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Unlike all of you, I can only look back in fondness and think, "if only I had...." I was raised in a pretty far left of center home. I cast my first vote in the 1974 election.... for Jimmy Carter. I remained a died-in-the wool democrat until 1996, when I cast my first vote as a republican for Bob Dole. I cast my last vote as a Republican Party member in 2012.

Reagan was for sure The Great Communicator, and he refused to let America think that she was anything less than that shining city on a hill. He stared down the soviets, and they blinked. I note that even though Reagan graciously credited the Carter administration for working tirelessly to free the hostages in Iran, the Iranians didn't release them until Reagan took office. I think they understood the risks of screwing around with Reagan, and they knew there very few risks to screwing around with Carter. There is no doubt that we were all safer in our beds at night because he was POTUS.

But, in retrospect, Reagan also gave us some mistakes too. We got immigration amnesty with a promise to enforce the new immigration law and to close the border. Didn't work any better than LBJ's version, or Bush's, or anybody else's. FOPA got his signature despite the Hughes Amendment. After he left office, he lent his support in favor of passage of the Brady Bill. He was a sunny optimist and a great man, but flawed and human too.

Because of my own political journey, it wasn't until after I turned the corner into conservatism that I read a compilation of Reagan's radio addresses, all of which he wrote himself, and all of which were brilliant. Back in my democrat days, it was easy to dismiss him as an intellectual lightweight, but he had the gift of distilling complex issues into symmetrical webs of simple and true interconnected statements, framing them such that the common man could completely understand them. In that regard, he was much like Jefferson and Madison and other founders, who deliberately used language understandable to the average person when drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. I now wish that I had not been so dismissive of him when he was in office.