Thursday, June 21, 2012

A Real Leader Vs. A Faux Leader

Today when I got home from the day job, the latest issue of The Weekly Standard was in my mailbox and the cover story was The Real Reagan by Fred Barnes.
After reading it not once but twice, what struck me was that Ronald Reagan was truly a real leader. He really did not care so much about the nuts-and-bolts of minutia of the job of being president. But he understood so much about the issues of the day. And much more than he ever let on.
It stands in stark contrast to a faux leader, the Dear Leader, President Barack H. Obama. One never really vetted. One that we have never seen his college transcripts. I mean, after all, unlike Mr. Reagan, the Dear Leader, President Obama, went to Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard law school. And he "wrote" a book before he actually became anything.
Yet as Mr. Barnes points out in the article, Mr. Reagan was portrayed in this manner:

These anecdotes (referring to a story about a movie)  may not appear to be terribly significant. But they’re more revealing than I thought at the time, for they undermine the profile of Reagan created by the media, the permanent Washington establishment, political insiders, many Democrats, some Republicans, and even a few members of Reagan’s White House staff. Their idea of Reagan—a bumbling, likable lightweight blessed with good luck and clever aides—wasn’t the Reagan that I encountered. It wasn’t the real Reagan.

Mr. Reagan we have come to find out was really a kind of smart guy after all. Not bad a dude that went to a Christian college, Eureka College in the middle-of-nowhere Illinois.
For instance, Mr. Reagan wrote himself every radio commentary that he delivered while a syndicated commentator in the late 1970s between presidential campaigns. That is something many, including your humble blogger, had no idea. But the book Reagan In His Own Hand shows an engaged person that wrote all the commentaries long form and wrote is the operative word. And courtesy of Mr. Barnes, here are some of the topics he dealt with during that time: Namibia, ocean mining, Cambodia, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, treaties, the B-1 bomber, missile defense, national security strategy, intelligence, Chile, visas, Vladimir Bukovsky, human rights, the Helsinki Accords, Cuba, Rhodesia, the Panama Canal, Guantánamo, Leonid Brezhnev, foreign aid, Palestine, Jamaica, and the United Nations.
But remember folks, Mr. Reagan was but an amiable dunce. He just got lucky.
Where was all of that from the Dear Leader, President Obama? How do we know anything about him? What he really has thought on the major issues of the day? I mean, yeah it is great that he "wrote" not one but two self-serving books before he did anything. But again, why was he not thoroughly vetted the way someone like Mr. Reagan was?
And why is it, even to this day, that Mr. Reagan seemed to be the only one interested in defeating Soviet communism?
As governor of California in 1972, Mr Reagan said that Soviet communism would soon be confined to “dustbin of history.” And he said the same thing 10 years later as president. And the establishment thought to a man and woman that Mr. Reagan was dreaming. If not a little daft. Too bad that by 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. That East and West Germany would be one with the West winning out.
Where is that kind of leadership from the Dear Leader, President Obama?
Understand that the Dear Leader, President Obama, ran as something that he clearly was not.
A mushy moderate.
Since becoming the president, Mr. Obama has driven home the fact that he is the most left-wing president since Lyndon, nope, Lynchin' Baines Johnson. And for sure even more to the left than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
On issue after issue, Mr. Obama is almost at odd with the very people that elected him in the first place.
A leader has to sometimes make adjustments, even if he or she does not want to.
So yes, Mr. Reagan did raise taxes while president. But in the end, he enacted the largest tax reform to date. So many of us conservatives can forgive the tax hikes because in the end tax reform was a better deal for the nation as a whole.
Where is that kind of leadership from the Dear Leader, President Obama?
I know many will say with so-called health care "reform".
The problem is that the majority of the American people did not want the "reform" that was being sold to them. Unless you can bring a majority to that, then it looks like it was bad from the beginning.
What I see from the Dear Leader, President Obama, is an iron fist instead of the velvet glove.
And most important of any leader is to have the people believing in themselves.
Ronald Reagan did that.
Barack Obama does not do that.
And thus the difference between Ronald Reagan, a true leader, and Barack Obama, a faux leader, is crystal clear.
One can only hope that Mitt Romney is more Ronald Reagan than Barack Obama.

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