First of all David, thank you and thank all of you for that remarkable welcome. I’m very glad to be here and Callista and I are delighted to have a chance to share with you the great work that David has done recently working with us which at 1 is going to be right here and will be in the Ambassador Ballroom. And so we’re delighted to share with you Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny. Which I think is a particularly important film in light of today’s New York Times headline.

Now I don’t always start my talks by quoting the New York Times. (Laughter) In fact this may be a first. The New York Times this morning said quote, “Obama’s budget plan sweeps away Reagan ideas.” Let me say, first of all, that is of course what the New York Times devoutly hopes for and would rival only the resurrection of the Soviet Empire and other things that they’ve missed. (Laughter/Applause)

It was a hard quarter century for the New York Times, the Soviet Union disappeared, freedom worked, entrepreneurs created wealth, technologies were invented, they lost readership. It was a great 25 years. (Laughter/Applause) But when Callista and I first talked with Dave about doing this film we thought it would generally be helpful just as when we worked with Marji Ross on developing first Winning the Future and then Real Change. We thought it was moving in the right direction.

I don’t think we realized the degree to which the combination of the left wing machine which now runs the house, the senate, and the white house, would create the perfect moment to revisit the 70s and 80s and I thought maybe we would get here in May or June.. I did not believe they were arrogant enough and foolish enough to force this confrontation in the first 30 days of a new presidency.

But let me say, I came here today first of all to thank everybody who organized this CPAC because this is the largest, most enthusiastic CPAC in history with over 8,500 people. (Applause)

And I wanted to take a few minutes to answer the President and answer his attorney general and comment on the machine which currently runs the congress. Let me say first of all that we now have more than enough evidence of what this administration thinks of the American people.

If you look at Attorney General Holder’s recent speech in which he described us as quote a nation of cowards. Let me say to Attorney General Holder I welcome an opportunity to have a dialogue with you about cowardice anywhere, anytime. (Applause)

Why don’t we have the dialogue in Detroit and see if Attorney General Holder has the courage to talk about the failure of the Detroit school system, the failure of the Detroit teachers union, the betrayal of the futures of thousands of young people. Why don’t we have the dialogue, I didn’t say debate, now dialogue, lets have a dialogue, lets talk together, lets be above partisanship.

Lets discuss the total failure of the Detroit political system which has taken a city of 1.8 m which had the high per capita in the us and has driven it into the ground so that there are now fewer than 900,000 people living there with a per capita income that is 62nd in the United States. That is the function of bad government, bad politicians, bad bureaucracy, bad ideas, and let’s talk about that. (Applause)

I would be prepared to go to the poorest neighbor in Detroit with the most abandoned houses, with the highest crime rate, with the greatest betrayal of the American people and I’d be glad to talk about the idea that the Declaration of Independence applies to every person in Detroit.

That we have all been endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that we should be committed to eliminating bad government, bad bureaucracies and bad policy to liberate the people of Detroit. (Applause)

So I hope that Attorney General Holder will indicate that he doesn’t want to belong to a nation of cowards and that he’s willing to have this honest dialogue about the failures of the institutions he supports, the failures of the unions he supports, and the failures of the policies he supports and lets talk about it in one of the cities in which the policies he supports has betrayed so sadly and most tragically.

Now I listened carefully to the President’s speech the other night. I think that it is the boldest effort to create a European socialist model we have seen. I think it’s quite clear what his values and his attitude is. But what I was truly struck by was that if his Attorney General thinks we are a nation of cowards, his admin thinks that we are just plain dumb. (Laughter)

So suggest to us that he is opposed to ear marks, (Laughter) when the very next day the democrats are going to bring up a bill with 8 thousand ear marks in it and then to suggest that one doesn’t count because they started all the pork before he got here. I was looking for change we can believe in. (Laughter/Applause)

I was looking for the courage to take on the old politics. I was prepared to support a veto of the bill and to say the President is showing enormous courage by taking on Speaker Pelosi and taking on appropriations chairman Obey. I think the country would rally with the President if he had the courage to take on the democratic machine.

And so I was startled that he was saying to us that he opposed to ear marks and then they were saying but of course these ear marks don’t count because he’s opposed to later ear marks which aren’t here now but they’ll be here later, later he’ll really oppose them because he’s really very courageous but the courage doesn’t come until later, because after all you heard Holder’s speech. (Applause) And so. I thought to myself I wonder how dumb they think we are that we wouldn’t notice 8 thousand ear marks.

Then he had a second part of the speech which I think should become a youtube video. That he attacked ceo’s which used private planes. And Speaker Pelosi as was her habit that night. She was in this pattern where she would hyperactively jump up before he finished it. (Laughter) If you go back and watch he doesn’t even get to finish the sentence before she’s applauding and here she is, she’s like here I am I’m speaker and I get to applaud and it’s very exciting. (Laughter/Applause)

And so she jumped up and she applauded his attack on private planes. (Laughter) And I thought to myself how dumb do they think we are. (Laughter) Do they think we don’t realize that she’s getting every single person in this room to pay taxes so that the US government can fly her around in a private plane.

The fact that you paint US Air Force on it doesn’t mean it’s not private; it’s the plane she uses. And why would the speaker of the house have a private plane. She should have the same opportunity to encounter TSA as the rest of us. (Laughter)

And I wondered how dumb they thought we were. But then the final educational lesson of the evening came when the President having promised that he would not raise taxes on anyone making under 250,000, mentioned in passing using code word so that none of us would recognize it that he is for an energy tax and I began to think about this and in the budget it became clear to me, I wasn’t quite sure from his speech because after all his speech was one of those truly artful as we are told by the elite media everyday he is so stunningly articulate, such a great master of language, so thoroughly capable of communicating that I didn’t quite understand what he was saying. (Laughter/Applause)

But then I looked at the budget yesterday which has a 640 billion dollar revenue item from energy tax. I thought to myself; let me get this straight, we’re not going to raise taxes on anyone below 250,000 a year unless you use electricity. And we’re not going to raise taxes on anyone under 250,000 a year unless you buy gasoline, and we’re not going to raise taxes on anyone under 250,000 unless you buy heating oil, and we’re not going to raise taxes on anyone under 250,000 a year unless you use natural gas.

I tried to think to myself even in the left wing of the Democratic Party where there are some people who are fairly unusual, (Laughter) how many of them don’t use heating oil, natural gas, gasoline, or electricity. I believe there is a small contingent in northern Idaho in a commune who are actually doing that. (Laughter) I actually believe the group that will be least taxed under the new plan are the Amish in central Pennsylvania. (Laughter/Applause)

I thought to myself how dumb do they think we are that they can pretend that an energy tax isn’t an energy tax and they can pretend that every retired American who uses electricity isn’t going to pay it and every person in New Hampshire who uses heating oil isn’t going to pay it and every person who drives a car isn’t going to pay it.

And you know, I just want to report to Attorney General holder and President Obama- this is a nation of people courageous enough to tell the truth and this is a nation of people courageous enough to insist that we not be governed by people who won’t tell us the truth. (Powerful Applause)

Now a month ago, I would not have said what I’m about to say but I’ve watched carefully the first month of the left wing machine. And I believe that we should leave here with two goals. The first is to make the election of 2010 and this fall’s elections in Virginia and in New Jersey among the most consequential in American history. (Applause)

They have shared openly and honestly with us their vision of higher taxes, bigger government, more bureaucracy, greater corruption, more political power by people unworthy of doing it, and a policy which will kill jobs, cripple the economy, trap children in schools that are disasters and weaken America’s future. They have every right to have that vision and we have every right to go to the polls and defeat it. Now that is clear who they are. (Applause)

In addition, we should set out to find representative government by electing people who actually are willing to read the bills before they vote on them. (Applause) We do not elect robots for a left wing machine in this country. We ask members to swear to uphold the Constitution and if you have no idea what is in the bill you voted on how could you possibly be doing your Constitutional duty. And every person who voted yes on a bill that they had not seen, did not understand, had no time to read which is going to spend 780 billion dollars in ways they did not understand. Every person who voted that way deserves to be defeated, and they deserve to be defeated… (Applause)

Let me be clear this is not a partisan comment. In districts which are overwhelming democrat, the conservative movement should recruit candidates in the democratic primary across the country and we should have as a goal 435 campaigns in this country of people dedicated to representative government, to lower taxes, to less power in Washington and to taking back from the bureaucracy the power it can’t possibly use over the American economy. (Applause) We will not achieve this by being an opposition movement.

People are sick and tired of the negative, they are sick and tired of politicians only fight without solutions and people are genuinely frightened for the country, they are frightened for our national security, they are frightened for the very nature of our culture, they are frightened about our economy, they want to see a movement that has positive solutions that would work better than the failed policies of the left. And those failed policies let me be quite clear, are bipartisan failures.

The great irony of where we are today is that we have a Bush-Obama big spending program that was bipartisan in its nature. Last year the bush Obama plan had a 180 billion stimulus package in the spring which failed. It came back with a 345 billion housing package in the summer which failed. It then had a 700 billion Wall Street bailout in October which failed. It had a 4 trillion dollar Federal Reserve guaranty which failed.

The Bush-Obama plan was continued. We didn’t’ get real change. We got Geithner in between evading taxes who had been part of the Bush group and now he’s part of the Obama group. We got big spending under Bush, now we have big spending under Obama, and so we have two new failures. (Applause)

The lesson I draw from this is that there’s a party of the American people and that party in many ways grew out of CPAC and was led by Ronald Reagan and in the legislative side reached its peak with the Contract with America and the election of a majority actually dedicated to reforming welfare, cutting taxes, and balancing the budget. And there’s a party of big government and political elites and tragically in the last few years the Republican party became the right wing of the party of big government and political elites. And that’s why there’s a Bush-Obama continuity in economic policy which is frankly a disaster for this county and cannot work. (Applause)

And so it is time to recreate the party of the American people and to recognize that that is a much bigger party than the Republican party. In every major speech Ronald Reagan reached out to democrats, independents, as well as republicans. He was a former democrat and he understood that to govern America you had to bring people together into a tri-partisan majority. And we should take that attitude from this convention.

We are bigger than the Republican party. We stand for principles that transcend the Republican party, and we’re going to fight for the principles that lead to economic growth and jobs. (Applause)

You can find the first phase of those principles if you to go American Solutions and you look at 12 American Solutions for jobs and prosperity. It is fundamentally different from the Bush-Obama plan of higher taxes, bigger bureaucracy, more power for politicians and bigger government.

The American Solutions 12 steps towards jobs and prosperity starts with a simple premise- You want to stimulate the American Economy? The first step is easy. Don’t give any money to politicians and bureaucrats. Have a 50% offset on the FICA tax, the social security tax, and Medicare tax for every American and every small business and self employed person and over night, you want to put lots of money back into this economy? Put it back with the American people and let them decide which companies ought to survive and which companies ought to grow. That’s called being a customer and not being a bureaucrat. (Applause)

You want economic growth and jobs? The President had it exactly wrong the other night. Not even close. He said we ought to punish companies that want to take jobs out of America. Exactly the wrong attitude. We ought to reward companies that want to bring jobs to America. (Applause)

The President doesn’t understand that when you tell businesses and you tell capital we are going to punish you for “A” everybody who’s smart, and most the people who create jobs are smart…a lot smarter than the current politicians who are trying to lecture them, almost none of whom have ever created a job. (Laughter)

Now let’s not pick on Chris Dodd or Barney Frank or any of these, (Laughter) I’m not picking on individuals. I’m talking about a general group of individuals who probably would not survive very long if they had to run a business. (Laughter)

When politicians tell you they’re going to punish you for something you have to wonder about whether they have the power to punish you for something else. And that doesn’t encourage anybody to open a new factory, it doesn’t encourage anybody to invest in a new job, it doesn’t encourage anybody to put money back in the stock market. But if you tell people we’re going to reward them, because we like jobs enough we’re actually willing to help job creators. We think it’s good to have businesses because businesses actually create jobs. Permanent jobs, not extended unemployment. Permanent jobs. Then all the sudden people say gosh, that’s a country I’d like to be in.

Now what would it be like to have a strategy to create jobs in the world market. I’ll give you a couple examples that are in the American Solutions 12 steps for economic growth and jobs:

One- Why don’t we match the Chinese and have zero capital gains tax. (Applause) Now, when you go back home to try to explain this you don’t have to explain anything complicated. Just find people with a 401K or a pension plan, or a savings account for they children to go to college and say to them- how would you like for that to be 20-40% more valuable in a few weeks. That’s what eliminating the capital gains tax would do. Because suddenly, people put capital back in the market, the market would rise in value, all of our savings would be worth more and virtually every American who had savings would suddenly be better off.

Now I know, that’s a bold idea to say instead of giving the money to the bureaucracy and instead of allowing Mr. Geithner who couldn’t figure how to pay his own taxes to look over all the rest of us, we’re actually going to let you be in charge of your own savings and give you a bigger value. You’d have an overnight increase in savings. Overnight. And capital would flow in from around the world.

Second- You want to create jobs in America? Let’s match the Irish corporate tax rate of 12.5%. (Applause)

You know, in one of the first great CPAC moments Ronald Reagan came here and he said that we had to have bold colors, not pale pastels. And let me give you this example of fighting over corporate tax as an example of bold colors. I am totally uninterested in an Obama like Oh I could be for a 400 billion dollar package of stupid spending because that’s not as bad as a 700 billion dollar package of stupid spending. I just want to take the position of being against stupid spending. It’s bold. It’s out on the edge. It’s daring. (Applause) And I want to have it a national debate for the next two years.

If you believe the best way to create jobs is to give more money to bureaucracies in Washington and more power to politicians in the congress, you have a team. And you if think the best way to create jobs is to lower taxes on business, encourage small business, make life easier for people who want to work hard and create jobs, you have a team.

Now let the American people choose which of these two approaches do you think is going to give you a better job, a more stable job, and a better economic future and lets have it out. And if the American people want to choose higher taxes, more bureaucracies, and more power to politicians that’s their right.

But I’ll tell you a secret- we’ve been down this road three times. Lyndon Johnson went down this road, it lasted two years and they got crushed. We did not elect a liberal, an openly liberal president for 40 years. They came back after Watergate with Jimmy Carter who was utterly totally confused, did not run as a liberal. (Laughter/Applause) And let me tell you, I’m not being unkind.

If you get a chance to see Rendezvous with Destiny you will realize this guy was just not there. (Laughter) There’s a great moment when he explains that we all feel bad and have malaise because you know it’s a really bad time and we feel malaise. And his idea of presidential leadership is to share with you, the first person to actually shared pain, he said I feel the pain that you feel about how painful it is to have me as President.

Some of you will remember by the way, this is a perfect test for liberals and conservatives. Some of you will remember that under Carter we had gas rationing and you could only buy gas every other day based on the last number of your license tag. You remember this? I had a guy come up to me recently when I was talking about this. He said to me he was 13 at the time and his father would give him the screwdriver and send him out back every morning to change the license plate so that, are you the one that told me this? (Looks at David Bossie) Okay, I didn’t want to get him arrested retroactively by the new attorney general. (Laughter/Applause)

All I can tell you is that if Holder sends the FBI now that you’ve admitted that you were violating the gas rationing law. They’re not going to go after your Dad, David because you’re more irritating. (Laughter) They’re going to go after you.

So here’s my test to take back home and test with your friends. Because I’ve thought about this for a couple weeks.

And it occurred to me, conservatism is when if you have a law so dumb that we’re teaching 13 year olds to break it, you probably ought to change the law. Liberalism is when you believe that Dave Bossie swapping license plates is proof that you need license plate police at every gas station to check and make sure. (Laughter/Applause)

So let’s have a debate between their bold colors of European socialism transplanted to Washington and our bold colors of American free enterprise, the American work ethic and the American vision that every American of every background in every community ought to have the right to pursue happiness, ought to have a genuine education from a school that actually functions and ought to have the most limited government possible to have the most efficient country in order to be able to compete in the world market and be able to win decisively for our children and grandchildren. (Applause)

And let me encourage you to join us at American Solutions on April 15 and in your own community and in your own neighborhood with deliberately. In 1994 I actually helped write a book on the Boston Tea Party. And we did have a lot of fun that year with the Clinton tax increase. But 15 years later I think one of the things that went wrong is that all too many of my colleagues forgot that being opposed isn’t enough.

We need more than a protest. I think that we need to outline the beginnings of a positive, clear, alternative series of solutions. We need to say to every representative of both parties and every senator of both parties you get a year to pass it and then we get a year to beat you. (Applause) And so you’re either with us or we’re going to try to do everything we can to replace you and we’re going to do it on a tri-partisan level.

We want every democrat who believes in lower taxes and more jobs, every independent who believes in lower taxes and more jobs, and every republican who believes in lower taxes and more jobs to join a nationwide movement to fundamentally reform government, to fundamentally get us into a future where we can compete economically.

And April 15, you can go to American Solutions and sign up and we’ll get you information so that everybody we can find everywhere in America who is worried about this economy who wants to create a better future and who knows that more big government and more power to politicians isn’t the answer can come join us. And one of the topics we’re going to talk about that day is going to be “Freedom versus Fear”which is a project which I’m delighted to announce that Saul Anuzis, many of you know as the Michigan State Republican Chair has agreed to head up for us at American Solutions. (Applause)

One of the efforts of the left which they’re going to try to pass in a stealth manner because they can’t possibly pass it once the country understands it is the effort to deprive American workers of the right to a private ballot and the right to negotiate economic prosper. I just want all of you to know that this fight, they call it card check. That’s not really what it is, it’s an innocuous term. That’s not what it is. It’s an effort to deprive you of the right to vote in secret, to ensure that they can coerce socially, and here’s what they would do we have a little project I know a number of you, several thousand of you have filled this win a Wii card and we’re going to give away one Wii today and we’re going to give away another Wii tomorrow so you can still fill this out.

But in order to educate you on this whole idea of the challenge we face to our freedoms, down here in print you can’t quite read it says you just agreed to join the union and pay the dues and this is our effort to unionize CPAC. (Laughter)

And what we want all of you to understand, this is why this is so dangerous, what we want you all of you to understand is that if this law passes, they can go into any hospital, any company, any small bus, any college and they can start getting this and when you sign these you have voted. You don’t get a secret vote later. This is the vote. And they only need to get 50% plus one to sign it and it’s over.

Now this is the greatest threat to freedom in the workplace I think in American history. And I think it’s very important for all of you to help us, in every single state that we get all representatives and both senators to understand this is a mortal threat to American freedom and we will never forgive somebody who votes for cloture or who votes for final passage. Because they will have said they are owned by the unions and they are against, an overwhelming majority- 82% of the country have said bluntly in the most recent survey they do not want to belong to the union. That 82% should not be exposed to coercive behavior on the behalf of people who want their money as dues that could then be spent by bosses without any accountability. So we need your help. (Applause)

Saul asked me to announce that Eric Hobbs won the first of the Wiis. We’ll give another one away tomorrow. So Eric, if you’ll see Saul you are now the owner of a Wii.

Um let me say one last thing about foreign policy because I think it’s very, very important. There is a new novel out by Alex Berensen who is a reporter for the New York Times and I recommend it to you highly. It’s a novel about an effort by Islamic fanatics to acquire two Russian nuclear weapons and take them apart because they can’t figure out how to break the codes and then use the material in the weapons to create a Hiroshima size bomb to be used in Washington during the State of the Union. One of the projects I’m gonna ask be done is to draw the size of the perimeter you would need to protect the capital from a Hiroshima sized bomb and you’re going to be staggered by how far that perimeter would be.

The point that Alex Berensen makes in this novel is that we are faced with a genuine crisis of people who really want to kill us. By the way it wouldn’t have to Russian nuclear weapon- It could be Pakistani, North Korean, Iranian. The second novel, and I’m going to write an op-ed and encourage the President to read these two novels.

Alex Berensen’s novel about an attack on America by a nuclear weapon and the second novel which will come out next month by my co-author Bill Forstchen is called “One Second After” and it’s about what happens in a North Carolina town immediately after an Electromagnetic Pulse attack, eliminates all the electricity producing capability of the country. And it’s horrifying. The reason I hope President Obama reads these two is to understand something that has never really been as true as it is now. And that is that we are not developing national security and homeland security at the margins. This is not about stopping two snipers or three car bombers… or 5 airplanes.

We live in a world where if we gamble wrong, and the current proposed defense budget is much too small, if we gamble wrong whether it is a major power like China or Russia, a medium sized power like North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran, and North Korea is a medium sized power by possession of nuclear weapons. Or it is a fanatic group willing to die in the process of killing us.

We live in a world where there are weapons capable of ending civilization as we know it. And we need to be prepared in a very militant and aggressive way to defend America from having a catastrophic disaster of the first order. (Applause)

Let me also say that in many ways this administration has been better than I would have guessed at the team they’ve assembled for national security and more responsible than I would have guessed in their policies.

But there is one thing they’ve announced that I think we should very aggressively question and challenge. And that is their proposal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding the Gaza strip through agencies infiltrated by terrorists.

And let me be very clear there are still missiles being fired everyday from Gaza. We did not start rebuilding Germany in the middle of 1943 on the grounds that if we could only find good Germans we could work with they would take care of the bad Nazis. And we did not start rebuilding Japan in 1943 on the grounds that if only we could find good Japanese they would convince the militarists to be pleasant. We understood that when you have opponents who want to destroy you, you have to first win the war and then you can rebuild. (Applause)

The war does not have to involve American troops and the war does not actually have to involve much violence. Ronald Reagan, as you’ll see in our movie, defeated the Soviet Empire in 10 years with a grand strategy and collaboration with Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Thatcher. (Applause)

North Korea, Iran, and Hamas are mortal threats to the survival of Western Civilization and it is absolutely irresponsible to believe that those regimes can stay in power and we can find a negotiated agreement. In all three cases we need non-military, but very sophisticated efforts at regime replacement and we need to say to the planet- somebody who threatens to destroy one of our cities is somebody we are not going to tolerate. And we’re not going to say well, we’ll get even after you take out our city.

The idea of trading Tehran for Washington was abhorrent to Ronald Reagan and it should be abhorrent to every American. Mutual assured destruction is, I think an immoral strategy and is not one that we can tolerate particularly against suicide bombers, who would be thrilled to swap their capital for our capital and so I think we have to understand and this administration had better learn pretty quickly.

We may not be interested in war, but our enemies are. And our enemies are dangerous and some of these threats can be mortal. And so I think this is a very important component.

Let me say by the way that you have your first great opportunity to set the stage for next year. It’s happening right now in New York 20. Because the Governor of New York picked a Democrat from a very Republican district, there is now a special election at the end of March. Jim Tedisco is a very competent, very capable candidate. He has a particular program, Tedisco for Congress, which is 20 for 20- Asking people to give 20 dollars to help win the 20th congressional seat.

It will be an enormous step. You know we won the first House Special Election after the election of President Obama. And it was a breakthrough that almost no normal Republican consult thought possible. We were in an African-American seat in the middle of New Orleans and our candidate was a South Vietnamese-American. And he won decisively. (Applause)

And congressman Cao is the first example of the fact that if we reach out to everyone, and we recruit everyone you can compete everywhere when the alternative is a big tax, big bureaucracy, big politics, big corruption alternative. And so we have to continue down that road. And we have a great candidate in New York 20 in Jim Tedisco, I hope all of you will decide to join his $20 for 20 club and if we can spread that word across the country we will be amazed how many resources he’ll have, we’ll be delighted how decisive the victory will be, and that will be step 2 back towards making sure that Speaker Pelosi no longer has her plane under any circumstances because she’ll no longer be Speaker. (Applause)

Let me just close with one last comment. We write novels as educational efforts and Bill Forstchen and Steve Hanser and I who are the three historians who work together on these, have a novel that will be out at the end of October that I want to share with you for a second because I want you to go back home and every time somebody starts to complain to you I want you to tell them this story.

Our novel is about George Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day. David Hackett Fisher has written a brilliant non-fiction history book called Washington’s Crossing which I recommend to all of you. And when you read it you’ll begin to understand why we’re doing this novel.

Bill Forstchen, my colleague actually grew up 20 miles from the crossing site and as a young man was a re-enactor and every Christmas day there was a small group that would re-enact the crossing and one year he decided he didn’t really understand it and so he did the re-enactment with no boots, wearing burlap bags. He said you cannot imagine how painful it was and how hard it was. And this is what I want to imprint in closing and I want each of you to go back home.

I have a very dear friend who spent 7 years in a prisoner of war camp in Vietnam; we have young men and women across this planet today risking their lives for us. If you hear somebody who tells you well it’s too hard, or I can’t do it, or I can’t win, or I’m so disappointed, I want you to look them in the eye and say, Once upon a time there men who believed so passionately in freedom, believed so deeply in America that, although they were outnumbered, one-third of them had no boots, they were going to cross an icy river at night to take on a professional, German military unit. And their commander said to them- the password tonight is victory or death. We live in the free-est, country in the world.

This organization, 35 years ago heard Ronald Wilson Reagan begin to explain freedom at a time when Republicans were collapsing because of Watergate. And then it heard Ronald Wilson Reagan explain freedom all through a period when we were told the left was going to be dominant, that the Soviet Union was going to be dominant, that freedom was going to diminish, and that we should just accept malaise because that was our future.

Because of CPAC and the message that Ronald Reagan carried across this country, the Soviet Union disappeared, the American economy rebounded, and I’m Proud to be an American was a very popular song because it made sense once again.

From now until Election Day of 2010 and from now until Election Day of 2012, we should reach out to every one of the 310 million Americans who are being served badly by big bureaucracy, big government, and arrogant politicians. And we should say to them- there is a people’s party and a people’s movement. That people’s party includes democrats, it includes independents, it includes republicans, and all we want to know is in the spirit of George Washington, are you prepared…because in our case it’s not victory or death, in our case we have the right as a free people to speak out, to stand up, to organize our neighbors, to win the argument and to bring freedom and prosperity and safety for our children and our grandchildren.

Thank you, good luck, and God Bless you. (Applause)