improvements to ordinary people’s lives. This, in turn, helped solidify popular support for Reagan’s economic position as well as for conservative policies in general. The effects of this lasted long after Reagan left office. The installation of computers in the workplace and experiments with new organizations in the 1980s did much to help build the foundations of the prosperity of the 1990s, when these innovations paid off in greater productivity and even more rapid advances in technology and

finished. During the next two years, however, growing racial and campus unrest, disappointment with the results of Johnson’s ambitious social programs, and doubts about the war in Vietnam and liberal foreign policies began to create a backlash against liberalism. In this atmosphere Reagan, propelled at first by conservative businessmen and activists, ran for governor of California against the liberal incumbent, Pat Brown. Reagan based his campaign on the need to restore order in California,

rediscovery of the 1980s has been that, lo and behold, the moral way of government is the practical way of government: Democracy, the profoundly good, is also the profoundly productive. When you’ve got to the point when you can celebrate the anniversaries of your thirty-ninth birthday you can sit back sometimes, review your life, and see it flowing before you. For me there was a fork in the river, and it was right in the middle of my life. I never meant to go into politics. It wasn’t my intention

had achieved his goals—his only failures were the end of his movie career and the loss to Ford—in the ruthlessly competitive worlds of Hollywood and California politics. As governor of California, he had quickly learned how to lead a large polity (California became the most populous state during his tenure), as well as the art of dealing with legislative opponents and the importance of choosing his staff on the basis of competence rather than just ideological purity. Reagan also possessed

performance, however, voters were not convinced that supply-side policies would succeed, and the campaign remained close until the last week of October. Then, in a televised debate with Carter, Reagan famously asked the voters, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Most concluded they were not and decided to try the supply-side alternative. On November 4, Reagan took 51 percent of the popular vote, and won forty-four states and 489 electoral votes. (Representative John Anderson, a