If the Democrats want to know why they keep losing, all they have to do is run a replay of Martin Luther King Day.

If they do, and if they are not brain dead, they’ll immediately notice the difference between Republican President George W. Bush’s MLK Day speech at Georgetown University and the rantings of the opposition party.

In one speech, the president took pains to say how proud he was to be in the presence of the president of the NAACP even though that organization has never supported him, has frequently said disparaging things about him, and even ran an ad during the 2000 election campaign which suggested he was somehow complicit in the dragging death of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas.

In spite of all that, on MLK Day the president honored the president of the NAACP, who was present. The president, as always, was gracious and optimistic. “We recommit ourselves to working for the dream that Martin Luther King gave his life for – an America where the dignity of every person is respected; where people are judged not by the color of their skin — by the content of their character; and where the hope of a better tomorrow is in every neighborhood in this country,” Bush said.

Compare that to how Al Gore honored Dr. King by attacking the president, or how Al Sharpton slandered the president. Both of them spiced their hysteric rhetoric with all the usual coded race words.

Amazingly, Gore accused the president of a criminal act when he authorized the National Security Agency to monitor communications between known terrorists overseas and their American allies here at home, a move that clearly fell within his powers as commander in chief and which undoubtedly contributed to the fact that we have not had another 9/11.

In his speech, Al Gore said, “What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and insistently.”

What hypocrisy. Despite the fact that the president acted to protect Americans from more 9/11’s, and was well within his rights to do so, when as vice-president, Gore once planned to allow the feds to shatter the Constitution by secretly bugging the phones of all Americans and then lied about it.

As Charles Smith revealed in NewsMax.com on August 29, 2002: “In 1993, Vice President Al Gore spearheaded a project called ‘Clipper’ which was designed to monitor America. Gore’s leadership in this scheme to allow the Feds to have easy access to bug American telephones is all too well documented for him to deny.”

The project, Smith wrote included plans to “mandate” the Clipper chip into all U.S. homes and businesses. “If Al Gore had become President, it is certain that the mandatory government phone and computer bug legislation would have become reality …” he concluded.

Then there was Hillary Clinton’s famous plantation speech, and the New Orleans mayor’s tirade in blasting the president. It doesn’t take much savvy to understand why the Republicans win and the Democrats lose. Could it be that the Republicans are smiling and looking at the glass and seeing it half-full and are working hard to fill it to the brim, while the Democrats not only see it as half-empty but would never be happy until it was completely dry so they can blame the president.

Dr. King, the man the Democrats honored by dishonoring his optimism, would never recognize today’s so-called black leadership which grovels at the feet of the Democrat leadership in return for the crumbs the Democrats feed them, or the things that the self-appointed black leaders are espousing in his name, a name they have raped.

It’s sad that a sizeable part of the black community is being led by people who could never measure up to Dr. King’s stature.

Hillary is right when she talks about a plantation. There is a plantation. It’s a plantation where the Democrats have instilled anger and hatred in the minority communities. And this time there’s no Martin Luther King to lead them to the promised land. They are going to have to do it themselves.

-Mike Reagan, the eldest son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network.