Happy Birthday to The Gipper!

He would have been 100 years old today!  Across America, Cenetennial celebrations are being carried out to mark what would have been the 100th birthday of former President Ronald Wilson Reagan. 

I miss the Gipper!  He gave America hope after the malaise years of Vietnam and Carter.  Like today, the economy was shot, unemployment was up, and we were constantly told that Japan was the rising economic power that would eventually dislodge America’s economic might and the Soviets were going to dominate us militarily .  America’s Best Days were behind and we needed to accept the fact we were a superpower in decline.  (Anything sound familiar?)

Then a little known B-grade Hollywood actor out of California said, “Well, we’ll just have to see about that…” and over the next 8 years put the pride back in America’s soul.  He called the United States a “shining city on a hill” pronounced the Soviet Union “an evil empire” and turned the U.S. economy into a global powerhouse again.  Leaders of the Democratic Party were agast as their rank and file broke away to reelect him by a landslide in 1984.  The same year a young 18 year old Steve Hackman cast his first vote which proudly went to the Gipper!  What a time it was for Republicans….a time when we didn’t have to canvess the trash bin for our leaders, we KNEW who our leader was.

I just read an article that said President Obama was trying to study Reagan to learn how he coped through some of the similar hurdles they have both encountered.  In the piece they quote Pres. Obama saying:

“No matter what political disagreements you may have had with President Reagan — and I certainly had my share — there is no denying his leadership in the world, or his gift for communicating his vision for America,” Obama wrote in an op-ed for USA Today.  Observers argue that Obama is looking to Reagan to find out how to turn around a bad economy, reach out to the other side of the aisle and restore faith in the American spirit.

Study hard Mr. President …Study hard!