In dark times, Reagan ran on optimism

“It was not for nothing that he was called the ‘great communicator,’” Gibbons said. “He was masterful on the stump. He conveyed a sense of reassurance. That is the underlying thing people are looking for in a president.”

In 1980, Reagan was building on the strong base of support he had cultivated among the country’s most conservative voters, including many Democrats, over the previous two decades. He was seen as the person who could lead them out of the political wilderness, despite the fact he had failed twice in runs for the presidency, at least one of which he wanted people to forget.

“He’d wiped ’68 from his memory,” Lou Cannon, a long-time reporter, said of Reagan’s aborted primary run against Richard Nixon. “He used to say, ‘I didn’t run in 1968.’” But Cannon, who chronicled Reagan’s rise in a series of biographies, covered Reagan that year, so he wouldn’t stand for the candidate’s deflections. “I’d tell these people, ‘Look, I was there. He can’t tell me that.’”

Even though the 1968 campaign was an apparent bust, Cannon said, it was vitally important to Reagan’s political development.

“In these places, particularly in these southern and western towns, he would go in and speak. A lot of these delegations were committed by their leaders to Nixon for one reason or another, but they loved Reagan, they adored Reagan. Nixon, they respected, but he didn’t make their hearts go pitter pat. In 1968, Reagan came to realize that, hell, he could be president,” Cannon said.

'Tempered by prudence'
The conservative voters Reagan met that year became the core of his support in the decades ahead. They embraced Reagan not just for his moving pro-America rhetoric, but also for his anti-tax, small government policies and his strong stance against communism and the Soviet Union.

But the broader public resisted this message. It wasn’t until the country had gone through one of the worst economic periods in its history that it was ready to take a chance on something new.

“We’d gone through the 60s and the 70s, including, quite frankly, the Nixon administration to a great extent, of big government,” Meese said. “I think people by that time were seeing how this had failed. But they were uncertain as to the future and Ronald Reagan gave them a concept for the future.”

In his nomination acceptance speech, Reagan laid out an indictment of the Carter administration, blasting it for runaway taxes, surging oil and gas prices and the forward march of the U.S.S.R. Against that backdrop, he proposed his plan for America, anchored by a conservative governing philosophy that still looms large over U.S. politics.

“I pledge to you a government that will not only work well but wisely,” Reagan said, “its ability to act tempered by prudence and its willingness to do good balanced by the knowledge that government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to it’s great power to harm us.”

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