If you look at the basic numbers of Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential race, you’re bound to see Reagan’s win as inevitable. The Republican challenger earned a 10-percentage-point victory over the incumbent Democrat, 8.5 million more votes, and an Electoral College margin of 489 to 49.

Read Craig Shirley’s extensive chronicle of the 1980 campaign, though, and you’ll realize that Reagan faced no cakewalk ? either in the contest for the GOP nomination or in the race with Carter. With 600 pages of text and 100 more of notes, Rendezvous With Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America documents virtually every piece of the chaotic contest that led to the Reagan Revolution in Washington.

You might not remember that Carter was surging in the polls and looking like a probable winner when he and Reagan met in Cleveland (Hello, Cleveland!) for their single one-on-one debate ? one week before election day.

Those who remember much about that debate likely remember Reagan’s famous quip (“There you go again”), Carter’s infamous flub (“I had a discussion with my daughter Amy the other day” about nuclear weapons), or Reagan’s question to voters: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

But I’d like to highlight another section of the debate Shirley addresses in this book:

[Harry Ellis of the Christian Science Monitor] turned to Reagan and the Gipper was primed. He utterly rejected what he characterized as Carter’s suggestion “that inflation somehow came upon us like a plague and therefore it’s uncontrollable and no one can do anything about it,” calling the idea “entirely spurious” and “dangerous.” Contrary to Carter’s argument, Reagan calmly pointed out, inflation in Ford’s last term was at a tolerable 4.8 percent, but by 1980 it was at an annual rate of 12.7 percent, not the 7 percent that the president had argued. Reagan agreed that some new jobs had been created under Carter, “but that can’t hide the fact that there are eight million men and women out of work in America today and two million of those lost their jobs in just the last few months.” He blasted Carter for saying that to get inflation under control, America would have to accept more joblessness and less productivity.

Reagan laid into the root cause of inflation: out-of-control government spending. He said Carter had blamed a host of other actors for inflation, including OPEC and the Federal Reserve; Carter, Reagan said, “has blamed the lack of productivity on the American people; he has then accused the people of living too well, and that we must share in scarcity, we must sacrifice and get used to doing with less.” That would not do for Reagan: “We don’t have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the government is living too well.”?

Shirley’s book leaves few areas of the 1980 campaign unexamined. If you’d like to read other recent books on Reagan, you’ll find short blurbs on good ones here, here, and here.