(6 of 12)
Reagan also listened. As he zigzagged across the country, he acquired a powerful sense of what ordinary people thought and hoped and wanted. "That did much to shape my ideas," Reagan said later. "These employees I was meeting were a cross section of America, and damn it, too many of our political leaders, our labor leaders, and certainly a lot of geniuses ... on Madison Avenue, have underestimated them. They want the truth, they are friendly and helpful, intelligent and alert. They are concerned ... with their very firm personal liberties. And they are moral." The hemophilic liberal was becoming steadily more conservative. Over the years he devised a series of slogans that many experts considered simplistic but many voters seemed to respond to. "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem," Reagan would say, over and over. "Government causes inflation, and government can make it go away. The best social program is a job."
He eventually became so vocally critical of such sanctified New Deal creations as Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority that GE abruptly dropped him in 1962, but Reagan was by now much in demand on what he liked to call "the mashed-potato circuit." When the conservatives rallied behind the presidential campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, Reagan's gift for oratory provided one of the unexpected highlights in the doomed campaign. "You and I have a rendezvous with destiny," Reagan declared (borrowing one of Franklin Roosevelt's most famous lines) to a G.O.P. fund-raising dinner in Los Angeles. "We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness."
When Goldwater's campaign ended in disaster, Reagan's rhetoric still echoed in the mind of a prosperous Los Angeles Ford dealer named Holmes P. Tuttle. He invited to his home a group of wealthy California conservatives, and they decided that Reagan should be their gubernatorial candidate in 1966. Governor Pat Brown was an amiably conventional liberal, who ran on his amiably conventional record. Reagan spotted and exploited a new issue: middle-class discontent over disturbances at the University of California and over the disturbances of the 1960s in general. He vowed to "clean up the mess at Berkeley." He won by a margin of almost 1 million votes out of 6.5 million.
Reagan proved a surprisingly pragmatic and successful Governor. Though all his campaign rhetoric opposed tax increases, he soon found that he needed more revenue to do all he wanted to do, so he imposed the biggest tax hike in state history. Winning a second term by half a million votes, Reagan turned to simplifying and reducing welfare spending and got his way by shrewd bargaining with his Democratic opposition. But his successes came during the years when his party was falling into disgrace nationally because of President Nixon's Watergate scandal. When Reagan retired as Governor in 1975, according to one poll, fewer than 20% of Americans considered themselves Republicans.