Jack Kingston: “on this 90th birthday of Ronald Reagan, I think all of us should be inspired; and we unfortunately are a country that…”

“on this 90th birthday of Ronald Reagan, I think all of us should be inspired; and we unfortunately are a country that has grown so cynical that, okay, it is not cool to say something nice about Ronald Reagan because I am a Democrat or it is not good to say something about Jimmy Carter because I am a Republican. Yet, I think all people who have served in public service in the courthouses, in the school boards and in the Nation's Capital, in the State legislatures around the country deserve respect for their contributions and for their attempts to make the world a better place. I was a college student when I first knew of Ronald Reagan. He was running for President in 1976. I was in the Ford camp, but I listened to his speeches very carefully and realized over the next several years that he, in fact, had something to contribute and something to say. Reagan's ideas, I would say, were probably basic conservative philosophies of less government, of individualism, of people solving problems and not government solving problems, and yet beyond that there seemed to be something else in him, a little twinkle in the eye that maybe captured our imagination; in the words of a poet, maybe took the ordinary and made them extraordinary, and had this ability to galvanize the people of America to try to do their best.”