What would Reagan say about Obama?

“Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, I am an ardent believer in the free market… We have arrived at a juncture in our politics where reasonable efforts to update our regulations, or make basic investments in our future, are too often greeted with cries of ‘government takeover’ or even ’socialism’…” [Emphasis added]

In a 1960 letter to Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, who had published an article by [screenwriter and Communist Party member Dalton Trumbo] and defended his right to freedom of speech, Reagan recalled how his views [on communism] had been formed during [the late-1940s]. “I once thought exactly as you think… It took seven months of meeting communists and communist-influenced people across a table in almost daily sessions while pickets rioted in front of studio gates, homes were bombed and a great industry almost ground to a halt.” What bothered Reagan above all, he wrote, was the discovery that Communist Party members operated in secret and did not tell the truth. “I, like you, will defend the right of any American to openly practice and preach any political philosophy from monarchy to anarchy,” he told Hefner. “But this is not the case with regard to the communist. He is bound by party discipline to deny that he is a communist so that he can by subversion and stealth impose on an unwilling people the rule of the International Communist Party which is in fact the government of Soviet Russia.” Anticommunism for Reagan, then, was not primarily foreign policy or geopolitics; it was personal and moralistic in nature, driven by his experiences with people he considered sophisticated and devious, who did not abide by the small-town Midwestern values he had absorbed in his youth.

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