The Great Communicator

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States. Earlier today a stirring memorial of the President was held on the grounds of the Reagan Presidential Library in California. Throughout the next 12 months there will be various commemorations of the Reagan Presidency.

It may be difficult for anyone under the age of 35 to understand what President Reagan meant to the United States and to the world. Much of what we know about the President, and what we find in history books has been filtered through the prism of a media industry and education establishment that were largely unfriendly, if not downright dismissive, of Ronald Reagan during his lifetime.

If you would like a short course on what type of president and what type of person Ronald Reagan was, I recommend the Feb. 5 op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan, who worked for the President in the mid-1980s.

If you would like to know what he meant to those who knew him up close, you could do no better than to click over to a recent syndicated column by Linda Chavez, who worked for the President at the Civil Rights Commission in the 1980s.

But I have my own reminiscence of what President Reagan meant to this country.

Ronald Reagan took office at what was arguably one of the worst periods in American history. The economy was in shambles, a mixture of high unemployment, inflation and double digit interest rates. Abroad, the U.S. had been humiliated by revolutionaries in Iran, who had held a large group of Americans hostage in Tehran for over a year. The Soviet Union was in an expansionist mode, fomenting with impunity international communism by proxy in several African countries and invading neighboring Afghanistan with the Red Army. Bleak, perhaps, understates the American outlook in 1981.

During the transition from the feckless Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan I was unemployed--not once, but twice. With little hope of finding a job. It was a scary, depressing, time. And bleak. Finally, in 1986 I was able to land a job. Not just a job, but a career -  the same career I enjoy today, 26 years later.

It took me some time to connect the dots between President Reagan, his economic program, and my landing a good job. It didn't hit me till the following year when I was driving to work one morning and I passed a Burger King. Outside the fast food store was a sign that read "Help Wanted." It was then that I realized that was the first "Help Wanted" sign I had seen since I was in my early years in high school. The Reagan economy was creating more jobs than there were people to fill them. And my job was part of that creation. Twenty-six years later that's what Ronald Reagan means to me.

President Reagan was a believer in freedom--economic freedom and political freedom. He believed that a government that over-reaches does so at the expense of its citizens' liberty. He also believed that America's unique ability to champion liberty and show by example made it exceptional. The source of this exceptionalism? Our Constitution. As he put it so well in his 1989 farewell address:

Almost all the world's constitutions are documents in which governments tell the people what their privileges are. Our Constitution is a document in which We the People tell the government what it is allowed to do.

If you have 20 minutes I ask that you watch President Reagan's Farewell Address, provided below. The President knew that he couldn't count on the media to represent his words to the American people. So he often spoke directly - and candidly - to them. This was the last of those speeches. Somewhat derisively, the media nicknamed him "The Great Communicator" - a name this common-sense, modest man didn't necessarily agree with. For Ronald Reagan gave credit for his ideas to others and for their execution to the American people:

...I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference. It was the content. I wasn't a great communicator. But I communicated great things. And they didn't spring full boom from my brow. They came from the heart of a great Nation.

Just thought you might like to know.