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Michael Reagan on Sarah
Palin |
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Posted 09/04/2008 ET
Updated 09/04/2008 ET
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I've been trying to convince my fellow
conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless
quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our
nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was
one of a kind.
I was wrong!
Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on
television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only
this time he's a she.
And what a she!
In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected
my Dad's indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention
center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media's assigned
spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring
rhetoric we haven't heard since my Dad left the scene.
This was Ronald Reagan at his best -- the same Ronald Reagan who
made the address known now solely as "The Speech," which during the
Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of
the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the
White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.
Last night was an extraordinary event. Widely seen beforehand as a
make-or-break effort -- either an opportunity for Sarah Palin to
show that she was the happy warrior that John McCain assured us she
was, or a disaster that would dash McCain's presidential hopes and
send her back to Alaska, sadder but wiser.
Obviously un-intimidated by either the savage onslaught to which the
left-leaning media had subjected her, or the incredible challenge
she faced -- and oozing with confidence -- she strode defiantly to
the podium and proved she was everything and even more than John
McCain told us.
Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last
night, however, was something much more than a just a woman
accomplishing something no Republican woman has ever achieved. What
we saw was a red-blooded American with that rare, God-given ability
to rally her dispirited fellow Republicans and take up the daunting
task of leading them -- and all her fellow Americans -- on a
pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my father envisioned as
our nation's real destination.
In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her
Democratic rivals and reveal them for what they are -- a pair of
old-fashioned liberals making promises that cannot be kept without
bankrupting the nation and reducing most Americans to the status of
mendicants begging for their daily bread at the feet of an
all-powerful government.
Most important, by comparing her own stunning record of achievement
with his, she showed Barack Obama for the sham that he is, a man
without any solid accomplishments beyond conspicuous
self-aggrandizement.
Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of
us live because that's the way she lives. She shares our homespun
values and our beliefs, and she glories in her status as a
small-town woman who put her shoulder to the wheel and made life
better for her neighbors.
Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of
self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest
lifestyle reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic,
ordinary American who made this country the greatest, most powerful
nation on the face of the earth.
As hard as you might try, you won't find that kind of plain-spoken,
down-to-earth, self-reliant American in the upper ranks of the
liberal-infested, elitist Democratic Party, or in the Obama
campaign.
Sarah Palin didn't go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban
neighborhood leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within
the ranks of one of the nation's most corrupt political machines,
never challenging it and going along to get along, like Barack
Obama.
Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it,
rising to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of
government she served in on her way up the ladder.
Welcome back, Dad, even if you're wearing a dress and bearing
children this time around.
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| Mr. Reagan is a syndicated radio talk-show
host, author of "Twice
Adopted" (Broadman
& Holman Publishers) and "The
City on a Hill,"and the son of former President Ronald
Reagan. |
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| This page last updated on
Saturday, August 06, 2011 05:26:03 PM
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