- A friend of mine was talking to me about how he doesn't really feel like most people should be allowed to vote. I think he was only half-serious when he made this comment. In this day and age, however, I think we can trust in the people. Afterall, it's academics who come up with big government, detente, higher taxes, and more social programs. William F. Buckley used to say, "I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard."
- I mentioned this to a couple of you already, but during the celebration last night for Obama Oprah said, "this is the most meaningful thing that has ever happened." Jonah Goldberg of National Review countered, "I dunno, even counting for excitement, isn't Oprah's statement kind of sacreligious?"
- Reagan was unfailingly optimistic, and can you imagine him being that given the conditions under which he entered office in 1980? Sure, the Miracle on Ice was great, but stagflation, a deep recession, and serious military blunders, should have been really hard on him. I bring him up to share this story about him which I thought was pretty awesome:
Yet the incident I always considered the best illustration of Reagan's regard for ordinary individuals took place not in the White House but in a North Carolina parking lot. "It was during the 1976 primary fight," says Dana Rohrabacher, who then worked on the Reagan campaign as an assistant press secretary. "We were getting ready for a rally in this gigantic parking lot at a shopping mall. I was in the staging area behind the podium, and a lady called me over to the side and said, 'I've got a group of blind kids here. Since they can't see him, I was wondering if you could have Governor Reagan come over and tell them hello.'"
Dana passed the request along to Mike Deaver, and Reagan, who was standing nearby overheard. "He said he'd do it, but he didn't want any photographers," Dana explains, "Can you imagine that? He was in the middle of a presidential campaign, and the press would have gone wild for a photo of him with a group of blind kids." But Reagan wanted this to be between him and the kids."
Deaver came up with a plan. When the speech ended, Deaver told Dana, he'd begin walking Reagan back to the campaign bus. Concluding that the candidate was about to leave for the next event, all the reporters and photographers would hurry back to their own buses. And then, when the press had cleared out, Deaver would double back with Reagan, returning the candidate to the area behind the podium, where Reagan would meet the blind children.
"It worked," Dana says. "The press guys all went back to their buses, and I brought the lady with the blind kids back behind the podium. There were six or seven kids, real sweet little kids about eight or nine or ten years old. Since there was a lot of background noise - you know how it is after a speech, with a crowd breaking up - Reagan bent down, close to the kids, to talk to them. But somehow I could see him thinking that that wasn't enough. So after the kids had asked him a couple of questions, he said, 'Well, now I have a question for you. Would you like to touch my face so you can get a better understanding of how I look?" The kids all smiled and said yes, so Reagan just leaned over into them, and one by one these little kids began moving their fingers over his face to see what he looked like.
Don't you just love him?
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