A Time for Choosing

Reagan’s timeless words hold relevance for PA Republicans

It is known simply as “The Speech.” Ronald Reagan delivered “The Speech” on behalf of Barry Goldwater in the closing days of the Senator’s doomed 1964 Presidential campaign. Officially titled “A Time for Choosing,” the speech catapulted Ronald Reagan to national prominence, the White House, and to his present status as one of the most successful, revered, and beloved Presidents in the history of the republic.

If that was all “The Speech” accomplished it would rightfully take its place among the great rhetorical documents in American history. However, “A Time for Choosing” became a pivotal event that changed the Republican Party from one of Rockefeller-era liberalism to Reagan conservatism. That in turn changed the course of the nation, which then lead to victory in the Cold War and the virtual end of communism as a global threat.

Such a powerful document then deserves to be re-read periodically as a means of keeping the party, the nation, and the world on the right track. It is possessed of timeless “self evident” truths, which all too often are not as “self evident” as they might seem. “A Time for Choosing” holds as much relevance today as it did in 1964. In fact, the Republican Party and the nation may be at as critical a junction now as it was during that watershed era.

This is especially so in Pennsylvania. As Ronald Reagan so aptly put it: “It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers.” With Republicans in Harrisburg serving as enablers for one of the largest tax increases in the history of the commonwealth; nearly unanimously supporting a billion dollar borrowing program to fund a massive government give-away program under the guise of “economic development;” and passing a gambling expansion law that will inflict great harm on Pennsylvania families, perhaps we have come to “A Time for Choosing” of our own.

Reagan continued: “Plutarch warned, ‘The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations, and benefits.” He might easily have been talking about the recent “economic development” bond program, or the goodies to be distributed under the gambling bill. Government can now hand out “bounties” and “benefits” galore – but as always, the source of the wealth comes only from the people, therefore the program amounts to little more than state government-sponsored socialism.

“The Founding Fathers knew a government can’t control the economy without controlling people,” Reagan said, “Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, ‘What greater service could we render if only we had a little more money and a little more power.” Regrettably, even under Republican control, that line applies as much to the actions of the Pennsylvania General Assembly today as it did to the Democrat-dominated Congress during the era of Lyndon Johnson’s “New Deal”.

And now, as then, the attacks upon those who would question the status quo are the same: “Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals,” Reagan lamented. “It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share in the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we’re always ‘against,’ never ‘for’ anything.”

Sound familiar?

In his own special way, Ronald Reagan had the answer – and the answer can be applied to the present as well as the past – “each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.” Not has high as the government will take him.

Ronald Reagan ended “The Speech” with perhaps the most articulate and compelling words since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Mr. Reagan said: “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

How many Republicans today, especially those in the General Assembly, can say they are doing more than, as Reagan put it, “just feeding the crocodile hoping he’ll’’ eat you last”? How many are making the right choice and doing “all that could be done”? It is again “A Time for Choosing.”