Ronald Reagan

I've been a Republican for 30 years. I was reared a Democrat but felt the party abandoned me in the 1970s. I am a Ronald Reagan conservative and would be a "Dixiecrat" if I were a Democrat today. Problem is, now the GOP has abandoned me. I had a preacher friend once say, "The two parties are divided between `sinners' and `Pharisees.' Which group did Jesus get along with?" I served as a Republican state senator in Maryland, but I am no fan of George Bush, Dick Cheney or Karl Rove. They talk like Reagan Republicans, but they don't govern like Reagan.

The following is excerpted from a commencement address to graduating seniors at Roland Park Country School on June 13. There is much rumination in these times on "the imagining of America." Where does this imagination about ourselves come from, and how do we express it? How credible is our rhetoric, and does it correspond to the way the United States is viewed in the larger world? If there is a disconnect, what are the implications? Most people know something about the legacy of "American exceptionalism."

WASHINGTON - As a young lawyer for President Ronald Reagan, John G. Roberts Jr. argued strongly that the White House should keep its internal files secret and refuse to release them to the Senate for confirmation of a presidential nominee to a senior government post. "We should take whatever steps are necessary to ensure the general opening of files to Hill scrutiny ... does not become routine," he said. "I would hope that ... we would be in a better position to resist committee demands."

ARLINGTON, Va. - They were an unlikely political "trinity" - Ronald Reagan, the president of the United States who came from the Disciples of Christ Church; Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister whose background was working-class Methodist; and Karol Wojtyla, the Roman Catholic priest from Krakow, Poland. Together, they did something no one thought possible: They contributed to the collapse of communism, a political pestilence of the 20th century. While the contributions of Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher to the fall of communism are well known, communism's trip to the "ash heap of history," as Mr. Reagan put it, might not have come had it not been for Pope John Paul II. Even former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev acknowledged as much when he told Italy's La Stampa newspaper in 1992: "What has happened in Eastern Europe in recent years would not have been possible without the presence of this pope."

ARLINGTON, Va. - Whatever else one takes from President Bush's trip to Europe, it is obvious who's on the offense and who's playing defense. Twenty years after Ronald Reagan proclaimed freedom inevitable for what were then called "captive nations," freedom is on the march as perhaps never before. Europeans are going to have to rethink their policy of vacillation, accommodation and surrender to evil. In the '80s, millions of Europeans demonstrated against Mr. Reagan's policy of victory over Soviet communism and its offspring in Central America.

AFTER SEPT. 11, 2001, President Bush knew America could no longer tolerate the status quo, that only offense could guarantee security in the wake of this era's peril - Islamic fascism. Courageously, boldly and at great political risk, Mr. Bush - through Afghanistan and now Iraq - ignited long-overdue and historic change in the Middle East. Muslims must ask whether they intend to allow extremist elements to act in the name of Islam. They must ask whether it is Mr. Bush or Arab tyranny that causes their poverty, backwardness and lack of freedom.

The first line of defense in America's next anti-missile system fails or succeeds in a window of 90 seconds. That's all the time there is, designers estimate, for a satellite to detect the flash of an enemy launch, determine that it is real and send off a counter-missile from the ground. It all happens too fast to include a human in the loop. "Time is of the essence," said Craig van Schilfgaarde, the Northrop Grumman Corp. engineer in charge of the project. Known as "boost phase" interception, it is designed to be the first "layer" of defense, firing rockets at enemy missiles just after launch, when they are most vulnerable.

WASHINGTON -- As the White House prepares to name a panel on tax reform, the labyrinthine U.S. revenue code could face the first top-to-bottom rewrite since President Ronald Reagan closed loopholes and slashed income tax rates on a historic scale in 1986. "This is a fundamental look at the entire code, every component of the code," a senior administration official said late last week. "Nothing is off the table." Yet some political analysts and policy advocates believe the result could turn out to be considerably more modest.

MANY AMERICANS probably were surprised at the pictures of Mikhail S. Gorbachev comforting Nancy Reagan at her husband's funeral and by his tribute to Ronald Reagan as "a true leader, a man of his word, and an optimist ... who earned a place in history and in people's hearts." After all, wasn't Ronald Reagan "the man who defeated communism" (as the London Economist proclaimed), and wasn't Mr. Gorbachev the top Communist in the Soviet Union during its latter years? How could Mr. Gorbachev have kind words for the man who defeated him?

BOSTON - Before the convention, I tried to organize a betting pool on how many times the Democrats would use the word values. I quit after Democratic National Committee head Terry McAuliffe gave his preview of the values on the convention menu: "patriotism, duty, honor, responsibility, opportunity, freedom, family and faith." Hey, you want fries with that? Values, values everywhere. Here are the entries in my notebook: American values, working-class values, heartland values, mainstream values, blue-collar values, democratic values and, of course, Democratic values.