Our Churchillian moment

Our friends at the Claremont Institute have a warm relationship with Paul Ryan. When Washington Fellow Bill Bennett put together a conference for the institute in Aspen in the summer of 2005, Rep. Ryan appeared as one of the featured speakers. He took the occasion to talk about how Social Security could be saved. Since he became Chairman of the House Budget Committee following the 2010 election, Rep. Ryan has donned the mantle of leadership on some of the most serious issues confronting the United States.

Recognizing the role he has played on the national stage, the Claremont Institute awarded Rep. Ryan its Churchill Award for Statesmanship this past November. His speech on the occasion carries a renewed interest today. The video of the speech is posted on the Claremont Institute YouTube channel under the evocative and still-timely title: “Our Churchillian moment.” This is a superb speech with a special poignance today.

Searching online for the text of the speech, I found that John Hinderaker posted it on our site under the heading “The man who will be president.” Quotable quote: “Today we need to take new inspiration from Churchill the leader, who saw what was at stake in the choices the people of his country had to make. For we are in our own ‘Churchillian moment’ – threatened, not by foreign aggression, but by a titanic fiscal imbalance that has the potential to crush America’s prosperity and diminish its capacity to lead the world.”

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