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<\/p>\nI’d be remiss if I missed the fact that today is the official Shot In The Dark holiday – Ronald Reagan’s birthday.<\/p>\n
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Reagan is a great conservative hero for what he wasn’t as well as for what he was.\u00a0 In an era when people thought the entree to political leadership was a degree from an elite university and a lifetime spent currying favor and working within the establishment, Reagan was a small-town midwesterner who’d gone to an obscure college and spent most of his adult life doing other things; a sportscaster, an actor, a pundit.\u00a0 He was well into middle age before he got into electoral politics.<\/p>\n
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This confounded his critics, who believed that the true measure of a 50-something man of accomplishment was a degree he’d gotten when he was 22.<\/p>\n
He was, in short, pretty much like the rest of us – as Dinesh D’Souza noted, an ordinary man who became an extraordinary president.<\/p>\n
He really had two great accomplishments.\u00a0 For starters, he had an uncommon gift for translating immensely high concepts – the economics of Hayek, the philosophy of the Federalists – into terminology that resonated with people who’d never sat through a politicial science seminar.<\/p>\n
He also had a singular knack for envisioning a goal, and focusing on it with a genial ruthlessness that drew his supporters down the path, no matter how difficult, and outlasted his opponents, no matter how well entrenched.<\/p>\n
He convinced a demoralized nation coming from an era of spirit-sapping lethargy\u00a0that we were a shining city on a hill:<\/p>\n
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