What to give the Reaganophiles on your gift list who have already gotten the two outstanding books on Ronald Reagan published this year, Steven F. Hayward’s The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989 and Craig Shirley’s Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America?
Here’s a suggestion: Government Is the Problem: Memoirs of Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Reformer.
Bob Carleson, who started off as a local government official in southern California, worked with Governor Reagan on welfare reform in the 1960s and 1970s and was an adviser to President Reagan in the 1980s.
He died in 2006, and his widow Susan Carleson and Hans Zeiger have edited his papers to produce this book, which includes some stories that have never before been told. Bob Carleson was one of the unheralded pioneers of welfare reform, which has proved to be one of the most successful and enduring achievements of conservative governance in the second half of the twentieth century.
Highly recommended.
