Troyhand
01-04-2008, 12:42 AM
Interesting article I found about Reagan. Thought it might be appropriate for tonight. :)
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_12_56/ai_n13648205
The campaigner
National Review, June 28, 2004 by Richard Brookhiser
IN January 1980 Ronald Reagan stumbled when George H. W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses. Reagan's immediate target after his loss was the New Hampshire primary, but in those more spacious days he had weeks of cross-country campaigning to fill. In that interval, I followed him on a swing for NATIONAL REVIEW that ended up in St. Paul, Minn. He was giving his stump speech at some downtown hall--ethnic? Masonic?--and for the longest time he didn't come to the stage. The band played "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," coolly. The sight of plastic boaters with campaign bumper stickers pasted on their crowns, atop the heads of people who are waiting, and waiting, to cheer, is one the most melancholy in the world.
I trust I will not shock the readers of this magazine, or the gods of journalistic objectivity, when I say that I was yearning for him to pull it out. His mighty effort to unseat Gerald Ford in 1976, a hair-raising alternation of wins and losses, had consumed the spring of my junior year in college. The 1980 campaign had been elaborately planned and funded; if he failed now, he would never run again (he was 69, after all). One of Minnesota's Republican senators, elected after some fluke spat in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, finally introduced Reagan, lukewarmly. Then he appeared. I felt what I always felt at the beginning of every Reagan speech: Who is this guy?
Actors, one thinks, are fluent. They are not supposed to flub their lines (Now is the winter of our discount ... discontent). But Reagan often made little word bobbles of this kind. His good looks and physicality had gone beyond paternal to being grand-paternal; his warm voice had become husky around the edges, and his manner could seem a tad old-hennish. But at the end of his speech, I felt what I always felt: I love him.
Part of it was technique. He had a way, to which his verbal fumbles contributed, of drawing back from the theoretical center of attention that hovers over every lectern. This had the effect of drawing the listener forward--closer to him. We needed to catch what was going on, so we brought our ears closer to his lips. Reagan had the confidence of a speaker long used to mikes. A politician like poor Walter Mondale would add, to the curse of an ugly accent, the vocal projection of a man used to addressing outdoor crowds. This made him charming as a splitting maul. Reagan, trained in radio stages and sound stages, was inviting as old flannel.
But let us never forget that the core of his attraction was what he said. Reagan's success cannot be appreciated apart from understanding the background of the Seventies, and the Seventies were awful. Pipsqueak sheiks had learned how to strangle us at the gas pump; the Ayatollah Khomeini promised something new, and worse. Inflation and unemployment, violating every model from Keynes to Milton Friedman, rose in inglorious tandem. The fall of Saigon had brought skull mountains to Cambodia, and restaurants to Arlington. The Soviets had not only conquered Afghanistan, which was on their border, but had acquired, through clever use of surrogates, improbable real estate in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America. The presidency had passed from a crook to a dullard to a meager whiner. Henry Kissinger, the most brilliant of our foreign-policy mandarins, conceived of himself as playing the losing hand of the West with Machiavellian skill.
We needed an optimist, someone who knew that the right should, and would, prevail. Even more, we needed someone who knew what the right was. We needed someone who believed, not because he had learned it at the University of Chicago, but because it made sense to him, that lower taxes and fewer regulations would stimulate economic growth. We needed someone who knew, not because a geopolitical map-folder suspected it was true, but because he felt it in his bones, that Communism was evil and dangerous and inhuman.
That is what Ronald Reagan had been saying for years, before he said it again in St. Paul. Even if he didn't make the case in detail, which he usually didn't, he could allude to the case as his fulcrum, his political point of vantage. He had been saying such things at least since his speech for Goldwater in 1964. In 1980, when America needed him most, it turned to him. He won New Hampshire, the election, an intellectual argument, and a world war. He was probably not surprised--which was one of the reasons he ultimately won.
COPYRIGHT 2004 National Review, Inc.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_12_56/ai_n13648205
The campaigner
National Review, June 28, 2004 by Richard Brookhiser
IN January 1980 Ronald Reagan stumbled when George H. W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses. Reagan's immediate target after his loss was the New Hampshire primary, but in those more spacious days he had weeks of cross-country campaigning to fill. In that interval, I followed him on a swing for NATIONAL REVIEW that ended up in St. Paul, Minn. He was giving his stump speech at some downtown hall--ethnic? Masonic?--and for the longest time he didn't come to the stage. The band played "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," coolly. The sight of plastic boaters with campaign bumper stickers pasted on their crowns, atop the heads of people who are waiting, and waiting, to cheer, is one the most melancholy in the world.
I trust I will not shock the readers of this magazine, or the gods of journalistic objectivity, when I say that I was yearning for him to pull it out. His mighty effort to unseat Gerald Ford in 1976, a hair-raising alternation of wins and losses, had consumed the spring of my junior year in college. The 1980 campaign had been elaborately planned and funded; if he failed now, he would never run again (he was 69, after all). One of Minnesota's Republican senators, elected after some fluke spat in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, finally introduced Reagan, lukewarmly. Then he appeared. I felt what I always felt at the beginning of every Reagan speech: Who is this guy?
Actors, one thinks, are fluent. They are not supposed to flub their lines (Now is the winter of our discount ... discontent). But Reagan often made little word bobbles of this kind. His good looks and physicality had gone beyond paternal to being grand-paternal; his warm voice had become husky around the edges, and his manner could seem a tad old-hennish. But at the end of his speech, I felt what I always felt: I love him.
Part of it was technique. He had a way, to which his verbal fumbles contributed, of drawing back from the theoretical center of attention that hovers over every lectern. This had the effect of drawing the listener forward--closer to him. We needed to catch what was going on, so we brought our ears closer to his lips. Reagan had the confidence of a speaker long used to mikes. A politician like poor Walter Mondale would add, to the curse of an ugly accent, the vocal projection of a man used to addressing outdoor crowds. This made him charming as a splitting maul. Reagan, trained in radio stages and sound stages, was inviting as old flannel.
But let us never forget that the core of his attraction was what he said. Reagan's success cannot be appreciated apart from understanding the background of the Seventies, and the Seventies were awful. Pipsqueak sheiks had learned how to strangle us at the gas pump; the Ayatollah Khomeini promised something new, and worse. Inflation and unemployment, violating every model from Keynes to Milton Friedman, rose in inglorious tandem. The fall of Saigon had brought skull mountains to Cambodia, and restaurants to Arlington. The Soviets had not only conquered Afghanistan, which was on their border, but had acquired, through clever use of surrogates, improbable real estate in Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America. The presidency had passed from a crook to a dullard to a meager whiner. Henry Kissinger, the most brilliant of our foreign-policy mandarins, conceived of himself as playing the losing hand of the West with Machiavellian skill.
We needed an optimist, someone who knew that the right should, and would, prevail. Even more, we needed someone who knew what the right was. We needed someone who believed, not because he had learned it at the University of Chicago, but because it made sense to him, that lower taxes and fewer regulations would stimulate economic growth. We needed someone who knew, not because a geopolitical map-folder suspected it was true, but because he felt it in his bones, that Communism was evil and dangerous and inhuman.
That is what Ronald Reagan had been saying for years, before he said it again in St. Paul. Even if he didn't make the case in detail, which he usually didn't, he could allude to the case as his fulcrum, his political point of vantage. He had been saying such things at least since his speech for Goldwater in 1964. In 1980, when America needed him most, it turned to him. He won New Hampshire, the election, an intellectual argument, and a world war. He was probably not surprised--which was one of the reasons he ultimately won.
COPYRIGHT 2004 National Review, Inc.