O n Sunday, Feb. 6, most people’s minds will be centered on one thing: the Super Bowl.

There will be some who are Packers or Steelers fans who want to see their team win a championship. There will be some football fans who just want to see a good game. Some will want to see the Black Eyed Peas perform at the halftime show (God knows why). Some will want to see the commercials. And some will probably just watch just because everyone else is.

People won’t be thinking about much else, which is a shame, because a great man was born that day 100 years ago.

It was Ronald Wilson Reagan, our 40th president.

Many conservatives have, quite rightly, looked up to Reagan as the quintessential political conservative. Reagan presided over a huge economic boom, spurred on partly by his tax cuts, and he helped bring an end to the Cold War without firing a single shot.

Though his record is more complicated than some starry-eyed conservatives make it out to be, he was truly a great president from the political right’s perspective.

But that isn’t what this column is about. This column is about more than the man’s politics ”” it’s about the man himself.

Reagan had a great wit. After the assassination attempt on his life, Reagan, wanting to be sure he had the best care possible, asked the doctors and nurses, “You’re all Republicans, right?”

Even when his life was in the balance, Reagan was still funny.

He had a quip for just about every situation. His wit was used many times to disarm his political foes. Once, when a reporter asked if any blame for the country’s economic woes should fall on him, Reagan, who became a Republican in 1962, answered, “Yes, because for many years I was a Democrat.”

He also loved telling jokes. Many of them revolved around the United States and the Soviet Union. One centered around two young men, an American and a Russian, arguing with the American saying, “I can walk into the Oval Office, I can pound on the president’s desk and say, ‘Mr. President, I don’t like the way you’re running our country.’”

The Russian says, “Well, I can do that too. I can go into the Kremlin to the General Secretary’s office, pound his desk and say, ‘Mr. General Secretary, I don’t like the way President Reagan is running his country.’”
Reagan also had a shrewd political mind. Though often derided as an “amiable dunce,” his political acumen was among the best of his generation. In his diary, he wrote of the tax cuts debate in 1981 in this way: “[Democrats] want to include a reduction of the inc. tax rate on unearned income from 70 percent to the 50 percent top rate on earned income. We wanted that in the first place but were sure they’d attack us as favoring the rich. … I’ll reluctantly give in … I’ll hail it as a great bipartisan solution. H–l! It’s more than I thought we could get.”

In his euphoria, Reagan, even in his diary, refused to swear.

Though I did say that I would leave Reagan’s political beliefs out, I must relay this piece of information.

When those on the militaristic right want to blast those who talk of limiting nuclear weapons around the world, they always bring back the old Republican adage: Ronald Reagan would not have hesitated in dropping a nuclear bomb.

Bill Buckley, the father of modern American conservatism, once believed this as well. “What I said in as many words, dressed up for the party, was that Reagan would, if he had to, pull the nuclear trigger. Twenty years after saying that, in the most exalted circumstances, in the presence of the man I was talking about, I changed my mind. … he would in fact not have deployed our great bombs, never mind what the Soviet Union had done.”

Ronald Reagan was a great man. This Sunday, Super Bowl Sunday, take a moment to remember Dutch, and see if your team can “win one for the Gipper.”