I had a great weekend at Young America's Foundation's Club 100 retreat in Southern California. I witnessed Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge's homie, post a link on the Drudge Report from a campground equipped with wireless. I rode a horse--a 1400-pound beast named Leroy--for the first time. I ate at In-and-Out Burger. I met some current and future conservative leaders. But, greatest of all, I finally paid a visit to the Reagan Ranch.

Reagan's retreat, which sits atop mountains overlooking the Pacific, is tough to get to. Barely paved roads lead up a steep, winding incline for miles and miles. The first thing I noticed about the ranch house is how tiny it is. It's a one-story building with just 1500-square feet inside. Reagan's library interested me. His favorite authors, judging by the collection of books in his house, were novelists Louis L'Amour and Allen Drury. There was some dated non-fiction: Alvin Toffler's Future Shock and Charles Reich's Greening of America to name two. A dusty tome called Modern Single Wing Football seemed a contradiction in terms. Reagan had a thing for cowboy art, meaning paintings with cowboys in them (Do you now understand why Harvard and The New York Times hated him?). Cowboy pictures are everywhere. Nancy Reagan, oddly enough, owned a Suburu Brat with one of those hard plastic tops covering the truck's bed (Can I call it a truck?). Ron Jr. apparently liked bumper pool, as the house contained one of the smallest and worst bumper pool tables I have encountered. The bed the Reagans slept in was too short to accomodate Reagan's six-foot-one frame, so he added a stool for his feet at the end of the bed. The guide explained that Nancy Reagan liked the temperature inside the house at 80 degrees, which strikes me as a form of mental illness but, whatever, to each his own.

Outside is impressive. The ranch covers more than 600-breathtaking acres. At one end, you can look down into a valley and see Wonderland, the home of another eighties icon. There's a tiny, man-made pond in the back of the president's vaction house. And a long, ugly fence made of cut telephone polls encompasses part of the property. Best of all, just a few days ahead of the tax-filing deadline, was the lawn furniture--or at least a replica of the lawn furniture, where Ronald Reagan signed the 1981 bill reducing taxes. The top rates were at 70 percent. By the end of his term they were at 28 percent. That's a radical reduction, and one of the main reasons I, like so many others, are eager to visit the Reagan Ranch and not the Carter Peanut Patch.