On March 30, 1981, Ronald Reagan was taken to the George Washington University Hospital after being shot by John Hinkley. In the operating room, the newly elected president looked at his doctors and said, “Please tell me you’re all Republicans.”
Reagan, who was born on February 6, 1911, would have turned 100 yesterday if he had not died from Alzheimer’s disease in 2004. But America has celebrated the president’s centennial anyway, in recognition of his place among our truly great leaders – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.
Reagan was preceded in his fight for conservatism by Barry Goldwater, the candidate of the “Radical Right” who lost the presidency to Lyndon Johnson overwhelmingly in 1964. At the time of Reagan’s election in 1980, columnist George Will remarked that Goldwater had won, it just took 16 years to count the votes.
Leaving office in 1989, Reagan completed his presidential tenure before most of today’s college students were born. But his accomplishments are very much relevant to the world in which we grew up.
In 1987, Reagan famously implored Mikhail Gorbachev, the premier of the Soviet Union who became Reagan’s friend, to “tear down this wall” – the wall separating West Berlin from the communist East. Two years later, the wall fell, and two years after that, the Soviet Union collapsed.
The result was the 1990s, perhaps the most peaceful and prosperous time in our nation’s history. Will appropriately summed it up as a “holiday from history,” when the nation entertained itself with President Clinton’s escapades and Al Gore’s lockboxes.
There were no bomb drills in elementary school; there were no fears of being suddenly obliterated in a nuclear holocaust. The end of the Cold War was Reagan’s most profound achievement.
Reagan’s leadership is relevant because we are living in a state and nation with no comparable figure. Looking at potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, there are no promising leaders stepping forward to carry the mantle of the party Reagan once championed.
Read the speech Reagan gave while traveling the country on Goldwater’s behalf in 1964, and then watch Mitt Romney on Fox News. There is no comparison between then two.
Reagan passionately communicated ideas about public policy and left his viewers with the impression that he actually understood those ideas. His talent was that he could make big issues seem relevant and simple to the public.
Today, potential candidates stick to the same poll-tested key words. They make advertisements of themselves that look more like movie trailers. Worse, they are jockeying to replace a man who has the most polarized approval ratings of any recent president.
Our campus and our generation are also polarized. We talk about creating a unified student identity, but the student body itself is segregated into many different enclaves. We are a microcosm of greater divides plaguing the nation, which have become more pronounced as Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama have further polarized the public.
Our governor just made an impassioned speech about being the governor of “all Alabamians,” and then turned around and said only Christians are his brothers and sisters.
How can we, as college students, create a unified identity for our generation, and our campus, if we do not even have a unified identity as Alabamians and Americans? How can we create a unified identity if our governor, our president, and the leaders of the opposition party all divide us?
We can’t. We need people to renew and reinvigorate our national morale, not embitter our political dialogue. We need more Reagans – principled leaders who use ideology as a guide to handling the challenges they confront, not a bludgeon with which to hammer their opponents – and fewer Palins.
Tray Smith is the opinions editor of The Crimson White. His column appears weekly on Mondays.
