ear, made a surprise request for Reagan to come to the podium by calling out, “Would my good friend Ron Reagan come on down, and bring Nancy?”
The McCain camp believed this gesture would go a long way to bridging the party’s unity gap and, perhaps more importantly, deflate the image of Reagan as a great public orator. “McCain bought into the perception that Reagan was still just an actor. He wanted the country to see him speak without a teleprompter because he thought Reagan would struggle. We all did,” a McCain advisor later admitted.
Reagan was livid. Earlier that morning he had unequivocally rejected an offer to appear on stage with McCain. McCain was now putting Reagan on the spot with the eyes of the nation watching.
So, Reagan rebuffed McCain, waving and shaking his head no, before smiling and giving McCain the thumbs up sign.
As far as Reagan was concerned, he had made his last speech of the 2008 campaign earlier that day as he met with his staff one last time to thank them for their hard work, telling the tear-filled room:
“The cause goes on. Nancy and I aren’t going back to sit on a rocking chair and say that’s all there is for us. We are going to stay in there and you stay in there with me. The cause is still there. Don’t give up your ideals, don’t compromise, don’t turn to expediency, don’t get cynical. It’s just one battle in a long war. Our cause will prevail because it is right.”
But as McCain’s family started waving Reagan down to the stage, the people in the convention hall erupted in chants: “We want Ron! We want Ron!”
Reluctant to disappoint the Republican faithful, Reagan stepped out of his skybox.
“I haven’t the foggiest idea what I’m going to say,” he told Nancy before striding down to the stage.
Yet Reagan took to the podium and began by thanking McCain before launching into his vision for the Party. Reagan did not stumble, as predicted, but instead delivered one of the most powerful speeches of his career:
“May I just say some words? There are cynics who say that a party platform is something that no one bothers to read and it doesn’t very often amount to much.
“Whether it is different this time than it has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors, with no pastel shades.
“We have just heard a call to arms based on that platform, and a call to us to really be successful in communicating and reveal to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party, which is nothing but a revamp and a reissue and a running of a late, late show of the thing that we have been hearing from them for the last 70 years. If I could just take a moment… I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now.
“It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and the issues today. I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.
“Then as I tried to write—let your own minds turn to that task. You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of a world they will be living in.
“And suddenly I thought to myself, if I write of the problems, they will be the domestic problems the Senator spoke of here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule in this country, the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.
“And then again there is that challenge of which he spoke: that we live in a world in which the terrorists plot their next attack that can kill thousands of innocent lives in a single heartbeat.
“And suddenly it dawned on me; those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether we met our challenges. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.
“Will they look back with appreciation and say, ‘Thank God for those people in 2008 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now, one hundred years later, free?’
“And if we failed, they probably won’t get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won’t be allowed to talk of that or read of it.
“This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.
“We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: ‘there is no substitute for victory.’”
After Reagan’s speech the crowd stood stunned. Many had tears in their eyes.
McCain felt sick to his stomach, and his face drained of color. He strained to keep his smile as he and Reagan raised their arms up together above their heads to the deafening cheers of the crowd. His moment was lost. It would be Reagan’s speech and not his own dominating the following news cycles.
Worse yet, many in the room had been filled with a palpable sense of buyer’s remorse.
Aaron Bishop, a grassroots organizer from Virginia overheard the woman next to him mutter, “Oh my God, we’ve nominated the wrong man.”
Chapter 1
“You know, people will insist that 2008 had 366 days. I don’t believe it. I think it had 36,666 days,” Democratic strategist James Carville said as the year came to a close. Carville was speaking on his own behalf, as a pundit for CNN, but he could have easily been speaking for the entire nation.
It had been a miserable year, littered with lost jobs, lost national pride, and lost hope. The country was at war on two fronts, with the casualty count rising steadily in Afghanistan and Iraq, while Americans at home were struggling to adjust to the depressing new economic reality of soaring inflation and high unemployment. Senator John McCain, having lost the election by a landslide, disappeared into political memory.
The downturn spared no one. Young adults had begun to discover a college degree was no longer a guarantee of a good job. Senior citizens had a rude awakening when $7 trillion of wealth vanished from the stock market, devaluing their savings and forcing them out of retirement. Even the jet-setting crowd had started feeling the heat, especially those unfortunate enough to have invested with Bernie Madoff, whose $50 billion Ponzi scheme set off an epic buzz kill at cocktail parties and social scenes stretching from coast to coast.
Lurking beneath the jarring loss of wealth and jobs was a powerful shift in the philosophical premises that had long guided American economic policy. For the first time since the Great Depression, the public seemed ready to embrace bigger government. In a September 2008 Time Magazine article, “The New Liberal Order,” Peter Beinart wrote, “Americans want government to impose law and order—to keep their 401(k)s from going down, to keep their healthcare premiums from going up, to keep their jobs from going overseas—and
