A Quote by Paul Begala

Again, President Reagan was sort of an amiable presence out at the ranch by the last 6 months of his presidency. He had no effect on national policy at all. — © Paul Begala
Again, President Reagan was sort of an amiable presence out at the ranch by the last 6 months of his presidency. He had no effect on national policy at all.
President Reagan rushed home from Santa Barbara vacation, from the Reagan ranch when the Korean jetliner was shot out of the air by the Russians.
Even if it wasn't always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan's eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn't want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their cardigans. They wanted to strut again. Reagan opened his arms and said, 'Walk this way.'
I serve on the Institute of the Black World's National Commission on African-American Reparations, and we have asked the President [Barack Obama] to, by executive order, establish a commission to study reparations. He can do this without Congressional approval. While I am not optimistic, I do hope that President Obama considers this in these waning months of his Presidency.
Reagan took an approach to the Cold War dramatically different from any other US President. To wit, he thought we should win. This was a fresh concept. At the time, it was widely ridiculed as a dangerous alteration of US policy. Only after it worked was Reagan's dangerous foreign policy recast as merely a continuation of the policies of his predecessors.
In a gesture to moderate Republicans, Reagan put Bush on his '80 ticket, and Bush recognized that the Reagan crowd was rapidly becoming an overwhelming majority in the party. So he adjusted his views, served Reagan loyally and spent much of his vice presidency using his stature to convince conservative leaders they could trust him.
His presidency ended more than a decade ago, but politicians, Democrat and Republican, still talk about Ronald Reagan. Al Gore has an ad noting that in Congress he opposed the Reagan budget cuts. He says that because Bill Bradley was one of 36 Democratic Senators who voted for the cuts. Gore doesn’t point out that Bradley also voted against the popular Reagan tax cuts and that it was the tax cuts that piled up those enormous deficits, a snowballing national debt.
As prime minister, I worked closely with Ronald Reagan for eight of the most important years of all our lives. We talked regularly both before and after his presidency. And I have had time and cause to reflect on what made him a great president.
For President Bush, the first, the 41st president, George Herbert Walker Bush, I spent all 4 years of his presidency on the staff for the National Security Council.
Ronald Reagan was one of our great foreign policy Presidents. He did not come from the Senate. He did not come from the foreign policy world. He was a governor, but his resolve, his clarity of purpose, his intelligence, his capacity to deal with complex issues and solve tough problems served him extremely well, and if I were elected President, I hope I could rely upon those same qualities.
Ronald Reagan's biographer wrote of the former president's final days: "for all the intimate familiarity of that face and body, I did not feel his presence beside me-only his absence."
Tip O'Neill, even after Ronald Reagan became president, called him "an amiable dunce," which is what the Democrats always do.
I believe we're all aware that there are people and organizations throughout the world who are bent on destroying America, everything we stand for and inflicting harm on American citizens. It is the obligation of the president of the United States to respond to those. I believe, I must add, that this adminstration for the last seven months has neglected compelling national security threats besides this ... I hope that the president will not confine his activities to just this.
President Bush earned $400,000 for his job as president last year. That's not really that much for being president when you think about it. But President Bush, he doesn't do it for the money, he does it for the eight months of vacation every year.
Lyndon Johnson realized he really was President, that his identity had changed by President Kennedy's shocking death, when aides who had been like family to him minutes before, stood in his presence on Air Force One.
If we have George W. Bush as president, we're going to go back to the kind of policies we had when his father and Ronald Reagan were president.
My dad lost his hearing in the last 18 months of his life, and as a result, I witnessed first-hand the effect that this can have on a family.
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