When Sarah Palin quoted Ronald Reagan in the vice presidential debate, I was moved. At the culmination of her cocky evening at the podium opposite Joe Biden, her final statement quoting Reagan was a moment of seriousness-of-purpose that took me by surprise: "It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."