“The New Republican Party I envision will not be, and cannot be, one limited to the country club, big business image that, for reasons both fair and unfair, it is burdened with today. The New Republican Party I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.”

Reagan didn’t urge just “making room” for them. The GOP, he said, should “welcome them, seek them out, enlist them, not only as rank-and-file members, but as leaders and candidates.” Now, it’s true, he then wanted to attract them based on their conservative social views. And, today, it might be said, tea party populists are well represented among the demographic he was talking about.

In February 1977, Reagan was still pretty much a conventional conservative on economics — deficit-minded, not a supply-sider. What really won over working-class voters (also young people) to the GOP was his adoption in 1979 of the tax cut policies of Rep. Jack Kemp, R-N.Y., the ultimate outreach conservative. “Reaganomics” ended hyperinflation and restored prosperity. The top tax rate dropped from 70 percent to 28 percent and the result was 18.5 million new jobs created over an eight-year period.

Reagan told CPAC that “when a conservative states that the free market is the best mechanism ever devised by the mind of man to meet material needs, he is merely stating what a careful examination of the real world has told him is the truth.” CPAC attendees ought to spend serious time figuring out how to fashion a message (and policies) that will make people believe it again. After the Crash of 2008, presided over by George W. Bush, they don’t believe it.

What was even more stunning for a CPAC audience in 1977 was this from Reagan: “The time has come to say to black voters, ‘Look, we offer principles that black Americans can, and do, support. We believe in jobs, real jobs. We believe in education that is really education; we believe in treating all Americans as individuals and not as stereotypes or voting blocs…’ ” Of course, Reagan never received more than 14 percent of the African American vote, but the idea of a conservative (other than Kemp) urging Republicans to include blacks in the party was a breakthrough.