[Dialogue] Reagan with lipstick

[W. J.]

>From Ronald Reagan's son, Michael. It doesn't get any better than this! 

Welcome Back, Dad. 
By Michael Reagan 
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. 
Last night was an extraordinary event. Widely seen beforehand as a 
make-or-break effort -- either an opportunity for Sarah Palin to show that 
she was the happy warrior that John McCain assured us she was, or a disaster 
that would dash McCain's presidential hopes and send her back to Alaska, 
sadder but wiser. 
Obviously un-intimidated by either the savage onslaught to which the 
left-leaning media had subjected her, or the incredible challenge she faced 
-- and oozing with confidence -- she strode defiantly to the podium and 
proved she was everything and even more than John McCain told us. 
Much has been made of the fact that she is a woman. What we saw last night, 
however, was something much more than a just a woman accomplishing something 
no Republican woman has ever achieved. What we saw was a red-blooded 
American with that rare, God-given ability to rally her dispirited fellow 
Republicans and take up the daunting task of leading them -- and all her 
fellow Americans -- on a pilgrimage to that shining city on the hill my 
father envisioned as our nation's real destination. 
In a few words she managed to rip the mask from the faces of her Democratic 
rivals and reveal them for what they are -- a pair of old-fashioned liberals 
making promises that cannot be kept without bankrupting the nation and 
reducing most Americans to the status of mendicants begging for their daily 
bread at the feet of an all-powerful government 
Most important, by comparing her own stunning record of achievement with 
his, she showed Barack Obama for the sham that he is, a man without any 
solid accomplishments beyond conspicuous self-aggrandizement. 
Like Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin is one of us. She knows how most of us live 
because that's the way she lives. She shares our homespun values and our 
beliefs, and she glories in her status as a small-town woman who put her 
shoulder to the wheel and made life better for her neighbors. 
Her astonishing rise up from the grass-roots, her total lack of 
self-importance, and her ordinary American values and modest lifestyle 
reveal her to be the kind of hard-working, optimistic, ordinary American who 
made this country the greatest, most powerful nation on the face of the 
earth. 
As hard as you might try, you won't find that kind of plain-spoken, 
down-to-earth, self-reliant American in the upper ranks of the 
liberal-infested, elitist Democratic Party, or in the Obama campaign. 
Sarah Palin didn't go to Harvard, or fiddle around in urban neighborhood 
leftist activism while engaging in opportunism within the ranks of one of 
the nation's most corrupt political machines, never challenging it and going 
along to get along, like Barack Obama. 
Instead she took on the corrupt establishment in Alaska and beat it, rising 
to the governorship while bringing reforms to every level of government she 
served in on her way up the ladder. 
Welcome back, Dad, even if you're wearing a dress and bearing children this 
time around. 
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