Criticism
In 1966 Governor Pat Brown, campaigning for re-election against Reagan, said of Reagan's speech about socialized medicine, that Reagan was "an enemy of social progress," who had "hired" out to the American Medical Association. In response, Reagan accused him of "pure demagoguery" in suggesting that California's elderly had reason to fear a Reagan victory in the race for governor.
In 1980 President Jimmy Carter, campaigning for re-election against Reagan, told crowds that: "As a traveling salesman for the American Medical Association campaign against Medicare, sowed the fear that Medicare would mean socialism and that it would lead to the destruction of our freedom." When the subject arose in a televised debate in late October, Reagan responded: "When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought it would be better for the senior citizens. ... I was not opposing the principle of providing care for them..." Carter's campaign accused Reagan of "rewriting history", saying that there was no such alternative legislation.
Read more about this topic: Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)