We forget this anniversary at our peril.

As conservatives face off against their own natural party, the GOP, in NY-23, Florida, and elsewhere, we should remember Ronald Reagan’s famous speech.

“Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.
This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism…

“No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth…

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

The full speech is below the fold.

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Dan Collins - who has by the way moved Piece of Work In Progress: update your links - has a post about the opposition to the President that shouldn’t be excerpted, but must be.  A taste:

…they get stonewalled at town halls packed deliberately with union supporters, or find that their Representative has literally decided to phone the meeting in, and they are accused of being astroturfed, even as they watch people from out of state bused in to support the health care fiasco.  They see Lyndon LaRouche wackos carrying Obama Nazi signs characterized as right-wingers.  They hear that their concerns are those of a small and demented minority.  They see videos cropped to make it seem as though they’re racists. They are told that their opposition to Obama’s policies springs from racism on talk shows and in editorials.  They receive unsolicited emails from Axelrod after being told that their information’s not being kept by the White House, and then it’s blamed on advocacy groups across a broad political spectrum.  They recall that there were 8 years of BusHitler rhetoric that went unchallenged in the MSM, which suddenly is up in arms about the extraordinary incivility of such comparisons.

[snip]

Oh, yeah, they’re angry.  But it’s not because they’re stupid.  It’s because “Trust us; we despise you” isn’t really very civil, is it?

Read the whole thing, and let me add one more of my own:

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In case you hadn’t realized that this debate is decades old:

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Since the White House has called on us to rat out our fellow Americans, I thought I would do my part.

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov

I have compiled a helpful list of people behaving in ways that strike me as “fishy”.

First up, here’s a bully who interfered with the free speech rights of a couple of gentlemen.

Rick Monday : April 25, 1976

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Jump with me to see more of these suspicious characters….

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Promoted from the diaries by Jeff. While I’ve registered my disagreement with sentiments like those contained in this diary, and have publicly expressed my desire for Ms. Palin to disappear from the public political eye as quickly as possible now that she has left the office to which she was elected, this diary is both well-written and expressive of the enthusiasm that far-from-insignificant number of die-hard Palin fans share, and it represents a point of view I recognize as every bit as valid as my own on the matter. -JE

Back in the mid 1990’s The Chrysler Corporation went public with a really new and exciting business model. The company best known for the K-car and inventing the mini-van at that point in time, had spent a lot of time behind the scenes to totally remake the company. They threw everything out, and started fresh. New “cab-forward” styling on their cars, and a brand new pickup truck, the first completely new truck in 25 years, and a completely refocused management, design, and manufacturing team.

Chrysler became the most exciting car company around. Envied by the other manufacturers. It really was the rebirth of a company that since the it’s formation had always been recognized as one of the best at engineering. This brought Chrysler back in a big way. Record sales, especially in trucks, helped Chrysler show healthy profits. If fact, Chrysler became so successful, Mercedes-Benz would soon come knocking with a bundle of cash and an offer!

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Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Board chairman H.R. Crawford told the panel at its Wednesday meeting that he heard some congresscritters talking about removing President Ronald Reagan’s name from DC’s airport.

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Much has been made of this sensational headline over the weekend. My, my we’ve become quick to eat our own and throw Jeb Bush under the bus.

But did anyone actually go beyond the headline to consider what he was actually saying (and there is more to it than was reported)?

First, shame on those of you who’d throw Jeb under the bus for his last name. Let’s compare his record to that of his brother’s or most other so called conservatives. Bush actually cut taxes in Florida, reformed education, allowed school choice, reduced government personnel, relied on the private sector, ended affirmative action in higher education, and a host of other conservative positions. He does not just talk the talk, but he walks the walk.

So when a guy like Jeb stands up and says, “You can’t beat something with nothing, and the other side has something. I don’t like it, but they have it, and we have to be respectful and mindful of that,” you might want to actually look beyond his last name to what he is actually talking about.

The reaction to his statement and the sensation headline at the Washington Times proves his point. It is time to get over Reagan — not the man or his ideas, but his administration.

If you remember, Reagan ran in 1980 against Jimmy Carter and stagflation. He ran against appeasing the Soviet Union. He ran against an out of touch and out of control Washington. Guess what? Most people these days think it was Republicans who caused the current economic crisis and Republicans who dismantled Reagan’s vision of government in favor of out of control government.

When your party is so grossly connected to the present out of control Washington, it does very little good to talk about fighting Jimmy Carter’s stagflation and the Soviet Union — neither of which exist.

And yet . . . we do. We do because we do no have any worthwhile candidates right now, so we have fallen into one of the devil’s favorite traps.

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Since November, I’ve become accustomed to predictions that the Republican Party is on its way to irrelevance.  Nonetheless, I was disappointed to hear that sentiment voiced by University of Virginia professor and pundit Larry Sabato, who generally tries to provide a relatively objective analysis.  On MSNBC’s Hardball today, Sabato opined that “we’re on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system. And the Republicans are the half a party.”  Here’s Sabato’s analysis followed by my thoughts on why such predictions are silly.

Essentially, it boils down to this. Minorities are going to be the majority by 2042. It could even be by the 2030s. Young people 18 to 29, they voted more than two to one for Obama, and their turnout is going to go up with each additional year as they age. The same with people with graduate degrees, who used to vote Republican on fiscal issues. Now they’re so turned off to Republicans because of [conservative rhetoric] and the social issues, they turned Democratic. Hey, you can`t just win with white male voters in the South, and that’s what the Republicans have left.

This sort of analysis sounds quite logical but is reminiscent of what the pundits said following the re-election of both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.  After the 1984 election, expert after expert explained why the shift of population and thus electoral votes to the Sun Belt had given the Republicans a “lock on the Electoral College.”  Despite my youthful eagerness for a GOP presidential monopoly, this electoral analysis struck me as too sweeping and simplistic to be correct.  Unfortunately, I was right.

Following the 2004 election, the message from the experts was the same, though the explanation had changed.  Now the Democrats had little chance of winning presidential elections because they were only competing in states that accounted for barely half of the 538 electoral votes.  It was a seductive argument, but again it was too simplistic and backward-looking to be true.

Predictions of electoral locks are appealing in their simplicity and particularly persuasive in the aftermath of a one-sided election.  But, like all analyses based on sample sizes of one or two elections, they’re essentially worthless, if only because the news headlines and candidates that await us are unknowable  Although it’s much less fun and won’t get you a guest appearance on MSNBC or FOX, the only honest analysis is admitting that you haven’t got a clue about what’s going to happen in future elections.

It was 1856. Fifty-five months before the civil war ripped the nation apart. Abraham Lincoln was on stage speaking to Republicans in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Ten thousand people showed up to hear the lanky lawyer from Illinois.

Lincoln was a gifted speaker, but he was awkward. He stood out in a crowd. Lincoln opened his mouth. His speech was no Gettysburg address. But a nation already grappling with the idea of a manifest destiny understood his message.

“We are eighty years old,” he started. “We stand at once the wonder and admiration of the whole world, and we must enquire what it is that has given us so much prosperity. This cause is that every man can make himself.”

Every man can make himself.

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The pundits and talking heads have settled on a sensational meme: Obama killed Reagan. To the Old Media and the pundit class, it’s got all the requisite characteristics of a great story. New beating old, liberal trumping conservative, it has power, pathos and amazement. But, it is also pure hyperbole and, well, a load of horse puckey.

Before I get too much further along here, it would be silly of me to claim that it could never happen that Obama will supplant Reagan as the miracle worker of the Oval Office. We have but to look at the long-term success of Franklin Roosevelt’s turning of America from a capitalist republic to a democratic socialist system to see that it is entirely possible that Obama’s next four years (or 16 if we’re talking FDR redux) could “re-make” the country once again. Not that what FDR did was a good thing, mind you, but it cannot be denied that it was a political success and was entirely transformative.

But, folks can we focus on something salient to this discussion for just a minute? As I write this, we’ve had a President Obama for a grand total of 45 days. So, with that small fraction of a term in mind, it is simply absurd to say that Obama has killed anything at this early stage. No president can wholly re-make the country in 45 days. It just isn’t possible.

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From ABC News:

ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reports:  The House Appropriations Committee just posted its $410 billion 2009 Omnibus spending bill.  It’s a doozy.  This is the bill that will fund the government’s operations until the end of the fiscal year.  It’s larded with thousands (so many, I can’t count them all yet) of earmarks and adds up an increase in overall discretionary spending of more than 8 percent, the biggest one year increase since 1978 (with the exception of the spending boost after the September 11 attacks).

And this is a bi-partisan feeding frenzy.  Roughly 40 percent of the money for earmarks (i.e. pet projects inserted by individual lawmakers) have been inserted by Republicans.

The Democrats, back before 2006, blamed the GOP constantly for major increases in discretionary spending. Now it is their turn and it turns out they are worse. 60% of increases by them. Wow.

Tonight, Barack Obama will address the nation. His aides, setting the bar extraordinarily high, say the speech will be Reaganesque.

“The president believes very clearly that we have to be honest with the American people about where we are,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“He will,” Gibbs said, “tell the country that we’ve faced … greater challenges than the ones we face now, but we as Americans always meet those challenges. But in the Reaganesque words, there are always better days ahead.”

Will the President dare to take on the issue of discretionary spending? Will he dare to challenge the Democrats?

I suspect this is the perfect opportunity for him to do so. The Dems are giving him a huge gift, i. e. a massive pig with a target on its rib cage for Obama to blow up and take on the corrupting culture of Washington.

This should, in fact, be the bar tonight. If Obama is willing to take this on, we’ll need to give him credit. If he does not, not only will he not have been “honest with the American people,” but he will not really be setting us up to meet any challenges.