Ronald Reagan

What role will religion play in the 2012 elections? According to voters, not a big one. A recent Pew Research Center poll revealed that most Americans are comfortable with what they know about the candidates' faith and that their votes will have little to do with the nominees' religion. In fact, a majority of the electorate is significantly more interested in Mitt Romney's tax returns and gubernatorial record than in his beliefs. Two-thirds of those surveyed said religion's influence on the way they vote is declining, which may explain how the Republican Party, whose platform in recent years has reflected white evangelical priorities, could have nominated a Mormon and a Roman Catholic to run for the White House.

TAMPA - Newt Gingrich used the specter of America's least popular Democratic president in more than a generation to suggest that President Obama, like Jimmy Carter, deserved to be booted out of office after a single term. Gingrich, the former House speaker, appeared on the convention stage alongside his wife, Callista - a rare format for the convention if not unusual for the Gingriches. The pair alternated lines. Gingrich, forced from the primaries by the man on whose behalf he was criticizing Obama, said the Democrat had diminished the United States' standing in the world, crippled the domestic production of energy, blunted bipartisan compromise, increased the size of government and failed to enact economic policies that would make the nation prosperous again.

TAMPA, Fla. - He is a ghostly presence at the Republican National Convention, He Who Shall Not Be Named. Former President George W. Bush has had no place of honor at his party's 2012 convention. In fact, other than a videotaped message delivered Wednesday night, neither he nor his father, former President George H.W. Bush, has had any place at all. If not for a scheduled, non-prime-time appearance Thursday by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the convention might have slipped by without any representation in person from the closest thing the country has to a Republican dynasty.

TAMPA, Fla. - Nearly 32 years have passed since a Republican ousted a Democratic president. Now Mitt Romney is trying to pull it off in much the same way that Ronald Reagan did. The newly anointed Republican nominee, echoing Reagan, says his presidency would bring not just a revival of America's moribund economy, but also a repair of its self-image, "the feeling we'll have that our country's back," as one Romney TV ad puts it. Romney also on...

The Republican team of Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan is less about the future than it is about nostalgia for a past that many Americans imagine was better -- a time when businessmen were free of government meddling and all citizens, even the poor, old or handicapped, were expected to fend for themselves or scrape by on charity.  From the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932 until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, a different, liberal...

Did you ever want to peruse Walt Disney's real office and bask in the beauty of the newly restored prop books featured in the opening frames of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,""Cinderella" and Sleeping Beauty"? Now's your chance. Thanks to D23, the official Walt Disney fan club, visitors to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley will be able to view 500 items from the Walt Disney Archives - the largest-ever exhibition of Disney archival material.

The venerated Ronald Reagan may not have been able to reach the presidency in today's Republican party, Jeb Bush said during a meeting with Bloomberg reporters in New York City on Monday morning. Bush labeled the nation's partisan bickering “disturbing,” placing much of the blame on the way President Obama conducted his first term. “His first year could have been a year of enormous accomplishment had he focused on things where there was more common ground,” Bush said,  according to Buzzfeed's Ben Smith . "Back to my dad's time and Ronald Reagan's time - they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support," Bush said, adding that Reagan "would be criticized for doing the things that he did. " Bush portrayed his father and Reagan's penchant for reaching across the aisle to achieve their political goals as out of style compared with Washington's “temporary” partisan fervor, and said such tendencies would have lead to a difficult path toward the presidential nomination.

SEATTLE -- This weekend, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and I sat down in a couple of armchairs and talked about how America drifts to war. Maddow is on a frenetic cross-country tour to publicize "Drift," her new book that shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list as soon as it was released. She flew in for a few hours in Seattle on Saturday, and I interviewed her in front of a standing-room-only crowd at Town Hall. In liberal Seattle, Maddow is a rock star, and she got a rock star's greeting when she walked onstage in her very casual clothes (including sneakers with Halloween-orange shoelaces)

FAIRFIELD, Calif. — Republican leaders and voters, frustrated by their party's prolonged presidential contest, are increasingly coalescing behind front-runner Mitt Romney. Yet Rick Santorum on Thursday urged conservatives not to forsake their principles under pressure. He did so by conjuring the memory of Ronald Reagan, still the conservative icon, at an oddly symbolic place: the jelly bean factory that created the former president's favorite treats. "Let them know, conservatives all across this country have not given up the fight, we're not going to concede to the moderate establishment who wants to convince everybody that it's over, it's time to go away," Santorum told about 200 supporters at the Jelly Belly factory in a town halfway between San Francisco and Sacramento.