You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

In a moment, it seemed, maybe the push of some big plastic button.

Everything changed in American politics.

Ronald Reagan is determined to put killer weapons in space.

The Soviets will have to match us, and the arms race will rage out of

control. There's a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't

see it at all. Orbiting, aiming, waiting. The response time to fire so short, there'll be no time to wake a president. There's once about a time that to be a Republican in this area, the country, felt faces, new policies, new words even, a new approach to the press.

The sour old men, as the Secretary of State called them at the time, the Democratic incumbent

had been leading, or at least tying in the polls for much of the election year.

After all, the Republican candidate was so unconventional, so upsetting to many in his own party

for his right-word visions on women's rights and a big-stick notion of foreign policy.

So outside the Main Street, even GOP state chairman, a majority of them, found him too simplistic.

One magazine called him the candidate from Disneyland.

Democrats said he was in over his head.

GOP operatives worried that his supporters, a mix of Democrats and Republicans,

were polling as not really loyal to either party.

But he loved that.

He lashed out at the buddy system, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, the Congress that caused all

our problems.

Following the advice of his campaign manager, don't get drawn into a numbers game, and

his pollster, don't get into a debate about your use of facts.

Confirming this, perhaps, Time magazine, with a colorful drawing of the American voter's mind on its cover, said,

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