Here’s who I’ll be supporting for President, and why.

I’m pleased to be here today to discuss who I’ll be supporting for president, and why.

It was the honor of my life to represent my state, Arizona — my family’s home — in the United States House and Senate for eighteen years. I am a conservative. I’ve always felt that my conservative beliefs and values were best expressed in the Republican Party. I was a Republican long before the president ever called himself one, and I will be a Republican long after identifying as such is no longer useful to him. Principle does not go in and out of fashion, does not chase ratings, or play to the base, or care too much about polls. And principle is the provenance of no one party. That is one of the things I am here to talk about today.

The other thing I am here to talk about is the future — both of my party, but more importantly, the future of our country.

I was raised on a cattle ranch in Northern Arizona. Goldwater country. When I was a kid, the Republican Party under President Reagan was brimming with ideas, full of purpose and principle. It was coherent, and inspiring, and idealistic. So much so that it awakened the imagination of a kid from the town of Snowflake, and a whole generation of other kids just like him. Made us think big thoughts, and of our place in the world, and of what it meant to be an American in America, the shining city on a hill.

With Reagan, a conservative’s vision of America as the indispensable nation was benevolent and big-hearted, a beacon to the striver and to the subjugated and those locked behind an ideological wall that divided the world into free and oppressed. It was morning in Reagan’s America. It wasn’t perfect, but it was always getting better. We were the sum of our goodness, not our gripes — of our resolve, not our resentments.

I got into public service believing that for our politics to be healthy, the American government needed people who believed as I do, but also people who believed differently from me. This has become somewhat of a novel idea. But it is the genius of our founders that the Constitution forces compromise. Governing is hard. Democracy is hard. Decency shouldn’t be that hard, but apparently it is. You know what’s easy? Name calling. Demagoguery. The politics of vengeance is easy…