If our presidents, or potential presidents, don't know this or don't articulate [an America ideal], that's a blown opportunity. The president can teach as well as lead.

Many of these failures can be laid at the feet of the awful state of American higher education, and especially the way in which our secular universities have divorced their instruction from timeless truths like faith and freedom. Many of the professors at these places plainly don't respect the founders and, in particular, the religious foundation of the founders.

It is quite sad, to me, that that ideal, that vision and understanding [of American founding ], doesn't seem to be a part of the current political season.

"Freedom" is probably the word he said more than any other. He used the word freedom constantly. I think for some his frequent calls for freedom became a cliché because he did it so often. They didn't get it, but Reagan certainly did. He thought deeply about the relationship between God and human freedom and the nonrelationship between atheistic communism and that freedom.

Throughout American history our presidents have invoked our nation's founding fathers. This is particularly true of recent presidents.

If our presidents, or potential presidents, don't know this or don't articulate [an America ideal], that's a blown opportunity. The president can teach as well as lead.

The American founding is not just about a group of people, a group of men. It is about an ideal: Both a vision and understanding of the very essence of democracy, constitutional government, a representative republic, and the remarkably powerful concept of being endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights.