Reagan is a great conservative hero for what he wasn’t as well as for what he was. In an era when people thought the entree to political leadership was a degree from an elite university and a lifetime spent currying favor and working within the establishment, Reagan was a small-town Midwesterner who’d gone to an obscure college and spent most of his adult life doing other things: a sportscaster, an actor, a pundit. He was well into middle age before he got into electoral politics.