In 1980, I was released from a three-year sentence to something called “high school,” which had been seriously cutting into my hunting, fishing, and woods-bumming time. But during that sentence, all three years, I was on our high school newspaper, and in my last year, I was made Opinion Editor, which was a lot like giving a maniac a loaded gun — I had a lot of fun, but it also made me more politically-aware than I had been. That was when I started my habit of challenging my assumptions, of digging into issues more deeply than I suspect most people do, and that was also when I started forming some of the opinions and principles that I still hold now, almost half a century later.
And that summer, I marched into the Reagan campaign offices in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and volunteered to help. Granted, all they let a fired-up 18-year-old kid do was hand out…
