason you won’t be able to accomplish anything.

But this president has a real problem with giving credit. If he had a plaque on his desk, it’d read, “The credit begins and stops here — with me.”

Did you hear how many times the president said “I” or “me” during the last debate? Did anyone hear a single “we”?

I don’t know if anyone counted on Monday, but during a 25-minute stump speech in Ohio in July Obama said the “I” word 98 times and the “me” word 19 times. (A few weeks later first lady Michelle’s total was 83 times in 25 minutes, so maybe it runs in the family.)

As long as the president is going to use the words “I” and “me,” “we” are never going to accomplish anything in Washington if he’s in charge.

All I can say, America, is that “I” can’t vote Obama out of office on Nov. 6. But “we” sure can.

Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

Making Sense

Everybody talks about the middle class being hurt in the Obama economy, but it’s really the working poor who are getting crushed.

The president boasts that he and four more years of his trickle-down government policies are going to save the middle class’ bacon, eggs and jobs.

And at the Tuesday night cockfight on Long Island, our presumptive ex-commander in chief accused Mitt Romney of being hypocrite and a liar who wants to help the rich at the expense of the middle class.

The middle class has become an important political football this fall, but no one knows what the middle class actually is.

There’s no official definition based on household income. It ranges between $42,000 and $60,000 a year and it’s different by state.

Earn $45k in Utah or Mississippi and you’re solidly middle class. Earn that much in Manhattan or the Great Train Wreck State of California, where Obama Gas can cost $5 a gallon, and you’re really hurting.

It’s certainly true the middle class has been hurt by the Great Recession. But the biggest losers are the working poor.

When the economy goes south, they are the first to lose their jobs or see their paychecks shrink.

The president doesn’t talk about helping them. But the working poor are people like my daughter, a schoolteacher in Southern California. And Victor, my barber. And Jenny, who does my nails. And the waiter at the local restaurant.

When the middle class feels the pinch, what’s the first thing they do to make ends meet? They drop their hair colorists and gardeners, who often end up becoming part of the 23 million Americans looking for jobs.

President Obama wants to encourage high-skilled immigrants to stay in America. That’s fine. But it’s the low-skilled immigrants and the working poor who I’m worried about.

They’re the ones who do America’s hardest, dirtiest jobs, and it’s their kids who are hoping to join the middle class of tomorrow.

When I was growing up in Los Angeles the low-paid workers of the day were the Japanese, many of whom were gardeners.

But the Japanese worked hard, educated their kids and became one of our most successful ethnic groups, even after the prejudice of World War II. That’s the way it’s always worked in this country — until Barack Obama came along.

The American people have two clear choices three Tuesdays from now. They can choose between a successful bussinessman and a failed president.

Obama wants to take wealth from the rich and give it to the poor so everyone in America can live on an equal scale.

But Americans have never been economically equal and don’t want to be. The president wants to create something that’s never existed in the history of the world; the economies that tried are on “the ash heap of history.”

Obama’s been a total disaster. The economy is tanking, 23 million are out of work, 47 million are getting food stamps, and he has no clue what to do for the next four years.

And since he can’t defend his own record, all Obama’s been doing is attacking Mitt Romney for his wealth and success.

Mitt has nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, he needs to stop being so shy about his record of success. He needs to do a little bragging to the American people — especially to the poor and working classes.

He needs to say, “When I ran Bain Capital I was asked to come in, save a lot of jobs, and make other people rich. I did a great job at that.

“I was brought in to save the Winter Olympics when it was being destroyed by corruption and financial problems. I succeeded at that.

“Now my job is to bring the American economy back to health and create jobs. I’ll be successful at that, too. And I’ll make it possible for the working poor, the middle class — all of us — to live better.”

Come on, all you undecideds, step up. It’s time to vote for Mitt and put America’s workers back to work.

—–Copyright ©2012 Michael Reagan. Mike’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. For info on using columns contact Cari Dawson Bartley at [email protected] or call 800-696-7561.

The Wake Up America 2012 Rally was co-produced by Jeffers Dodge and PopModal Videos, home of Mr. Reagan’s video collection of television appearances. Mr. Dodge commented in his email to Mr. Reagan, “The ‘Wake Up America 2012 Rally’ went very well. We estimated about 2,500 people overall. Producing this event was was exhilarating but exhausting… I loved it..”

Here are some photos by Peter Duke:

Deborah Flora’s Anti-War-On-Woman

Dennis Prager: Keynote speaker

Madison Rising

From 1985 to 1989, the leadership and unlikely friendship of two men – U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev – catalyzed an astonishing event: the end of the Cold War.

Nearly 21 years ago, on Dec. 25, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved itself, marking the definitive end of the Cold War. Few had foreseen that it would end, and almost no one expected it to do so with so little violence.

Michael E. Reagan, son of the late President Reagan, will discuss how this extraordinary event happened when he speaks at Wofford College on Thursday, Nov. 1, for the college’s Hipp Lecture Series on International Affairs and National Security.

He will speak at 7 p.m. in Leonard Auditorium in Main Building on “Reagan and Gorbachev: The Unlikely Friendship that Ended the Cold War.” The program is free and open to the public.

“I’m looking forward to speaking at Wofford College and the Hipp Lecture Series on International Affairs and National Security,” Reagan says. “My father understood that principles matter when you are on the world stage. He believed in American exceptionalism and that America remains the best hope for mankind.”

Van Hipp, the Wofford alumnus who endowed the lecture series, says, “President Reagan’s effort to help end the Cold War was one of the great achievements of the 20th century. Michael Reagan had a front row seat to his father’s historical accomplishments, and we are pleased to have him at Wofford as part of our lecture series.”

Read full article at: https://www.wofford.edu/newsroom/2012/Michael-Reagan-to-speak-at-Wofford-on-Nov-1/

Ronald Reagan was not impressed with Joe Biden.

In fact, writing in his diary in his usual abbreviated style on June 15, 1987, Reagan described Biden this way:

He’s smooth but pure demagog [sic]- out to save Am. [America] from Reagan Doctrine…

As America settles in tonight to watch now-Vice President Biden face off in debate with Congressman Paul Ryan, whom no one has ever accused of being either a “smooth but pure demagogue” much less part of “a lynch mob,” it’s worth a look at exactly why the nation’s 40th president saw Biden this way — and how Reagan’s assessment is reflected in the conduct of today’s Obama-Biden administration…

To be a demagogue, of course, is to exhibit a personality trait not a policy. To appeal to prejudice… And he has three policy favorites in which his addiction to demagoguery most frequently surface: foreign policy, race, and economics….

Yesterday, Reagan biographer Paul Kengor shared a story about then-Senator Biden’s treatment of William Clark, Reagan’s appointee in 1981 as Deputy Secretary of State. The story is a classic of Biden demagoguery for which Reagan had such disdain. And there’s more to the story….

In other words, … Joe Biden has never changed…

Joe Biden, Ronald Reagan concluded, was nothing more — or less — than a “smooth but pure demagogue.”

The Gipper called it as he saw it.

Read the complete post at: https://m.spectator.org/169477/show/f06436edfd5f24a8799b5e67d03592ab/?