Ron Reagan - Political Activities

Political Activities

In an April 2003 interview, Reagan said, "The Bush people have no right to speak for my father, particularly because of the position he's in now. Yes, some of the current policies are an extension of the 1980s. But the overall thrust of this administration is not my father's—these people are overly reaching, overly aggressive, overly secretive, and just plain corrupt. I don't trust these people."

He was also strongly opposed to the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. "9/11 gave the Bush people carte blanche to carry out their extreme agenda — and they didn't hesitate for a moment to use it", Reagan said. "By 9/12 Rumsfeld was saying, 'Let's hit Iraq.' They've used the war on terror to justify everything from tax cuts to Alaska oil drilling."

In July 2004, Reagan spoke at the Democratic National Convention about his support for lifting Bush's restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, from which he expected a cure or new treatments for Alzheimer's disease, of which his father had recently died: "There are those who would stand in the way of this remarkable future, who would deny the federal funding so crucial to basic research. A few of these folks, needless to say, are just grinding a political axe and they should be ashamed of themselves", Ron Reagan said of the restrictions. "We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology." Reagan's mother, Nancy, is on record as supportive of this position.

In September 2004, he told the Sunday Herald newspaper that the Bush administration had "cheated to get into the White House. It's not something Americans ever want to think about their government. My sense of these people is that they don't have any respect for the public at large. They have a revolutionary mindset. I think they feel that anything they can do to prevail — lie, cheat, whatever — is justified by their revolutionary aims" and that he feared Bush was "hijacking" his father's reputation.

Reagan later wrote an essay titled "The Case Against George W. Bush by Ron Reagan" for Esquire. He was quoted as saying that he voted for Democratic Party candidate John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. On October 31, 2008, Reagan endorsed then–Illinois senator Barack Obama for president in the 2008 presidential election.