During the 1980 presidential campaign John McClaughry served as one of Ronald Reagan’s three principal speechwriters. In late October 1980, he was assigned to draft Reagan’s election eve national television speech. The idea—initially—was to summarize the main points of his campaign for the presidency, and to illustrate how his thinking on public issues would serve the American people.
Before McClaughry could produce a third draft, there was a new development. According to three-day running polls, Reagan was leading President Jimmy Carter by 10 points nationally and his support was trending upwards. So the campaign high command decided—rightly—to not have Reagan give an election eve address.
“Reagan’s Lost Speech” was never cleared for delivery, or even (so far as we know) shown to Reagan. But it encapsulated ideas that made Reagan so appealing to so many, most importantly the notion that “the overriding question is not one of Left or Right. It is one of reversing the flow of power and control to ever more remote institutions.”
In the speech, which unfortunatley bore little ressemblence to his presidency once it was underway, Reagan would offer his dream as president to “capture a vision of America—strong, vital, productive—where the affliction of giantism began to give way before a resurgence of individual liberty, of strong families, of the human-scale institutions that give meaning to our existence, of a new faith in American’s future.”
Read the whole thing for the first time exclusively here at Reason.
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