Tim Pawlenty was fresh out of high school in 1980 when, inspired by Ronald Reagan's "voice of strength and conviction," he made an early foray into politics.
The future Minnesota governor handed out Reagan campaign literature on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota campus.
Matt Entenza, another Minnesota college student at the time, had a distinctly different reaction.
"He made me a Democrat," said Entenza, the Minnesota House DFL leader, who as a Macalester College student watched what he said were Reagan's budget cuts reduce some Social Security benefits and student aid checks.
The political leaders coming of age now -- those in their 40s -- were shaped to a great extent by Reagan.
The 40th president dominated the American political scene in the 1980s. It was the period during which today's new leaders were developing their political ideologies and beginning to act on them.
"It was hard to be a young person in the '80s and not be sort of caught up in this Ronald Reagan revolution," said Mike Erlandson, who as a high school student became a skeptic of the president's military buildup, and went on to become Minnesota DFL chair.
Days after the death of perhaps American conservatives' most revered icon, several Minnesota political leaders shared memories that exemplify Reagan's effect on both his followers and his adversaries.
In 1980, Pawlenty, now 43, was a University of Minnesota underclassman with deep concerns about national security, the hostages in Iran and the floundering U.S. economy. He said he found in Reagan an embodiment of "economic and social values consistent with my working-class roots -- common-sense conservatism."
"He had a bold vision for change -- a transformational leap -- but he did it in a way that got people's heads nodding," Pawlenty said.
The governor said that one of his first memories of political involvement "was passing out Reagan literature to hippies on the West Bank. That was a hoot."
Bantering with long-haired critics of the GOP candidate also gave him early training in emulating Reagan's gift for engaging in political discourse with a smile and an optimistic, upbeat attitude, he said.
"It was so hard not to like him," Pawlenty said of Reagan. "Over time, that's hard to fake."
Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Kennedy, 47, who grew up in the Irish-American hamlet of Murdock in western Minnesota, had two presidents of Irish ancestry to idolize: John F. Kennedy and, a generation later, Reagan.
He said Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, and Reagan voiced "the same sort of optimism and conviction for freedom -- in terms of their pro-growth economic policies and their ... support of maintaining strong defense capabilities."
Kennedy, a second-term congressman, put JFK and Reagan with Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt "among those that I draw the most inspiration from in my public policy."
He said Reagan's successes "helped shape my conviction in peace through strength ... of prosperity through freedom, of letting people keep more control over their own lives and their own pocketbooks to spend, save and invest."
Kennedy, an accountant before turning to politics, credits his multiple job offers upon graduating business school in 1983 to an economy rebounding from Reagan's "pro-growth policies."
Entenza, now 42, supported independent presidential candidate John Anderson, a former moderate Republican, in 1980. But it didn't take long for Reagan's policies in the White House to steer him away from his family's GOP roots.
"My grandmother was a Republican ward captain in Worthington," he said. "She voted for Reagan. But she felt completely betrayed when her widowed friends began to lose Social Security. And all of a sudden I had friends who were dropping out of college because student aid was cut."
Erlandson, 40, who is also chief of staff for Democratic Rep. Martin Sabo, was a senior at Columbia Heights high school in 1982 when he was first elected as a delegate to the DFL state convention.
He remembers how Reagan was shot two months after taking the Oval Office, yet recovered quickly and "got almost everything he wanted" from Congress in those first years.
By 1986, Erlandson had landed an internship on Capitol Hill, returning the next year to begin his career with Sabo and watch Reagan defend himself in the Iran-contra scandal over the administration's covert arms sales to Iran and aid to Nicaraguan rebels.
"I think the perception of the Reagan legacy is the fall of communism and lower taxes and smaller government," Erlandson said.
He contended that historians will find the realities were that "the Soviet Union was probably ready to crumble under the weight of communism," the military "is totally out of whack with what we need" to fight regional wars, and Reagan rang up soaring budget deficits that later forced President George H.W. Bush to raise taxes, costing him a second term in the White House.
Yet Erlandson said Reagan's extraordinary communications skills set the standard for modern politics.
The writers are at