Ronald Reagan never failed to remind us that with freedom comes responsibility.  He told a group of students in 1973, “The people who hold public office today are no better, no worse than the people that send them to public office and you cannot expect them to be.  They are representative of you.”  He may as well have said, if there are fools in office then fools put them there. 

For those of you who hate the fact that the Republican Party fails so often to support its own platform.  For those of you who grumble that far too many RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) instead of true conservatives get elected, we may do well to consider why. 

 If the political class is worse than it has been (and I think it is), Reagan would have it that our citizenry is at least partly to blame—in some way we’ve gone slack—let down our guard, been shall we say, less than eternally vigilant. 

 In 1974 when he leveled with a crowd, he said: “There is only one way to make [the] government bite the bullet on inflation, on high taxes, on all those things that should be a matter of [your] concern.  And that is to hold all elected officials accountable.  Match their performance with their promises, and if you find some who don’t measure up, vote them out of office.”  Reagan believed the American people would always be capable of this.  The Election of 2010 supports his faith in us.  The Election of 2012 must bear out his faith in us, as we continue in the way he led. 

 Of all the presidents thus far in my lifetime, Ronald Reagan is my favorite; and I’ve got a lot of memories tied up with him and his presidency.  I heard his speech, in person, at the Republican National Convention in Kansas City in 1976 when I was 15.  When I was 17 he appointed me Youth Advisor for the State of Texas to his grassroots conservative group called Citizens for the Republic.  I voted for him soon after I turned 18.  The U.S. Military Academy at West Point gave me special leave to attend his Inauguration in January 1981.  I went there with my mother.  I remember 53 hostages in Iran being released literally as Reagan headed for the White House.  No American doubted that it was in Iran’s best interest to release them before Jimmy Carter left town.  I was back at West Point when those same Americans, who were held hostage for 444 days, were greeted by cheering crowds, yellow ribbons tied around every tree, and a standing ovation from the Corps of Cadets at the Mess Hall that lasted 20 minutes. 

 When I was 22 years old Reagan signed my commission as a brand new Second Lieutenant.  And even though he didn’t have anything to do with it, I remember he was my president when I met my wife Aida in the Philippines at an Army-Air Force exercise, during the regime of Ferdinand Marcos; and he was my president when we got married in Houston in December 1985.  We were living in Hawaii in 1986, when Marcos fled into exile and accepted our government’s invitation to live there.  Aida remembers Reagan was our president when she became a naturalized citizen in El Paso before we went overseas to Germany.  And we were in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down (November 9^th, 1989) less than a year after Reagan left office, and even then we knew with certainly that leadership makes a difference! 

 It was his leadership that made the crucial difference and helped us win the Cold War—and the Army of Excellence he built made the difference too; and the economic dynamism he unleashed through the reduction of tax rates and some well-conceived trade agreements—these allowed us to outspend and outmaneuver the Soviets; and a renewed spiritual strength and resolve of the nation during that timeframe made us worthy of victory even if it is only by God’s grace we won and communism collapsed.  It was Reagan’s Cold War Army too, superbly trained and equipped that the elder Bush relied on, which won the first Gulf War in 100 hours against the fourth largest Army in the world. 

 As an historian, I know there’s always a debate over what constitutes Ronald Reagan’s actual historic legacy.  Then again, there’s the more important notion of what constitutes a consistent and as yet unfinished legacy—something remaining, for those of us who count ourselves among his philosophic heirs.  Indeed there is one such area of the Reagan Revolution, which I regard most especially as his unfinished legacy, which I do hope daily to accomplish with God’s help and thousands of patriots standing strong—it never substantially got off the ground, even though it was Reagan’s explicitly stated objective.  That is: redressing the imbalance of power between the States and the federal government, or effectively restoring federalism. 

 “New Federalism” is something the modern conservative movement talked about and promised to do since World War II, from Eisenhower to Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan—and we have failed on this count most miserably.  “Big government conservatism” even caught on in Washington circles, even though the notion is an oxymoron and just as injurious to freedom, just as bankrupting to the economy as big government liberalism is.  The Tea Party among other groups will no longer accept any excuses, and this less-than-compromising attitude is at once Reaganesque and traditional republican, albeit definitely not “Establishment” in either of the two major political parties.  We owe it to Reagan, however, and we owe it to ourselves and posterity, to deliver without delay.  

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Wesley Allen Riddle is a retired military officer with degrees and honors from West Point and Oxford.  Widely published in the academic and opinion press, he ran for U.S. Congress (TX-District 31) in the 2004 Republican Primary.  Article is based on remarks he made 5 FEB 11 at the Beltonian Theater in Belton, TX at the Centennial Celebration of Ronald Reagan’s birth co-sponsored by the Central Texas Tea Party and Republican Freedom Coalition.  Email: Wes@WesRiddle.com.