November 2014
QuickPoint! – A Time for Choosing
Word Count 220
By Steve Buckstein
Did you choose between a left or right in yesterday’s election? If that phrase sounds
familiar, perhaps you watched an emerging leader utter it 50 years ago last week.
In 1964 an actor named Ronald Reagan gave what has become known simply as
“The Speech” on behalf of his ill-fated Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater.
The half-hour TV address, “A Time for Choosing,” wasn’t able to propel
Goldwater to the Presidency, but it is credited with launching Reagan’s political
career and his eventual landslide victory in 1980 against a sitting president, Jimmy
Carter.
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You can watch The Speech online. Here are two of my favorite lines:
“This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for selfgovernment, or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a
little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we
can plan them ourselves.”
And…
“You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d
like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down:
[Up to] man’s age-old dream—the ultimate individual freedom consistent with law
and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”
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I didn’t fully appreciate these concepts then; I do now.
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Steve Buckstein is founder and Senior Policy Analyst at Cascade Policy Institute,
Oregon’s free market public policy research organization.
www.cascadepolicy.org
[email protected]
Cascade Policy Institute is a tax-exempt educational organization as defined under IRS code 501 (c)(3). Nothing
appearing in this Cascade Commentary is to be construed as necessarily representing the views of Cascade or its
donors. The views expressed herein are the author’s own.