I know you don’t need to read anything more about Reagan — for the next ten, twenty years or so? — but I thought I’d contribute a couple of cents. Actually, I thought I’d link to some cents (sense?) I tossed in some time ago. In this book, there is an essay called “A Name of My Own: Me and Reagan.” I could not find it via Google: except here. This is a link to a PDF version of the issue of National Review dated June 28, 2004. That is the Reagan memorial issue. It’s awfully good, if I say so myself. (The issue, I mean, not my essay.) “A Name of My Own,” for those interested, starts on page 37.

The piece begins,

Of all the things Ronald Reagan did for me, maybe the best was that he gave me something to call myself. I am a Reaganite. It can be difficult to answer when someone says, “What are you, politically?” The word “conservative” is subject to a thousand interpretations. You don’t want to launch into a lecture about the Scottish Enlightenment, the strange journey of the word “liberal,” the advent of Frank Meyer, etc. So, instead you can say — if it’s true — “I’m a Reaganite.”

And I am. Also, I contributed another little essay to a volume edited by Mike Deaver. I believe this link will deliver you to that essay, if you’re interested. It is a reflection on how I became a conservative. Reagan was key, of course. At the end of this essay, I attempt “a little credo.”

As regular readers know — all too well — I started out in Ann Arbor, Mich., a “small citadel of the Left,” as I call it. I’m a bit of a backlash baby. Ann Arbor is the home of the University of Michigan, whose principal newspaper is the Michigan Daily, which we once knew as Pravda West. (Actually, that’s what we called the Ann Arbor News, too. There were many Pravda Wests about.) Today in the Daily, there’s a column by two students, Alexander Franz and Jonathan Pape: “The real Reagan.” So gratifying to see, in such a place.

Hang on, gonna throw something else at you: a review-essay called “Reagan in Full,” which I wrote in 2001. This was a few years after Tom Wolfe published his novel A Man in Full. We were all using titles like that. This review-essay is published in that collection of mine, which I linked to above: Here it is again. It is also here, on the good ol’ Net.

Okay, that was more than two cents.