Sixty-nine-year-old Ronald Reagan was the oldest candidate ever nominated for the presidency. Coming first to national attention as a movie actor, he initially shared the politics of his staunchly Democratic father but moved to the right in the 1940s and 1950s. He campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Reagan’s political career took off when he was elected governor of California in 1966. He ran as a conservative, but in office he displayed flexibility, approving a major tax increase, a strong water pollution bill, and a liberal abortion law. Displaying similar agility in the 1980 presidential campaign, he softened earlier attacks on programs such as Social Security and chose the moderate George H. W. Bush as his running mate.

Reagan’s campaign capitalized on the economic recession and the international challenges symbolized by the Americans held hostage in Iran. Repeatedly, Reagan asked voters, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” He promised to “take government off the backs of the people” and to restore Americans’ morale and other nations’ respect. Reagan won the election, while Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since the 1950s.

While the economy and the Iran hostage crisis sealed Reagan’s victory, he also benefited from the burgeoning grassroots conservative movements. Reagan’s support from religious conservatives, predominantly Protestants, constituted a relatively new phenomenon in politics known as the New Right or New Christian Right.

During the 1970s, evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity claimed thousands of new adherents. Evangelical ministers such as Pat Robertson preached to huge television audiences, attacking feminism, abortion, and homosexuality. They called for the restoration of old-fashioned “family values.” A considerable number of Catholics shared the fundamentalists’ goal of a return to “Christian values.”

Conservatives created political organizations such as the Moral Majority, founded by the Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979, to fight “left-wing, social welfare bills, … pornography, homosexuality, [and] the advocacy of immorality in school textbooks.” Dr. James Dobson, a clinical psychologist with a popular Christian talk show, founded the Family Research Council in 1983 to lobby Congress for measures to curb abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and single motherhood. The publications and think tanks of more traditional conservatives, who stressed limited government at home and militant anticommunism abroad, likewise flourished, while the monthly Phyllis Schlafly Report merged the sentiments of the old and new right.

Reagan spoke for the New Right on such issues as abortion and school prayer, but he did not push hard for so-called moral or social policies. Instead, his major achievements fulfilled goals of the older right — strengthening the nation’s anti-Communist posture as well as reducing taxes and government restraints on free enterprise. “In the present crisis,” Reagan declared, “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

Reagan was extraordinarily popular, appealing even to Americans who opposed his policies but warmed to his optimism, confidence, and easygoing humor. Ignoring the darker moments of the American past, he presented a version of history that Americans could feel good about.