Here's the audio from our latest installment of Freedom University your learning source for liberty. It's a new series of monthly specials on 710 KNUS, taking you behind the headlines and back to the founding principles that have made America the freest nation in history. Freedom will be lost if we don’t constantly educate and motivate ourselves to keep it. The study assignment for this month, aired April 1, is called "Lessons from Reagan." Click here for the podcast.
If you're older, you’ll remember the Gipper's great moments of 1976 in the heat of Kansas City, and of 1980 in the snows of New Hampshire. Younger memories will recall his outwitting Mondale in that 1984 debate and his defiance at the Berlin Wall in 1987.
But on this month's program we dig behind those memories to draw out some of the enduring lessons for political victory and policy success from the most important conservative president of the past hundred years, Ronald Reagan – at a time when conservatives really need perspective after the tough losses in 2006 and 2008, then three recent election victories in blue states, and then the body blow of ObamaCare being jammed into law.
I talked for the full hour with veteran political consultant and author Craig Shirley, a leading historian of the Reagan years. Craig wrote what many consider the definitive book on 1976, entitled “Reagan’s Revolution: The Untold Story of the Campaign that Started It All.” He followed that up with a terrific book on the 1980 race, entitled “Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America.”
Joining the conversation was Greg Schaller, my colleague at Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, where he teaches political science and American government.
Contact Craig Shirley here. Or contact Greg Schaller here.