Politics & Power Quote by William L. Jenkins

Nostalgia is doing the heavy lifting here, and it knows it. By framing 1980 as a moment when “a nation in need of change” made an almost unanimous, instinctive choice, Jenkins turns a contested election into a moral referendum. The phrasing doesn’t describe politics so much as it scripts a national mood: America as a once-glittering object dulled by recent mishandling, Reagan as the polish.

“Restore the shine” is a strategic metaphor because it dodges specifics. Shine isn’t policy; it’s feeling, optics, confidence, the story a country tells itself at the mirror. That ambiguity is the point. It allows Reaganism to be remembered less as a set of arguments (tax cuts, deregulation, a harder line on the USSR) and more as an aesthetic correction to the 1970s: stagflation, energy shocks, Watergate aftertaste, the Iran hostage crisis. “Tarnished” implies not structural flaws but surface grime, as if the nation’s problems were embarrassments that could be buffed out with leadership and optimism.

The subtext is equally clear: the previous era is cast as dim, weak, even humiliating, without naming Carter or any predecessor. That keeps the sentence clean and elevates Reagan above ordinary partisan combat. The verb “selected” also softens the sharp edges of electoral politics and ideological conflict; it suggests a collective, almost consumer-like choice for a better brand of America.

As a politician’s line, it’s meant to consecrate Reagan as a corrective force and to claim ownership of “change” itself. It’s less history than a campaign-ready memory: a myth of renewal that still recruits supporters by promising that confidence can substitute for complexity.