Truman National Security Project

I served with Ronald Reagan, I knew Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan was a friend of mine: Todd Akin, you’re no Ronald Reagan. Okay, none of that is actually true. However, when I was young, it seemed that then-President Reagan was part of my family. When he fired the air traffic controllers and faced down the Soviets, my grandparents, mom, aunts and uncles delighted as if their own blood had done so.

My relatives were Reaganites well beforeBedtime for Bonzo. Liberals delight in mentioning that 1951 movie starring the future president, but to conservative Southwest Missourians, it was just neat to watch a young Gipper on the silver screen. He was just like us. We hadn’t become more conservative; it was the coastal elites who had “tuned in, turned on and dropped out.” As for my family, we were Mississippi transplants and so Southern we thought the Ozarks experienced harsh winters. Reagan might have called the state, “Mizz-oo-r-ee” instead of “Mizz-oo-r-ah” but he was one of us.

As all good things must do, the Reagan era ended. By 1994, I was an undergraduate history and political science major at Southwest Missouri State. Every legislative session, my alma mater sent a cadre of interns to work in the state legislature. From January through May of 1994, I lived, breathed, and worked state politics. Maybe it was my grandfather’s love for Reagan, or perhaps I just enjoy the theater of it all, but whatever the cause, I had fallen in love with politics.

Read the entire article here.