The Positive Ronald Reagan 
by Richard Engle

It is now one year since Ronald Reagan's passing. Once again the media is talking about his positive demeanor and not about his conservative policies. The media can't get a grip on the fact that Americans loved him as President because of what he believed in and did and not just because he was such a wonderful guy.

It causes me to consider why he was so positive. Could it be that it was his conservative values that lead to that exuberant personality?

Conventional wisdom would suggest the opposite. Conservatives are negative about everything. Voting "No" is considered the positive thing to do by conservative lawmakers. Conservatives don't think the government ought to be involved in any number of its great schemes. No, on art funding. No, on a national education plan or a Federal Department of Education. No, on just about every grand effort of government except the one area that specializes in killing people and breaking things, namely the military.

What could be positive about conservative policies? Was Ronald Reagan an aberration? Did he get some sinister pleasure out of talking about the government not doing things? Was he getting a high off of the power he was building in America's national defense?

I would suggest that something very different explains his consistent positive attitude in public. He knew that his policies matched how the vast majority of Americans lived their lives. He knew that the stereotype of Republicans representing only the rich white guys at the country club was outside reality.

The left leaning traditional media want you to think that the natural constituency of Democrats is everyone but those rich white guys. They want you to think that all women, (oops, that's a majority of the populace right there) all persons of non-Anglo heritage, all union members, all poor people, and all highly educated people (except for the rich white guys) are the natural constituency of the left.

Ronald Reagan knew better.

He faced a voting public that identified itself as Democrat by a strong majority. He faced voters that were experiencing hard times making ends meet for their families. He faced polls that said a majority of American women want abortion to be legal. Yet he knew that he could win their votes by appealing to their greatest dreams and aspirations. He knew that despite the appearances and polls, Americans live like conservatives.

Americans are God fearing. They work hard to provide for their families. They don't want to be taxed out of all they have been working for. They want to be safe from crime and foreign threat. They don't want the government to be highly involved in their lives. They don't want some minority interest to impose a lack of standards when the standards they were raised with were good. Americans love their families and don't want to define that as something other than what it has always meant. And, Americans treasure life, individual life.

The natural constituency of the left is not the vast majority of Americans. They may have had a habit of voting Democrat but they have the values of the Republican Party.

Who are the natural constituency of the left?

Only a few small groups are naturally inclined to the left. First is the dependency society and those that work in it. These are persons who are on welfare, or some variation thereof and identify themselves as among those that should be dependent upon the aid of the government. These people have the impression that they are owed the benefits they receive and will fight for the continuance of the same. Grouped with these are the persons who work for the government in the distribution of largesse. While not all such will naturally vote for left leaning candidates and issues, but the largest percentage will.

The second group is made of those persons whose primary ethnic identity is other than American. Some people look at being a hyphenated American (such as Irish-American, or black-American, ect.) as a flavor or added spice to their Americanism, but the people I am speaking of see the second half of the hyphenated word as subservient to the first. By cooling the melting pot we cease to be "One nation under God" and instead become many nations under one government.

Finally, the left can count on the votes of those whose lifestyle is dramatically outside the mainstream. This applies most significantly to those who are openly active in the homosexual community. While there is a good percentage of persons active in homosexuality that vote as conservatives they tend to be people who don't identify themselves foremost as homosexuals.

All other Americans have more reason to vote conservative than they do liberal . Each of us can think of numerous people who do vote for liberal Democrats yet don't fall in any of those three categories. Such as, Yellow Dog Democrats committed to the party not the ever-shifting principles, union members, and most of all persons who vote liberal out of false guilt over the blessings they have thus far experienced. These are among those still voting for liberal Democrats. The numbers show that all but the three previously mentioned groups are often persuaded to vote for a conservative Republican over a liberal Democrat.

Liberals seem to realize that they are the ultimate of endangered species. They have engaged a significant effort to increase the dependency society, multiculturalism, and ending the dominance of the traditional family. Success for them depends on building these groups faster than we can persuade traditional Democrat voters who have been left behind by the extremism of the Democrat Party liberal establishment.

As an ideologically committed conservative, I find great promise in the fact that the great majority of Americans live as conservatives and we have only the job of persuading them to vote as they live. We can all approach the voting public with Reagan's effervescent positive attitude knowing that there is only the smallest of constituencies that do not have cause to vote with us in their majority.

Richard Engle is president of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies in whose newsletter the above article first appeared.

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