The new Reagan

Michael Reagan on Sarah Palin:

I've been trying to convince my fellow conservatives that they have been wasting their time in a fruitless quest for a new Ronald Reagan to emerge and lead our party and our nation. I insisted that we'd never see his like again because he was one of a kind.

I was wrong!

Wednesday night I watched the Republican National Convention on television and there, before my very eyes, I saw my Dad reborn; only this time he's a she.

And what a she!

In one blockbuster of a speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin resurrected my Dad's indomitable spirit and sent it soaring above the convention center, shooting shock waves through the cynical media's assigned spaces and electrifying the huge audience with the kind of inspiring rhetoric we haven't heard since my Dad left the scene.

This was Ronald Reagan at his best -- the same Ronald Reagan who made the address known now solely as "The Speech," which during the Goldwater campaign set the tone and the agenda for the rebirth of the traditional conservative movement that later sent him to the White House for eight years and revived the moribund GOP.

I have long found the "Reagan is dead and there will never be another like him" chorus to be tiresome. Of course all men and women are unique and when one of us goes there will never be another exactly like us. However what so many seem to miss is that conservatism was not great because Reagan held to its views, rather Reagan was great because he was a conservative.

And conservatism does not live or die with one man or one woman. Conservatism is at root a worldview and the ideas and ideals which proceed logically out of that worldview. All that has ever been needed is for a politician to genuinely believe in those ideas and embody those ideals (and have reasonable communications skills) to ignite the passion which Reagan once inspired.

Sarah Palin is such a woman and Bobby Jindal is such a man. And there are others who have just not had the spotlight turned upon them at a moment in which they could show the world what they were made of. But never doubt that they are there.

There are Reagans in waiting sitting in mayor's offices and chairing city council meetings in every state in the Union. They are in governor's mansions and state legislatures. There are some in the House of Representatives and maybe even in the Senate. They are serving in the armed forces or starting businesses and a couple of them may even be in Hollywood.

All that is necessary is for those of us who truly love our country to never give up, to never lose faith and above all to never settle for a watered down and emasculated creed which chases after the left whining "me too, me too - just not as much".

H/T for the cartoon to Shooting the Messenger