Reagan buttered up a disillusioned electorate and offered it happy thoughts. The nation's mood in general was pretty sour. Even so, Reagan was polling quite poorly in the weeks leading up to the election. If things are going badly enough the people will vote someone out as much as they will vote someone in.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
