Mr. Toastmaster [Representative] Mickey Edwards, thank you very much
for those generous words—reverend clergy, ladies and gentlemen, we're delighted to be
here at the ninth annual Conservative Political Action Conference.
Anyone looking at the exciting program you've scheduled over these four days, and
the size of this gathering here tonight, can't help but be impressed with the energy and
vitality of the conservative movement in America. We owe a special debt of gratitude to
the staffs of American Conservative Union, Young Americans for Freedom, Human Events and
National Review for making this year's conference the most successful in the brief but
impressive history of this event.
Now, you may remember that when I spoke to you last year, I said the election
victory we enjoyed in November of l980 was not a victory of politics so much as it was a
victory of ideas; not a victory for any one man or party, but a victory for a set of
principles, principles that had been protected and nourished during the years of grim and
heartbreaking defeats by a few dedicated Americans. Well, you are those Americans, and I
salute you.
I've also come here tonight to remind you of how much remains to be done, and to
ask your help in turning into reality even more of our hopes for America and the world.
The agenda for this conference is victory, victory in this year's crucial congressional,
state, and local elections.
The media coverage that you've received this week, the attention paid to you by so
many distinguished Americans in and out of government — conservative and not so
conservative — are testimony to the sea change that you've already brought about in
American politics. But, despite the glitter of nights like this and the excitement we all
still feel at the thought of enacting reforms we were only able to talk about a few years
ago, we should always remember that our strength still lies in our faith in the good sense
of the American people. And that the climate in Washington is still opposed to those
enduring values, those "permanent things" that we've always believed in.
But Washington's fascination with passing trends and one-day
headlines can sometimes cause serious problems over in the West Wing of the White
House—they cause them. There's the problem of leaks. Before we even announced the
giveaway of surplus cheese, the warehouse mice had hired a lobbyist. [Laughter] And then a
few weeks ago, those stories broke about the Kennedy tapes. And that caused something of a
stir. Al Haig came in to brief me on his trip to Europe. I uncapped my pen, and he stopped
talking. [Laughter] Up on the hill, I understand they were saying, "You need
eloquence in the State Dining Room, wit in the East Room, and sign language in the Oval
Office." [Laughter] It got so bad that I found myself telling every visitor there
were absolutely no tape recordings being made. And if they wanted a transcript of that
remark, just mention it to the potted plant on their way out. [Laughter]
But Washington is a place of fads and one-week stories. It's also a company town,
and the company's name is government, big government. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion
that a few of you might have agreed when we decided not to ask Congress for higher taxes.
And I hope you realize it's going to take more than 402 days to completely change what's
been going on for 40 years.
I realized that the other day when I read a story about a
private citizen in Louisiana who asked the government for help in developing his property.
And he got back a letter that said: "We have observed that you have not traced the
title prior to 1803. Before the final approval, it will be necessary that the title be
traced previous to that year. Well, the citizen's answer was eloquent.
"Gentlemen," he wrote, "I am unaware that any
educated man failed to know that Louisiana was purchased from France in 1803. The title of
the land was acquired by France by the right of conquest from Spain. The land came in the
possession of Spain in 1492 by the discovery by an Italian sailor, Christopher Columbus.
The good Queen Isabella took the precaution of receiving the blessing of the Pope. ... The
Pope is emissary of the Son of God, who made the world. Therefore, I believe that it is
safe to assume that He also made that part of the United States called Louisiana. And I
hope to hell you're satisfied." [Laughter]
Now, changing the habits of four decades is, as I say, going to take more than 402
days. But change will come if we conservatives are in this for the long haul—if we
owe our first loyalty to the ideas and principles we discussed, debated, developed, and
popularized over the years. Last year I pointed to these principles as the real source of
our strength as a political movement, and mentioned some of the intellectual giants who
fostered and developed them—men like Frank Meyer, who reminded us that the robust
individualism of America was part of deeper currents in Western civilization, currents
that dictated respect for the law and the careful preservation of our political
traditions.
Only a short time ago, conservatives filled this very room for a testimonial
dinner to a great conservative intellect and scholar, author of the "The Conservative
Mind," Russell Kirk. In a recent speech, Dr. Kirk has offered some political advice
for the upcoming elections. He said now, more than ever, we must seek out the "gift
of audacity." We must not become too comfortable with our new-found status in
Washington. "When the walls of order are breached, the vigorous conservative must
exlaim: Arm me, audacity, from head to foot." It was Napoleon, master of the huge
battalions, who once said: "It is imagination that rules the human races" and
Disraeli who mentioned that "success is the child of audacity."
We must approach the upcoming elections with a forthright and direct message for
the American people. We must remind them of the economic catastrophe that we faced on
January 20th, 1981: millions out of work, inflation in double digits for two years in a
row, interest rates hovering at 21 1/2 percent, productivity and the rate of growth in the
gross national product down for the third year in a row, the money supply increasing by 12
percent—and all this due to one overriding cause: Government was too big and had
spent too much money.
Federal spending, in the last decade, went up more than 300 percent. In 1980
alone, it increased by 17 percent. Almost three-quarters of the federal budget was
routinely referred to as "uncontrollable," largely due to increases in programs
like food stamps, which in 15 years had increased by 16,000 percent, or Medicare and
Medicaid—up by more than 500 percent in just 10 years. Our national debt was
approaching $1 trillion, and we were paying nearly $100 billion a year in interest on that
debt—more than enough money to run the federal government only 20 years ago.
In an effort to keep pace, taxes had increased by 220 percent in just 10 years,
and we were looking at a tax increase from l980 to 1984, already passed before we got
here, of more than $300 billion. Unless we stop the spending juggernaut and reverse the
trend toward even higher taxes, government by 1984 would be taking nearly one-quarter of
the gross national product. Inflation and interest rates, according to several studies,
would be heading toward 25 percent—levels that would stifle enterprise and initiative
and plunge the nation into even deeper economic crisis.
At this point last year, much of the smart money in Washington was betting, as it
is today, on the failure of our proposals for restoring the economy, that we could never
assemble the votes we needed to get our program for economic recovery through the
Congress. But assemble the votes we did. For the first time in nearly 25 years, we slowed
the spending juggernaut and got the taxpayers out from under the federal steamroller. We
cut the rate of growth in federal spending almost in half. We lowered inflation to a
single-digit rate, and it's still going down. It was 8.9 percent for all of 1981, but
ourJanuary figure, at an annualized rate, is only 3 1/2 percent.
When they talk of what should be done for the poor, well, one thing alone, by
reducing inflation, we increased the purchasing power of poor families by more than $250.
We cut taxes for business and individuals and index to inflation. This last step ended
once and for all that hidden profit on inflation that had made the federal bureaucracy
America's largest growth industry.
We've moved against waste and fraud with a task force including our Inspectors
General, who have already found thousands of people who've been dead for as long as seven
years still receiving benefit checks from the government. We've concentrated on criminal
prosecutions, and we've cut back in other areas like the multitude of films, pamphlets,
and public relations experts, or, as we sometimes call them, the federal flood of flicks
and flacks and foldouts.
We're cutting the size of the federal payroll by 75,000 over the next few years
and are fighting to dismantle the Department of Energy and the Department of Education,
agencies whose policies have frequently been exactly the opposite of what we need for real
energy growth and sound education for our children.
Even now, less than five months after our program took full effect, we've seen the
first signs of recovery. In January, leading economic indicators like housing permits
showed an upturn. By 1983 we will begin bringing down the percentage of the gross national
produce consumed by both the federal deficit and by federal spending and taxes.
Our situation now is in some ways similar to that which confronted the United
States and other Western nations shortly after World War II. Many economists then were
predicting a return to depression once the stimulus of wartime spending was ended. But
people were weary of wartime goverment controls, and here and in other nations like West
Germany those controls were eliminated against the advice of some experts. At first, there
was a period of hardship—higher unemployment and declining growth. In fact, in 1946,
our gross national product dropped 15 percent, but by 1947, the next year, it was holding
steady and in 1948 increased by four percent. Unemployment began a steady decline. And in
1949 consumer prices were decreasing. A lot of the experts underestimated the economic
growth that occurs once government stops meddling and the people take over. Well, they
were wrong then, and they're wrong now.
The job of this administration and of the Congress is to move forward with
additional cuts in the growth of federal spending and thereby ensure America's economic
recovery. We have proposed budget cuts for 1983, and our proposals have met with cries of
anguish. And those who utter the cries are equally anguished because there will be a
budget deficit. They're a little like a dog sitting on a sharp rock howling with pain,
when all he has to do is get up and move.
On the spending cuts now before the Congress and those tax reductions we've
already passed for the American people, let me state we're standing by our program. We
will not turn back or sound retreat.
You know, if I could just interject here, some of those people who say we must
change direction when we've only been on this new direction for five months—and it's
only the first limited phase of the whole program—it was described pretty well by
Mickey Edwards, sitting right here, while we were having dinner. He said, "If you
were sliding downhill on a snowy hill, and you know there's a cliff down there ahead of
you at the bottom and suddenly there's a road that turns off at to the right," he
said, "you don't know where that road to the right goes, but," he says,
"you take it." We know where that other one goes.
In the dicussion of federal spending, the time has come to put to rest the sob
sister attempts to portray our desire to get government spending under control as a
hard-hearted attack on the poor people of America. In the first place, even with the
economies that we've proposed, spending for entitlements—benefits paid directily to
individuals—will actually increase by one-third over the next five years. And in 1983
non-defense items will amount to more than 70 percent of total spending.
As Dave Stockman pointed out the other day, we're still subsidizing 95 million
meals a day, providing $70 billion in health care to the elderly and poor, some 47 million
people. Some 10 million or more are living in subsidized housing. And we're still
providing scholarships for a million and a half students. Only here in this city of Oz
would a budget this big and this generous be characterized as a miserly attack on the
poor.
Now, where do some of these attacks originate? They're coming from the very people
whose past policies, all done in the name of compassion, brought us the current recession.
Their policies drove up inflation and interest rates, and their policies stifled
incentive, creativity, and halted the movement of the poor up the economic ladder. Some of
their criticism is perfectly sincere. But let's also understand that some of their
criticism comes from those who have a vested interest in a permanent welfare constituency
and in government programs that reinforce the dependency of our people.
Well, I would suggest that no one should have a vested interest in poverty or
dependency, that these tragedies must never be looked at as a source of votes for
politicians or paychecks for bureaucrats. They are blights on our society that we must
work to eliminate, not institutionalize.
Now, there are those who will always require help from the rest of us on a
permanent basis, and we'll provide that help. To those with temporary need, we should have
programs that are aimed at making them self-sufficient as soon as possible. How can
limited government and fiscal restraint be equated with lack of compassion for the poor?
How can a tax break that puts a little more money in the weekly paychecks of working
people be seen as an attack on the needy?
Since when do we in America believe that our society is made up of two
diametrically opposed classes—one rich, one poor—both in a permanent state of
conflict and neither able to get ahead except at the expense of the other? Since when do
we in America accept this alien and discredited theory of social and class warfare? Since
when do we in America endorse the politics of envy and division?
When we reformed the welfare system in California and got the cheaters and the
undeserving off the welfare rolls, instead of hurting the poor we were able to increase
their benefits by more than 40 percent. By reducing the cost of government, we can
continue bringing down inflation, the cruelest of all economic exploitations of the poor
and the elderly. And by getting the economy moving again, we can create a vastly expanded
job market that will offer the poor a way out of permanent dependency.
One man who held this office, a President vastly underrated by history, Calvin
Coolidge, pointed out that a nation that is united in its belief in the work ethic and its
desire for commercial success and economic progress is usually a healthy nation, a nation
where it is easier to pursue the higher things in life like the development of science,
the cultivation of the arts, the exploration of the great truths of religion and higher
learning.
In arguing for economy in government, President Coolidge spoke of the burden of
excessive government. He said: "I favor a policy of economy, not because I wish to
save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil
are the ones who bear the cost of the government. Every dollar that we save means that
their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical
form." And this is the message we conservatives can bring to the American people
about our economic program.
Higher productivity, a larger gross national product, a healthy Dow Jones
average—they are our goals and are worthy ones.
But our real concerns are not statistical goals or material gain. We want to
expand personal freedom, to renew the American dream for every American. We seek to
restore opportunity and reward, to value again personal achievement and individual
excellence. We seek to rely on the ingenuity and energy of the American people to better
their own lives and those of millions of others around the world.
We can be proud of the fact that a conservative administration has pursued these
goals by confronting the nation's economic problems head-on. At the same time, we dealt
with one other less publicized but equally grave problem: the serious state of disrepair
in our national defenses.
The last Democratic administration had increased real defense spending at a rate
of 3.3 percent a year. You know how much inflation was, so they were actually losing
ground. By 1980 we had fighter planes that couldn't fly, Navy ships that couldn't leave
port, a Rapid Deployment Force that was neither rapid nor deployable and not much of a
force.
The protection of this nation's security is the most solemn duty of any President,
and that's why I've asked for substantial increases in our defense
budget—substantial, but not excessive.
In 1962, President Kennedy's defense budget amounted to 44 percent of the entire
budget. Ours is only 29 percent. In 1962, President Kennedy's request for military
spending was 8.6 percent of the gross national product. Ours is only 6.3 percent. The
Soviet Union outspends us on defense by 50 percent, an amount equal to 15 percent of their
gross national product. During the campaign I was asked any number of times: If I were
faced with a choice of balancing the budget or restoring our national defenses, what would
I do? Every time I said, "Restore our defenses." And every time I was applauded.
So, let me be very clear. We will press for further cuts in federal spending. We
will protect the tax reductions already passed. We will spend on defense what is necessary
for our national security. I have no intention of leading the Republican party into next
fall's election on a platform of higher taxes and cut-rate defense. If our opponents want
to go to the American people next fall and say, "We're the party that tried to cut
spending, we're the party that tried to take away your tax cuts, we're the party that
wanted a bargain-basement military and held a fire sale on national security," let's
give them all the running room they want.
There are other matters on the political agenda for this coming year, matters I
know that you 've been discussing during the course of this conference. I hope one of them
will be our attempt to give government back to the people. One hundred and thirty-two
federal grants-in-aid in 1960 have grown to over 500 in 1981. Our federalism proposal
would return the bulk of these programs to state and local governments, where they can be
made more responsive to the people.
We're deeply committed to this program, because it has its roots in deep
conservative principles. We've talked a long time about revitalizing our system of
federalism. Now, with a single, bold stroke, we can restore the vigor and health of our
state and local governments. This proposal lies at the heart of our legislative agenda for
the next year, and we'll need your active support in getting it passed.
There are other issues before us. This administration is unalterably opposed to
the forced busing of school children, just as we also support constitutional protection
for the right of prayer in our schools. And there is the matter of abortion. We must with
calmness and resolve help the vast majority of our fellow Americans understand that the
more than one and a half a million abortions performed in America in 1980 amount to a
great moral evil, an assault on the sacredness of human life.
And, finally, there's the problem of crime, a problem whose gravity cannot be
underestimated. This administration has moved in its appointments to the federal bench and
in its legislative proposals for bail and parole reform to assist in the battle against
the lawless. But we must always remember that our legal system does not need reform so
much as it needs transformation. And this cannot occur at just the federal level. It can
really occur only when a society as a whole acknowledges principles that lie at the heart
of modern conservatism. Right and wrong matters, individuals are responsible for their
actions. Society has a right to be protected from those who prey on the innocent .
This, then, is the political agenda before us. Perhaps more than any group, your
grassroots leadership, your candidate recruitment and training programs, your long years
of hard work and dedication have brought us to this point and made this agenda possible.
We live today in a time of climactic struggle for the human spirit, a time that
will tell whether the great civilized ideas of individual liberty, representative
government, and the rule of law under God will perish or endure.
Whittaker Chambers, who sought idealism in communism and found only
disillusionment, wrote very movingly of his moment of awakening. It was at breakfast, and
he was looking at the delicate ear of his tiny baby daughter, and he said that, suddenly,
looking at that, he knew that couldn't just be an accident of nature. He said, while he
didn't realize it at the time, he knows now that in that moment God had touched his
forehead with his finger.
And later he wrote: "For in this century, within the next decades, will be
decided for generations whether all mankind is to become Communist, whether the whole
world is to become free, or whether in the struggle civilization as we know it is to be
completely destroyed or completely changed. It is our fate to live upon that turning point
in history."
We've already come a long way together. Thank you for all that you've done for me,
for the common values we cherish. Join me in a new effort, a new crusade.
Nostalgia has its time and place. Coming here tonight has been a sentimental
journey for me, as I'm sure it has been for many of you. But nostalgia isn't enough. The
challenge is now. It's time we stopped looking backward at how we got here. We must ask
ourselves tonight how we can forge and wield a popular majority from one end of this
country to the other, a majority united on basic, positive goals with a platform broad
enough and deep enough to endure long into the future, far beyond the lifespan of any
single issue or personality.
We must reach out and appeal to the patriotic and fundamental ideals of average
Americans who do not consider themselves "movement" people, but who respond to
the same American ideals that we do. I'm not talking about some vague notion of an
abstract, amorphous American mainstream. I'm talking about "Main Street"
Americans in their millions. They come in all sizes, shapes and colors—blue-collar
workers blacks, Hispanics, shopkeepers, scholars, service people, housewives, and
professional men and women. They are the backbone of America, and we can't move America
without moving their hearts and minds as well.
Fellow Americans, our duty is before us tonight. Let us go forward, determined to
serve selflessly a vision of man with God, government for people, and humanity at peace.
For it is now our task to tend and preserve, through the darkest and coldest nights, that
"sacred fire of liberty" that President Washington spoke of two centuries ago, a
fire that tonight remains a beacon to all the oppressed of the world, shining forth from
this kindly, pleasant, greening land we call America.
God bless you, and thank you.