Remembering the visit

The following column was published Sept. 15, 1988, following President Ronald Reagan's visit to Cape Girardeau.

By Peter Kinder

I arrived at Washington's National Airport aboard a TWA flight from St. Louis on a bone-chilling Sunday -- Jan. 4, 1981. Thrilled with my opportunity, enthused about prospects of a new job on Capitol Hill, determined to do my part in effecting watershed change at a crucial point in our nation's history, I could barely contain my excitement. A self-confessed newspaper nut even then, while waiting for bags to arrive I purchased both Washington newspapers, the Post and the now-defunct Washington Star, and plunged into them.

A lead story in both papers was a "warning" so help me, that is how both papers played it and how it was intended -- to the man who had just carried 44 states in ridding the White House of the hapless Jimmy Carter. The gist of the warning was that Ronald Reagan had better realize he was now in the big leagues (Washington), because until then he had dealt only in California and only with the legislature and not on the national level in the rarefied atmosphere of the Potomac, and that here, in Tip O'Neill's and Ted Kennedy's world, everything was played by a different set of rules that Mr. Reagan would likely never measure up, blah, blah, blah.

In an important sense, Reagan never did measure up -- not, at least, to Washington's standards. For he, more than any man who has occupied the Oval Office in my lifetime, has remained true to the beliefs that took him there.

Beliefs. What a funny word to use when talking about a politician. What most politicians have are positions -- positions carefully crafted by pollsters and image makers to offend the least number of voters. But Ronald Reagan has beliefs.

It has always amazed me that Reagan could accomplish 14 things before breakfast and still be called a lightweight by blustering congresspersons, ignorant pundits, silly college professors and others who couldn't hold his shaving kit.

The first seven months of the Reagan presidency culminating in the great tax-cut victory in the House in August 1981 remain unforgettable. Alliances with conservative Southern boll-weevil Democrats were cemented. As Mr. Reagan's velvet steam roller rolled through Tip O'Neill's House of Representatives again and again, he flattened a disconsolate O'Neill and anyone else in his path with such regularity that, over poor Tip's body, historic reforms were achieved.

The Reagan agenda, the Reagan beliefs? Tax rate cuts to liberate our economy and to once again make Americans majority shareholders in their incomes. Spending restraint, as symbolic of the fact that in America the great wealth-producing American people, and not the tax-consuming Washington establishment, are sovereign. Ditto regulatory reform. Slower growth in money supply to cut inflation. A military buildup to restore America's rightful place as unquestioned leader of the Free World. Respect for patriotism, the right to life and other traditional values long sneered at by the reigning liberal establishment.

Somehow, that liberal establishment, speaking through it dominant media auxiliaries, managed to convince some Americans that these beliefs, this sensible program, was a far-out, right-wing agenda. It is Ronald Reagan's singular, surpassing achievement -- his monument, if you will -- that he has redefined the mainstream of American political culture, steering it back toward the safer, saner, stronger values and reforms described above.

And he did it with beliefs, beliefs which are, I believe, the source of the mystical bond which Ronald Reagan has with the American people.

In achieving this, he has triumphed over the implacable opposition of the media elites and the other elements of the liberal establishment. And he didn't just triumph. He soared, smiling, cracking jokes, leaving us with unforgettable one-liners all the way. (Yesterday, in Cape: "So this fall, here's one cowboy who'll be rooting for the Indians."), and in the process bore the burdens of office more lightly than any president in memory.

Proud of whatever small part I have played in the Reagan Revolution, my own allegiance to the president dates from the late 1960s. I first heard him speak in person more than 20 years ago in St. Louis and have seen him a dozen times since. Worming my way into an East Room reception at the White House in May 1981, barely six weeks after a would-be assassin's bullet struck him, I shook his hand and grasped his arm with my left hand. I'll never forget how frail his arm seemed then, as he was still recovering from his wound and the surgery. By August, he was back at the ranch in California, chopping woods and riding horses.

A host of these memories came flooding over me as I watched that 77-year-old man bounding up the steps with the energy of one 40 years younger in the Show Me Center yesterday. I'll bet I wasn't the only one in the room on the verge of choking up with a lump the throat and tears in my eyes.

I'm glad and immensely proud that Cape Girardeau ignored the perpetual naysayers on the college faculty and threw a party for the greatest president I've ever known.

Peter Kinder of Cape Girardeau is president pro tem of the Missouri Senate.