When I was a young professor at the University of California in the late sixties I despised Governor Reagan, the more fool I. His whispery voice and downhome manner struck me as both cornpone and phony, and his occasional use of a more intellectually sophisticated vocabulary annoyed me, because it felt as if he was assuming scholarship he did not have in order to appear respectable. He was like Robert Stack using his magisterial manner to shill for some crackpot ghost or flying saucer show, or, later, Pat Robertson in a coat and tie interviewing a creationist with a PhD...