But perhaps his greatest skill as a candidate and as a president was to believe utterly in whatever he was saying at the time he was saying it (a gift Bill Clinton, who was surely the most beguiling president since Reagan, shared). In politics, this is as good as sincerity. Reagan never stopped acting and never saw anything wrong with that. Asked when he first ran for office in 1966 what kind of governor he would be, he replied, "I don't know; I've never played a governor." But he also had the actor's flaw (as Clinton did) of wanting to win over his audience and doing whatever was necessary to do so. According to historian Garry Wills, in 1983 Reagan told the Israeli prime minister he had served in an Air Force unit that had filmed Nazi death camps. It was not true; Reagan never left the United States during his military service. But it was right for the moment. The scene played.

On the eve of his election in 1980, a reporter asked Reagan what people saw in him. "Would you laugh if I told you that I think, maybe, they see themselves and that I'm one of them?" Reagan replied. "I've never been able to detach myself or think that I, somehow, am apart from them." Yes, there are issues in campaigns. Sometimes important issues, foreign and domestic. But Americans rarely elect persons they do not like. Americans rarely elect persons who are detached and apart from them. Which is why every politician today, Republican and Democrat, wants to be Reaganesque. It was not his creation, nor did he ever claim it was. Wills argues that as Reagan patterned his style after Franklin D. Roosevelt—"optimistic, generous, high-minded"—so Bill Clinton took Roosevelt's style back from Reagan (and after Clinton, it was George W. Bush who prevailed with a message of optimism). Reagan was most proud of his appropriation. At the end of his term, he said, "Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears, to your confidence rather than your doubts."

Which was not the same thing as being shallow. Reagan also campaigned on issues and was, in fact, the most ideological candidate since Barry Goldwater. But he had what Goldwater lacked: a pleasing personality, a boyish charm, a likability that radiated from the TV screen. It all worked together. "Without the conservative grounding, he would have floated away," wrote historian Gil Troy of Reagan. "Without the image-making, he would have sunk under the weight of his rhetoric." He was as near a perfect candidate as modern America had ever seen.

"Do you think of yourself as a politician?" a reporter once asked him.

"No," Reagan replied. "Ex-actor."

In 1992, when he wasn't president anymore, he gave a stirring speech to the Republican National Convention in Houston. "I hope you will let me talk about a country that is forever young," he said. But there are only two places where things never age: on the screen and in our memories. Ronald Reagan remains forever young in both.

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