Back to Reagan country!
As it turns out, I am going back to Reagan Country in north-central Illinois for a long weekend. We were there last weekend, after the Pumpkin Fiasco, and now I'm returning for a volleyball match, but also to visit some additional historic sites. Here's a guide:
There was a time in the past when I would have avoided Reagan territory for political reasons (and my wife still feels that way). But my own mood has softened. First, I like it that Reagan came from not very prosperous circumstances--we saw the modest apartment he was born in. And second, I agree with Obama that Reagan was a transformational figure:
"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path, because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like, you know, with all the excesses of the '60s and the '70s, you know, government had grown and grown, but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating, and I think people just tapped into — he tapped into what people were already feeling, which is we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism, and, and, you know, entrepreneurship that had been missing."
And thirdly, I guess, not only as a speaker, a Great Communicator, Reagan was an intellectual powerhouse compared to the Palin-Beck-Bachmann-teabagger crowd. Perhaps not him personally, but there were people around him who were actually interested in policy ideas! And they wrote books about them, actual books! I worked on a lot of those issues when I was in Washington, and I wrote quite a bit about them, too.
Things have gone downhill in his wake. There aren't any "conservative intellectuals" left now, and there used to be many.
So now I don't avoid travel to central Illinois, but do kind of consider Alaska off-limits. Although with the Governor resigned, perhaps I ought to go up there--before the glaciers melt away.
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