"There is a thread that runs through American presidential politics. It is an urge to find, especially in difficult times, a candidate who is his own man, whose concerns are larger than his party’s, who is a rational moderate in pursuit of what is best for the whole country. In the spring of 1980, John Bayard Anderson of Rockford, Illinois seemed to have seized that thread. He was widely perceived to be good, decent, honest, less partisan, and more intelligent and experienced than the rest of the field."