Rick Perlstein Quotes

Ronald Reagan could not get elected as a Republican today.

The stories have been told so often by those of us who supported President Reagan over the years that they seem mundane, almost like a fictional novel or a movie script.

Reagan won because he was real. He believed in America. He told people he was gonna make it great again coming out of a disastrous four years of Jimmy Carter and Watergate before that.

If you go back and look at President Reagan's speeches, they bring you to tears almost.

Ronald Reagan gave our party a bowling alley image as opposed to a country club image. We were talking to people who go bowling on Thursday night, and they were understanding what we were saying.

I wonder if these people today would think Reagan was a Reagan conservative.

Even if it wasn't always morning in America during the years of his presidency, Reagan's eagerness to insist that it was tapped into a longing among voters. They didn't want to picture themselves turning down their thermostats and buttoning up their cardigans. They wanted to strut again. Reagan opened his arms and said, 'Walk this way.'

It's time for conservative Americans to do what Reagan did.

Ronald Reagan became, you know, not only a Republican but a pretty conservative Repub - not the most. But a pretty conservative Republican. And he's somebody that I actually knew and liked. And he liked me. And I worked with him and helped him.

Whether one admired or was repulsed by the positions he took on matters foreign and domestic, it is undeniable that Reagan's ability to project anger was highly attractive to his most passionate supporters on the far right - and crucial to his political success.

Some of my Democratic friends don't like it when I say that, but Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat and still a leader. He brought strong people around him, and he had a vision for where he wanted to take the country.

I believe that Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was—an Arctic region covered with ice.

Ronald Reagan at the beginning of his political career went all around the country campaigning against Medicare.

Ronald Reagan was 3 parts optimism and 1 part nostalgia.

Under Ronald Reagan, hatred of the liberal media took on a storybook quality. Reagan had honed his political skills as a spokesman for General Electric.

We are all living in a world shaped by Reagan and his ideology of small 'l' liberalism.

We have to bring back that Reagan optimism.

Don't worry, America. We survived Jimmy Carter, and we will survive Barack Obama. Only one questions remains... who is the next Ronald Reagan?

There are people who are trying to advance themselves by wrapping themselves in Reagan.

George W. Bush, though a president's son, is cast as Reagan's heir even more than his father's.

In the '80s, Ronald Reagan inspired me to become politicized, because I grew up in that era when everything I cared about was under attack.

In 1980, in 1984, millions of middle-class Democrats became Reagan Democrats, and more of them drifted toward the Republicans with Bush in 1988.

President George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a strong conservative, ran to continue the third term of Ronald Reagan, continue the Ronald Reagan revolution. Then he raised taxes and in '92 ran as an establishment moderate - same candidate, two very different campaigns.

In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children's children.

I'm a conservative. I was an avid supporter of Ronald Reagan; I thought he was fabulous.