The night Ronald Reagan was elected I watched the whole sorry spectacle on the TV in the student lounge at my small college in the Pacific Northwest. It wasn't a surprise - it had been clear ever since the debate with Carter that Reagan was going to win. The media had already started the death watch even before the polls opened that morning.
I tried to convince myself it didn't matter - that one capitalist hack had simply been replaced by another. I was way out in left field in those days, and had voted for - and worked for - Barry Commoner, the candidate of the Citizens Party, an early forerunner of the Green Party). We carried our precinct (essentially, the college dorms) and I was proud of that.
But I was in a distinct minority. There were a lot of students from Californian at the school - people who'd grown up with Reagan in the governor's mansion. And some of the faculty had been at Berkeley when he sent the cops in (earning him the counterculture title of "fascist gun in the West." Some of them were walking around the campus that night with stunned looks on their faces. They couldn't believe the senile old huckster they'd known and hated had just been elected president of the United States.
I walked back to my dorm that night with an uneasy feeling that maybe I was wrong - that Reagan's election marked some kind of turning point. Which it did, of course - as we discovered over the next few years.
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