Freedom cannot exist alone.

[Barack] Obama isn't pointing to anyone, and certainly doesn't like it when others note (correctly) that his influences were the likes of Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan and modern founder of community organizing, or Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist and agitator from Chicago who mentored Obama in Hawaii in the latter 1970s, and who Obama warmly acknowledges in his memoirs.

[Gerald] Ford and [Jimmy] Carter, in fact, were huge disappointments to me. Think about this: They were the presidents around the time of America's historic bicentennial, and yet rarely quoted the founders.

When [Jimmy] Carter did quote them, he quoted them in what I believe were misapplications, such as arguing for the creation of a federal Department of Education. In one case, Carter quoted [Tomas] Jefferson's and [George] Washington's appreciation of education and then, in a leap, implied that they would be delighted that he was creating a giant federal bureaucracy for education.

President Bush, yes, spent money like a drunken sailor, and left the nation with a record $400-billion deficit. President Obama, however, is spending far more money than Bush, with a record $1.8 trillion deficit projected for his first year.

I noticed some time ago that neither of the candidates are quoting the founders. If they are, they're doing it so rarely that I haven't noticed, or enough to be negligible. Certainly, neither is invoking the image of [George] Washington at Valley Forge or the Shining City Upon a Hill. In addition to this being true for John McCain and Barack Obama, it was true for Hillary Clinton as well.

Reagan didn't want to wear his faith on his sleeve in a political way. Reagan thought that was egregious, and he was first turned off by it in the 1976 campaign when he thought Jimmy Carter was doing it. Reagan simply did not want ever to appear to be using faith for political purposes.