LINCOLN DAY DINNER

Ron Johnson

Winnebago County

Republican Party

La Sure’s Banquet Hall,

Oshkosh, WI

March 21, 2010

Now the moment I was asked if I would be willing to speak here tonight I knew exactly what I would talk about - Freedom. It has been 234 years since our founders fought for their freedom. We now find ourselves in an entirely new struggle for our own freedom. And that’s incredibly sad.

I was born in 1955, and I’ve witnessed some pretty stressful times in our history. Nothing like our Nation’s great wars, but I did live through the cold war.

I’m old enough to remember nuclear blast drills in grade school and the little round Nuclear Fallout shelter signs, which supposedly told us where it would be safe. I remember the social unrest of the ’60s, the Vietnam War protests, and the Civil Rights struggle. I remember the Watergate hearings in the ’70s, Nixon’s resignation, the oil embargo, gas lines, stagflation, Jimmy Carter’s Malaise speech, 21.5% interest rates, and the misery index.

And then we experienced a breath of fresh air as Ronald Reagan’s principled policies ushered in two decades of peace and prosperity. With a 28% top tax rate, for a brief period of time we were actually 72% free!!!!

Then came 9/11, and our world changed.

But throughout my 54 years of life, with all I have witnessed, it is not until this moment in time that I actually fear for own my personal freedom. Even after 9/11, with the anthrax scare, tightened airport security, and debate over the Patriot Act, I always felt my personal freedom would be protected… I could trust that our constitutional checks and balances would work. After all, we all witnessed the finest among us step up to the plate, travel half-way around the world to defend not only our freedom, but also the freedom of people whose culture and religion had given rise to our enemy. With men and women like that, I figured our country was in good hands. Everything would be O.K.

But then a not so funny thing happened on the way to the 2008 election. The same liberals that had torn our country apart in the ’60s saw their chance. In the words of Rahm Emanuel, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” And they didn’t. They used the Iraq war to sew discontent, and with the help of a hapless regulatory bureaucracy, the financial crisis of 2008 created the perfect storm for a young, charismatic, and woefully inexperienced man to win the presidency on an empty slate of hope and change.

But it wasn’t just this perfect storm that ushered in the threat to our freedom. Those seeds were really sown back in the ’60s. Conservatives let it happen; they were asleep at the wheel. Ideally, colleges and universities should be institutions dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge through the diversity of thought. One big difference between conservatives and liberals is that we conservatives actually believe in free speech and diversity. Liberals merely use these terms to gain power. And they have gained power. Battered by the onslaught of protests, college administrators capitulated, and liberals took control of our universities. If you’ve ever heard or read anything by David Horowitz, or better yet, if you’ve ever been involved in any form of campus politics, you know how complete their control is.

By controlling the faculties of our colleges of education, law, and journalism, liberals have been able to exert far greater influence over our schools, courts and the media than the strength of their ideas ever would have allowed. Far too often, our schools indoctrinate our children with liberal dogma. Our courts have created the right of privacy out of thin air, and codified laws abridging the right of free speech. And all of this is aided and abetted by a mainstream media whose left wing bias knows no bounds.

With the control of these institutions, together with their sweeping electoral victory in 2008, radical liberals finally had obtained the power they have been so desperately seeking. We may have been peering into the abyss of a financial system meltdown, but the real abyss we are hovering over is that of socialism and state control. This is FAR more frightening.

We need to turn this situation around. And the key to turning it around is education. At the 2008 Business & Education Summit here in Oshkosh, Dr. Willard Daggett displayed a poster that hung in many schools during the 1940s & ’50s. It listed what the schools back then were attempting to instill in every student. Let me read the list: Honesty, Loyalty, Trustworthiness, Courage, Respect, Compassion, Initiative, Perseverance, Responsibility, Contemplation, Optimism, and Adaptability. Placing these posters in every school and making sure we teach these traits would be an excellent start.

Teaching the true history of our founding and a complete understanding of our Constitution is essential. Our children should have a deep reverence for the genius of our founding fathers, not a cynical attitude that only emphasizes times when our nation has been wrong. But it is not only our children that need to learn.

We all need to have a better understanding of economics and how a Free Market system works. I can understand well-intentioned people early in the 20th century thinking that a more compassionate, socialist system might produce the utopia they sought. But we now know how that experiment ends. It wasn’t pretty. And yet, we still have many on the left singing the praises of dictators like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, even as their economies continue to degenerate and their people suffer increasingly greater oppression. By not teaching and knowing that history, we are destined to repeat it.

It is amazing that so many people would rather put their faith in one all powerful government to protect them against the highly dispersed power of thousands of individual businesses. It is government that has the power to tax, to take property under the right of eminent domain, to imprison, and to impose the most awesome of all penalties, capital punishment. And yet, some people fear businesses more than government. That’s crazy. Business doesn’t control America. An increasingly out-of-touch and isolated bunch of politicians and bureaucrats do. A few corporations did abuse the public trust and their fiduciary responsibility. And they should pay the price. But it is the government that has maxed out our credit card, and it is the government that is imperiling our financial future.

Everyone needs to realize that businesses are us. 107 million of us work in them, and we own them either directly or through our 401.k and pension plans. Big Pharma and Big Oil are not evil. They provide life saving drugs and gasoline to every corner in America. If companies don’t provide products at a price, quality, and service level that we want, they simply go out of business. (Or at least they used to). It is a voluntary exchange. If we want new and better products, we need to let businesses keep more of their profits, not less. How do we expect to discover the next miracle drug if we tax and sue pharmaceutical companies out of existence? The fact is, we need businesses to succeed if we expect America to prosper.

The good news is that the Internet, talk radio, and TV stations like Fox News & CNBC have returned some balance to the media. The bad news is that our courts are truly on a razor’s edge, and we have a long way to go in education. We need to field conservative candidates at all levels of government. From School Boards to the Presidency, we need candidates who will design their campaigns to educate the public instead of simply smearing their opponents. And we need citizen legislators instead of politicians. Better yet, we need citizen legislators who will tell us the truth.

Is it too strong a statement to say that we’ve been lied to? How is Social Security different from a giant Ponzi scheme? Our money has been spent, and the lockbox is nothing more than a future claim against our children’s income.

And now we’re expected to trust the same politicians who have mismanaged Social Security with 1/6th of our economy? How exactly do you provide health coverage to 30 million more Americans and not add a dime to the deficit? The answer is, it’s not possible. And why would the premier of Newfoundland come to America for his heart surgery if Canadian nationalized health care is such a better system? I really hoped I wouldn’t have to say this tonight, but now that it seems certain that Obamacare will pass, the 2010 election must primarily be about its repeal. Obamacare needs to be reconciled!!!!

All of this is clearly unsustainable, but our politicians continue to write new laws that create new entitlements and ever increasing levels of debt. John McCain was right; we ARE guilty of inter generational theft, and it must stop. If we don’t mend our ways, just as my parents were part of the Greatest Generation, we’ll go down in history as members of the Most Selfish Generation. Now is the time to recognize that we have the power of the term limit, and we must exercise that power.

Now my purpose here tonight isn’t to send you home all depressed. What I would like to do is stir some emotion and motivate some action, so let me close with a somewhat more uplifting story. It’s a report I saw on TV, shortly after the start of the second Iraq war when the only method of communication back home was by satellite phone. It was told by an imbedded reporter who had 30 minutes of extra satellite time that he was offering to the troops.

So he goes up to the 1st Soldier, explains the situation and asks: “Is there anyone back home you’d like to talk to?” And the soldier responds, “Well, sir, I’d love to talk to my girlfriend, but my buddy’s wife is pregnant why don’t you let him use the 30 minutes.” So the reporter approaches his buddy and says, “Soldier, I hear your wife’s pregnant. I’ve got some extra phone time, would you like to call her?” That soldier responds, “Sir, there’s nothing I’d rather do, but my Master Sergeant’s father is sick and not doing well, why don’t you let him use the phone.”

To tell you the truth, I really can’t remember how many soldiers passed that phone to a buddy, but I distinctly remember that by the end of the story, the reporter was having a real hard time telling it. With his voice cracking, he just kind of dropped his head and quietly asked, “Where do we find such men?”

We know the answer to that. They come from Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Neenah and Menasha. They come from Wisconsin. They come from America. America’s spirit lives. It may not be doing well in some quarters. It may be under attack. It may be imperiled. But it is alive, and it is our duty to make sure it not only survives for future generations, but that it thrives.

This year’s election is by far the most consequential of my lifetime. If you’re like me, and you’ve been sitting on the sidelines just shaking your head, now is the time to get up and take to the field. Talk to your family. Talk to your friends and neighbors. Go out and talk to total strangers. We all know what needs to be done.

This is a fight for freedom. It’s not someone else’s fight, this is our fight. And it is a fight that we absolutely must win.

So let me end with this simple prayer: May God help us, and may God continue to bless the Greatest Nation in the History of Mankind, America.