December 10, 2012

Heritage Foundation President Feulner was honored at an event in Maine two months ago. Here’s an excerpt of his introduction by Maine Heritage Policy Center Director Neal Freeman:

It may be no more than historical coincidence, but the great steam engine of conservative reform began to rumble at just about the time Ed Feulner assumed command at Heritage.

Ed channeled that force Hitchens spoke of, that surging ideological momentum. Ed has refined it, amplified it and transmitted it to an entire generation of scholars, journalists, activists and intellectual entrepreneurs — in other words, to what has become under his leadership the contemporary conservative movement. Beginning with its indispensable support for Ronald Reagan and continuing into the present season with its withering critique of Barack Obama, conservatism over much of the past thirty years has been, roughly speaking, what Heritage and Ed Feulner say it is. All of us who push back against the insidious creep of statism, not to mention those among us who cling atavistically to guns and to God, are in Ed Feulner’s debt.

Read the whole thing.

Last week, Heritage’s Board of Trustees announced that Feulner will be succeeded in April as president by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC).