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Flashback: Reagan in ’64

by Rush Limbaugh - Mar 22,2010


RUSH: Ronald Reagan, 1964, articulated the same crossroads at which we find ourselves today. Reagan gave this speech during the presidential campaign. This was right smack-dab in the middle of the creation of Medicare. That would be signed in 1965. So he faced similar circumstances.

REAGAN: This idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite, in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. You and I are told increasingly, ‘We have to choose between a left or right.’ Well, I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down: Man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.

RUSH: That’s where we find ourselves. And then he said, some of the most famous words of his life.

REAGAN: You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.

RUSH: Chew on that.