Who Will Defend Family in 2012?

The Republicans bill themselves as the party of the family. They defend family values, or at least they oppose certain anti-family policies such as abortion and same-sex marriage. The reason for this concern is that the family is the bedrock of society. The family is the little society in which human beings receive their moral formation, fitting them for the larger society. As goes the family, so goes law and order and prosperity and decent service in the check out line.

The other reason for this concern--the negative one--is that the family has come under devastating assault over the last two or three generations. In some communities, it doesn't even exist. Those communities are the poorest, most crime ridden, most blighted in every way.

In my Worldmag column this week, "The Semi-conservative Republican Party," I take the GOP to task for not going beyond the defense of individual liberty (political and economic) to the rigorous and systematic defense of the family, the social unit on which the enjoyment of that liberty depends fundamentally.

I write: "Ronald Reagan appointed a Special Working Group on the Family to examine all policies for their impact on the family. That was good as far as it went, but the work needs to be less reactive. A thoughtfully crafted, fully coordinated family policy should recognize the requirements for and impediments to healthy family life, and inform the president of whatever measures are necessary and constitutional to strengthen it. State governors and local governments should do the same.

"Conservatives these days are hawkish over how a given tax or regulation will affect small business and job creation, and that’s good. But the family deserves the same protective scrutiny."

Abe Lincoln Weighs In On Health Care Debate

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) speaks homespun common sense in good midwest American fashion here in his opening statement on the currently proposed health care reform legislation. Let the Congressman have the floor.



He's eloquent. He's sincere. He quotes Lincoln ("You can't make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak.")

Of course, I was curious as to the source of this Lincoln quote, so I went searching. It does not appear that Honest Abe wrote these words, although they have been attributed to him for many years. Snopes traces it to a Presbyterian minister named William John Henry Boetcker who was the director of the Citizens' Industrial Alliance when he penned these truisms in 1916. The theory goes that they were later published on the back of a leaflet of genuine Lincoln quotes and the confusion was inevitable. Nonetheless, the ideas are Lincolnian.

Ronald Reagan quoted these pearls of wisdom at the 1992 Republican National Convention, and attributed them to Lincoln.

I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln: "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed.

This clip does not include the spuriously attributed Lincoln line (it follows just after), but it is well worth the five minute investment to watch it.



You can read the full text of the speech here.

Reagan Weighs In On ObamaCare

If only Ronald Reagan were alive to speak into the debate about government takeover of the health care system.

But take heart! Though he is gone, he speaks nonetheless!

Here is the Gipper himself in 1961 explaining at that time why citizens should actively oppose "socialized medicine." This is a 10 minute recording on a record album produced by the American Medical Association. But it's all Reagan: his thoughts on the subject; his eloquence.



Notice how he speaks directly to the ordinary American as an ordinary American himself without talking down or pretending to be something he was not. Notice also his appeal to political theory and the Founding. Notice lastly, that his appeal is not to prosperity nor to fiscal sanity, as good and legitimate as those are. His appeal is to the noble concern for liberty.

He closes with this warning:

If you don't do this [call your Congressman] and if I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Yes--he saw socialized medicine itself as being decisive in the fight for liberty against socialism, which he viewed as antithetical to the American spirit and the American system of government, and which he identified with tyranny.

Wisdom For Our Times

Someone I have recently friended on Facebook has been collecting political quotations. I share these with you.

Here are two from Ronald Reagan, the wisdom of which are being reconfirmed in our day by the Obama-Reid-Pelosi government.

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help. ~Ronald Reagan

The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.~ Ronald Reagan

And let’s add the wisdom of Milton Friedman who was much more politically astute than many of his libertarian followers are:

A society that puts equality... ahead of freedom will end up with neither. ~ Milton Friedman

Barack Obama, like Jimmy Carter before him, has mastered only half of the following advice.

Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. ~Will Rogers.

Turning now to our Democratically controlled Congress:

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer. ~Will Rogers

“The country,” i.e. its economy and moral fabric, is complex. This Democratic Congress seems to think it can easily and quickly rearrange everything so that justice will reign unsullied and with no significant unanticipated evils that will result from it. These only liberal bulls have learned nothing from the destructive social experiments of the sixties.

The last word goes to our great second President.

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress. ~John Adams.

Would that they were only useless.

Obama Trying On Reagan's Big Shoes

Obama has been compared to FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Jimmy Carter. He has spoken well of Ronald Reagan, and took heat for it in the primaries. Lou Cannon explains ("Obama's Reagan Transformation?" New York Times, Jan. 28, 2009) how it makes sense for him, under these conditions of economic distress, to mimic Ronald Reagan by putting off the social agenda and other domestic priorities until he has the economy back on its feet. There are signs that Reagan is indeed the model he is following.

The trouble is that whereas Reagan understood how wealth is created and thus how an economy grows, Obama's economic medicine is likely to extend and deepen our suffering. In a time of crisis, such as Reagan faced and such as Barack Obama is facing now, it is not enough simply to learn from Reagan the tactician (and Reagan, we learn, took counsel from Nixon), but to learn from Reagan the statesman in general. This necessarily includes understanding the relationship between the substance of his political and economic principles and the flourishing of the nation under his leadership.

Being Reagan is not as easy at it looks.

Doodling on Duty

The incoming president is facing tough tests in the economy, social policy, and international affairs. A President cannot disregard any sphere of responsibility. He cannot forgo understanding the economy (John McCain). He cannot pretend that the wider world is no longer of any importance (Bill Clinton in '93). And he cannot think that posterity will not judge his artistic abilities.

Here is Obama's doodle from one of the few moments he found himself in the U.S. Senate

This fetched $2,075 at auction. The market has spoken. What will history say?

And then there's the Reagan test. Can he doodle like the Gipper?

By the way, if you cannot recognize Obama's subjects (that would say something!), they are (L-R, not politically), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), Sen. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA).

McCain Our Churchill

John McCain seems suddenly Churchillian. Consider the resemblance. Both men came from a long line of public men, albeit of different sorts. Both distinguished themselves militarily when young, although differently. Both spent years in the legislature and in leadership positions there, Churchill as Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer and McCain as a prominent member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. If McCain is elected president, both will have come very late in life to executive leadership of their respective nations. Churchill was 65 when he became Prime Minister in 1940. John McCain will be 72 at the end of this month.

More substantively, both men were fairly isolated even within their own parties in their prescient opposition to looming tyranny in Europe. At a joint press conference in Slovenia with then Russian President Putin, President George W. Bush said "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country." In disagreement with this, Sen. McCain said "When I look into Vladimir Putin's eyes, I see three letters: a K, a G and a B." He has been advocating the expulsion of Russian from the G8 group of industrialized nations, a suggestion that obviously most have found unnecessarily provocative. Now if McCain had Obama's eloquence, the resemblance would be more convincing.

But Americans are not moved by associations with Winston Churchill. But events have opened the opportunity for McCain to step into the Reagan role. And his penchant for prudent confrontation with the Russians, despite fierce opposition from the Democrats, is Reaganesque. Putin's making explicit his imperial ambitions in Europe may clinch the election for McCain. Anything that reminds America that we are living in a dangerous world is a boost for McCain and daybreak to the Obama dream-sleep.

Hal Riney, 1932-2008. Good job.

Hal Riney, one of the greatest American admen, has died of cancer at age 75. Read about him in the NYT obituary.

Politically, he gave us "It's Morning Again in America" for Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984 as well as "A Bear in the Woods." Watch several fine political ads from Reagan-Bush '84 on Creativity-online.com.