believe the Republican Party represents basically the thinking of the people across the country, if we can get the message across to the people. I believe that a third-party movement has the effect of dividing people who share the same philosophy and usually winds up, because of that division, electing those they set out to oppose. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all the issues troubling the people? Americans are hungry again to feel a sense of mission and greatness.”
In late February, he accepted the offer to give the keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference. In what was his first public appearance since the Minnesota convention, Reagan expanded on his Imus interview, outlining his vision for an improved Republican Party:
“Despite what some in the press might say, we who are proud to call ourselves ‘conservative’ are not a minority party; we are part of the great majority of Americans of both major parties and of most of the independents as well.
“I have always been puzzled by the inability of some political and media types to understand exactly what is meant by adherence to political principle. All too often in the press it is treated as a call for ideological purity. Whatever ideology may mean, and it seems to mean a variety of things depending upon who is using it, it always conjures up in my mind a picture of a rigid, irrational clinging to abstract theory in the face of reality. We have to recognize that in this country, ‘ideology’ is a scare word. And for good reason, Marxist-Leninism is, to give but one example, an ideology. All the facts of the real world have to be fitted to the Procrustean bed of Marx and Lenin. If the facts don’t happen to fit the ideology, the facts are chopped off and discarded.
“I consider this to be the complete opposite to principled Conservatism. If there is any political viewpoint in the world which is free from slavish adherence to abstraction, it is American Conservatism.
“When a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.
“When a conservative quotes Jefferson that government that is the closest to the people is best, it is because he knows that Jefferson risked his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to make certain that what he and his fellow patriots learned from experience was not crushed by an ideology of an empire.
“Conservatism is the antithesis of the kind of ideological fanaticism that has brought so much horror and destruction to the world. The common sense and common decency of ordinary men and ordinary women, working out their own lives in their own ways[:] this is the heart of American Conservatism today. Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before.
“The principles of Conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind.
“The country cannot be limited to the country club, big business image that it is burdened with today. The new Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the working class man and woman, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat.
“Our task is not to sell a philosophy,” Reagan continued, “but to make the majority of Americans, who already share that political philosophy, see that modern Conservatism offers them a political home. We are not a political cult; we are members of a majority. Let’s act and talk like it. The job is ours and the job must be done. If not by us, who? If not now, when? Our party must be the party of the individual. It must not sell out the individual to cater to the group. No greater challenge faces our society today than ensuring that each one of us can maintain his dignity and his identity in an increasingly complex, centralized society.
“Extreme taxation, excessive controls, oppressive government competition with business, galloping inflation, frustrated minorities, and forgotten Americans are not the products of free enterprise. They are the residue of centralized bureaucracy, of government by a self-appointed elite.
“Our party must be based on the kind of leadership that grows and takes its strength from the people. Any organization is in actuality only the lengthened shadows of its members. A political party is a mechanical structure created to further a cause. The cause, not the mechanism, brings and holds members together; and our cause must be to rediscover, reassert, and reapply America’s spiritual heritage to our national affairs.
“Then with God’s help we shall indeed be as a city upon a hill, with the eyes of all people upon us.”
The standing ovation lasted several minutes. Reagan was not only taking on the current administration; he was also confronting the GOP elites that had run the party into the ground. Perhaps, more importantly, Reagan was giving the party hope, a hope its members had not felt since Obama had been elected.
“For the first time in a very long time it feels good to be a Conservative again,” CPAC member Brian Dula told reporters outside the hall, before lamenting, “If only Ronald Reagan was ten years younger.”
Chapter 3
“Mr. President, this is a big fucking deal.”
It was the morning of March 23, 2010: a date for the history books. President Obama had just signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law, and the microphones in the East Room of the White House inadvertently picked up the Vice President’s words and broadcast them live across the nation.
For once, the gaffe-prone VP was understated. The $1 trillion federal legislation was the most expansive legality enacted since the New Deal, promising to do the seemingly impossible by providing universal health coverage to all Americans while lowering costs and shrinking the deficit.
Victoria Reggie Kennedy, the widow of Senator Edward Kennedy, who had made universal healthcare his life’s work, had stood at Obama’s side during the ceremony along with 11-year-old Marcales Owens, who had become a poster child for health reform after his uninsured mother died of cancer. The President had seemed to sense the gravity of the moment, saying, “The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see. Today we are affirming that essential truth, a truth every generation is called to rediscover for itself, that we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations.”
It had been a stunning turnaround for the President and his party who, only two months earlier, had believed the bill to be dead. Scott Brown, the Massachusetts Republican who had centered his campaign on opposition to the legislation, had shocked the nation by winning the Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. This historic rebuke had deprived Obama of the 60-vote super majority necessary to pass the bill.
The results in Massachusetts had marked the third time in three months that Obama could not deliver for a Democratic candidate. In November, he had abetted the defeat of Creigh Deeds in the Virginia governor’s race and failed to prevent Democratic Governor Jon Corzine’s ouster in New Jersey. If the American people were sending the President a message, he was not getting it. While most Americans favored reform, they were overwhelmingly opposed to the kind of sweeping government intervention Democrats were proposing. Polls showed that the nation wanted the administration’s attention focused on the struggling economy.
Despite much diligence, the Republican’s work in Congress to prevent the passing of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, was undermined in what many considered to be an underhanded maneuver.
