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June 10, 2004

Rep. Petri Comments on President Reagan


Media Advisory: Rep. Tom Petri offered extemporaneous comments Thursday on President Reagan. An mp3 actuality of the comments is available for those who want it. The comments follow:

"Ronald Reagan was a great President. The fact is that before he became President we'd had a number of failed presidencies - people driven from office, not running for re- election, being defeated in office.

"The word among those who studied the American presidency was that it was too big a job for one man, that things just couldn't be handled by one person. And after a couple of years they were saying, well, Reagan wasn't working hard enough but he managed to be dealing with everything that needed to be done.

"His secret, I think, was, of course, to have clearly in mind his priorities, to delegate everything that could be delegated to other people, to concentrate his efforts to doing what only he, as President, could do: communicating, meeting with people, hiring people and keeping an eye on their overall performance and not actually getting down and doing a lot of the detail work himself.

"But that's not to say that he wasn't responsible or that he didn't provide the direction. He clearly did."


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