Ronald Reagan had many fine qualities and he had many shortcomings. He's not the simple, folksy figure that he's often portrayed as.

We come out of Jewish-refugee, Holocaust stock, which means that our predecessors fled and we learned that systems of power are vulnerable to corruption and can treat the defenseless in a destructive fashion.

I have criticisms of Ronald Reagan, but he lives in another universe from the kind of political theater that is represented by people, like Sarah Palin, who aren't really public servants.

Reagan has very significant things to teach us - positive lessons and quite negative lessons.

Ronald Reagan, whatever his pros and cons were, was a public servant in the end.

Elites are once again invoking Reagan, dropping their Gs and saying things in a folksy sort of way thats meant to capture the hearts of people. And its all fraud; its all stagecraft. And people are falling for a great deal of elite behavior in this country packaged as if its proletariat behavior.

The whole idea of a democracy is that we ourselves, the people, are supposed to make a path of our politics, and it is we who with our feet and our vote and our labors and our vigilance are supposed to shape our country.