NINE MEN ran for president in 1980. Nine big issues would be decided by whoever won: taxes, monetary policy, the air traffic controllers' strike, deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, missile defense, Soviet communism, anti-Communist wars of liberation, tax reform, national spirit. Ronald Reagan took a bold approach, consistent with his conservative principles, on all nine--and won. Three or four of the other candidates, if elected, might have acted similarly on a few issues, but not on all nine. That is why the election of Reagan mattered so much and why the world was changed so dramatically for the better as a result.

The other candidates were President Jimmy Carter and Senator Edward Kennedy, both Democrats, Republican senators Howard Baker and Bob Dole, House members John Anderson and Phil Crane, former Treasury secretary John Connally, and George H.W. Bush. Carter and Kennedy and probably Anderson would have decided differently from Reagan on all nine issues. Crane, Dole, and Connally would likely have come the closest to matching Reagan--but not that close.

Let's look at the nine:

* Taxes. With a large budget deficit, would any of the candidates have held out for a 25 percent cut in tax rates on individual income? Probably not. Carter and Kennedy opposed tax cuts and Bush called Reagan's plan "voodoo economics." Baker, Dole, Connally, and Anderson were not noted tax cutters. Crane? Maybe. Baker, as Senate majority leader in 1981, was queasy about the Reagan cuts, calling them a "riverboat gamble." Now we know the consequences of the cuts, a rejuvenated economy. Reagan was right.

To discredit Reagan, economist Paul Krugman of the New York Times noted that Reagan twice raised taxes. Krugman also made this point to zing President Bush for sticking with his tax cuts. Reagan, however, kept the cuts he'd proposed, plus one measure--indexing--which had been added on the Senate floor. For the most part, the tax breaks he wiped away had no incentive effects and had been tacked on to his original proposal. When Reagan took office, the top income tax rate was 70 percent. When he left, it was 28 percent. Tax raiser? Hardly.

* Monetary policy. Remember "stagflation," the simultaneous presence of high inflation and stagnant growth that, in the Carter years, seemed intractable? It wasn't.

To eliminate inflation, Reagan allowed Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker to crunch the money supply and cause the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Republican and Democratic politicians insisted Volcker should let up. Not Reagan. He didn't utter a peep of protest.

Newsweek columnist Robert J. Samuelson called Reagan's hands-off approach "one of his greatest triumphs." Indeed it was. Reagan and Volcker touched off two decades (and counting) of low inflation. In other words, permanent low inflation. "No other major leader--Republican or Democrat--would have then done what Reagan did," Samuelson wrote last week. Exactly right.

* Air traffic controllers' strike. Reagan surprised the world, including the senior White House staff and his cabinet, by firing the controllers, who had violated their legal and personal obligation not to strike. More than any decision in Reagan's first year in office, this action provided a huge clue about Reagan: He was not to be trifled with. And that's exactly how Reagan saw it. "This episode was an early test of my administration's resolve," he wrote in 1989 after leaving the White House. "We had the choice of caving in to unreasonable demands while keeping our air traffic system operating without incident, or of taking a stand for what we thought was right with the risk of throwing the system into possible chaos. I felt we had to do what was right." He refused to hire the controllers back later.