Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (25 page)

Renewed fears of Japan, 1989.
Mike Luckovich, Creator’s Syndicate.

Madonna, 1990.
© S.I.N./CORBIS.

I
N DEVELOPING HIS CAMPAIGN
, Ronald Reagan made a number of appeals, some of them politically opportunistic, to religious conservatives. Republicans, he emphasized, stood firmly against crime, pornography, and immorality. Bob Jones University, he said, should have tax-exempt status. Repudiating his earlier support for a liberalization of abortion, Reagan backed the GOP platform, which called for a constitutional amendment opposing the practice. Breaking with past GOP platforms, he stood against the ERA. He said that he would back a constitutional amendment to restore prayer in the public schools and that schools should teach creationism—“the biblical story of creation”—as well as Darwinism.
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Carter, meanwhile, refused to endorse a constitutional amendment banning abortion.

Although Reagan had fashioned a career in left-leaning Hollywood and only occasionally attended church, these aspects of his past seemed to do him little harm among religious conservatives. Some early polls suggested that he was leading Carter—who had confessed to illicit sexual urges in
Playboy
—among such voters by a two-to-one margin. Newly formed anti-gay groups, such as the Traditional Values Coalition and the Umbrella Voice, also came out against Carter. Falwell, a prodigious fund-raiser, amassed a reported $100 million for Moral Majority causes in 1979–80, an amount that was much higher than that collected by the Democratic National Committee.
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As the campaign moved forward, Reagan had good reason to hope that white voters partial to the Religious Right, having formed common cause with southern whites who opposed civil rights activism, with conservative blue-collar workers and Catholics, and with people who rejected big government, would help him win the election.
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Reagan, however, was not primarily interested in waging war for social conservatism. Confident that many adherents of the Religious Right were on his side, he concentrated his fire against the many other chinks, as he saw them, in Carter’s armor. One of these, Reagan exclaimed, was the president’s record concerning foreign affairs. Speaking as if American foreign policies had not hardened after the invasion of Afghanistan, Reagan hammered repeatedly at Carter’s rejection of the B-1 bomber and the neutron bomb. He promised to spend much more money on defense than Carter, by 1980 a hawk, was allocating. Concerning Carter’s earlier backing of détente, he quipped, “Détente: isn’t that what a farmer does with his turkey—until Thanksgiving Day?” Carter and his supporters in Congress, he said, “seem like Santa Claus. They have given the Panama Canal away, abandoned Taiwan to the Red Chinese, and they’ve negotiated a SALT II treaty that could well make this nation NUMBER TWO.”
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In demanding that America act forcefully in the world, Reagan was determined to pull the nation out of what he charged was the pusillanimous posture that the United States had assumed since the Vietnam War. That conflict, he later said, had been a “noble cause.” Again and again Reagan emphasized his vision of the United States as an exceptional nation that had historically been a force for good in the world. America, the last great hope, had a special mission to overcome Communism, which he said was a tyrannical and ultimately doomed system. Reagan promised to transform an imperiled presidency into a dynamically effective institution. He would enable the United States, humiliated by Iranian revolutionaries who still held fifty-two Americans hostage, to stand tall once more.

Appalled by rhetoric such as this, many of Reagan’s opponents denounced him as a warmonger. Others dismissed him as a Neanderthal who was ignorant of or incurious about a whole host of issues. These negative impressions remained forever etched in the minds of detractors. Clark Clifford, a prominent Democrat, later and famously said that Reagan was an “amiable dunce.” Edmund Morris, an unsympathetic biographer who observed him carefully during the mid- and late 1980s, later called him an “apparent airhead.”
⁹⁶

In assailing Reagan as a hard-line conservative, critics were correct. Opposing affirmative action, choice, and big government, he stood stubbornly and proudly on the right wing of his party. Those who thought he was an airhead, however, underestimated him. Well before 1980, Reagan had been passionate about political issues—to the extent that acquaintances who had known him during his Hollywood days thought he had both bored and neglected his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman.
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For years he had been a diligent reader of
Human Events,
a leading journal of conservative opinion. After 1975, when he finished his second term as governor of California, he spent a good deal of time studying contemporary problems. Between 1976 and 1979, he gave hundreds of speeches, many of which he had written out longhand, mainly concerning foreign policy and defense.
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By 1980, he scarcely paused to rethink his opinions. Knowing where he wanted to go, he steered a straight and usually predictable course, even if others, less set in their ways, perceived rocks and other hazards in his path. Reagan’s stubborn certitude continued to appall his opponents, but it fortified an ideological consistency, as his supporters perceived it, which was to be a major source of his considerable political popularity.

As the campaign of 1980 progressed, it became obvious that Reagan was a formidable political figure. Despite his age, he remained a graceful, athletic, physically fit man who seemed far younger than sixty-nine. He had a marvelously soothing baritone voice and an easy platform manner, and was a captivating public presence and speaker. Americans seemed drawn to his supreme self-confidence and especially to his optimism, which led him to assert that that the United States had by no means entered an “Age of Limits.” On the contrary, he said, the United States was an exceptional nation in the entire history of the world. It had the capacity—and the responsibility—to do almost anything that would advance freedom abroad. This unfailingly upbeat message contrasted sharply with the atmosphere of “malaise” that had come to surround Carter’s ill-fated presidency.
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Put off by his cheeriness, his daughter Maureen later said, “It’s enough to drive you nuts.” She had a point: Reagan’s “the United States can do it all” approach to domestic and international problems was as simplistic as Carter’s claim had been in 1976—that he could ride into Washington as an outsider and clean up the country. But Garry Wills, a Reagan biographer, understood the key sources of his political appeal, stressing first of all that his self-assurance was contagious and second that he was an oddity—a “cheerful conservative.”
¹⁰⁰

Wills,
Reagan’s America
(Garden City, N.Y., 1988), 2. Maureen Reagan in Pemberton,
Exit with Honor
, 17.

Though these assets served Reagan well in 1980, the miserable state of the economy helped him most of all. In 1979, inflation had so worried Carter that he had named Paul Volcker, a conservative who was widely admired by business leaders, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. With the president’s support, Volcker instituted tough-minded policies, including curbs on the money supply, to cut inflation. The result in the short run, however, was recession, the worst imaginable political development for an incumbent president. Unemployment, which had averaged 6 percent in 1977, climbed to 7.8 percent by May 1980. Interest rates shot through the roof, with the prime rate soaring to the scarcely believable level of 18.5 percent in April. Bad economic news persisted later in the year.
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Reagan, seizing on Carter’s inability to cure the nation’s domestic maladies, understandably highlighted the magic of his own remedies. As his demand for greater defense spending indicated, he was hardly as consistent an advocate of small government as some conservatives might have hoped. He spoke so fondly of FDR in his acceptance speech for the GOP nomination that the
New York Times
carried a lead editorial the next day, “Franklin Delano Reagan.” In calling for tax reductions of 30 percent, he risked running up huge budget deficits. But he nonetheless directed his appeals to conservative foes of big government. He insisted that domestic spending had to be cut and that the federal bureaucracy had to be slashed. He promised to dismantle the recently created Cabinet departments of energy and education. “Government,” he quipped, “is like a baby, an alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”

As the campaign neared its end, Reagan intensified his ridicule of Carter’s economic policies. By then he was regularly posing a rhetorical question to audiences: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
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Republican audiences especially relished his favorite line: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job, and a depression is when you lose your job, and”—here he paused for effect—“recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”
¹⁰³

Though barbs like these stung Democrats, the contest seemed close into the final week of the campaign. Democrats asserted repeatedly that Reagan was too old for the job: If elected, he would be the oldest man in American history to be voted into the presidency. Moreover, John Anderson, a fiscally conservative, socially moderate Republican congressman from Illinois who was running as an independent, seemed likely to cut into Reagan’s support. More Americans still identified themselves as Democrats than as Republicans. If Carter could hang on to the remnants of the New Deal electoral coalition that had helped to him to win in 1976, he might prevail again.

Reagan, however, was impressive in a long-awaited late-October television debate with Carter. Relaxed and poised, he pretended to be saddened by the president’s attacks. When Carter accused him of favoring deep cuts in Medicare, he shook his head and interjected, “There you go again.” Within the next few days, Reagan forged into the lead.

Results of the election, in which Reagan easily outpolled Carter, suggested that the Democratic electoral coalition had retained some residual strength, notably among blacks, union members, and low-income people in the cities. Subsequent analyses of the voting also revealed that a “gender gap” was opening. Women, worried by Reagan’s hawkish positions on foreign affairs and by his conservative approach to issues such as education and health care, supported him by only a narrow margin, of 46 percent to 45 percent. By contrast, 54 percent of men backed Reagan (as opposed to 37 percent for Carter).
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The gender gap was to persist in later years. Reagan, moreover, did not draw masses to the polls: Turnout, at 54.7 percent of eligible voters, was a tiny bit lower than the 54.8 percent that had voted in 1976.
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He won only 28 percent of those eligible to vote and 51 percent of those who voted, just 3 percent more than Ford had captured four years earlier. Democrats also retained control of the House, 243 to 192.

Still, there was no doubting that voters had repudiated Carter. Many liberals, having supported Ted Kennedy during the primary season, remained cool to him. The president received only 41 percent of the vote, 9 percent less than he had won in 1976. Anderson, cutting into the totals for both candidates, received 8 percent. Reagan was especially successful in the Sunbelt, losing only in Georgia, Carter’s home state. His popularity among white voters in the South, where Carter had been strong in 1976, exposed the powerful influence of racial feelings—and to a lesser extent of the Religious Right—in American life and politics.
¹⁰⁶
Then and for the next quarter century, Democratic presidential candidates fared poorly among white voters in Dixie and among religious conservatives. Reagan otherwise lost only Maryland, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. He scored an overwhelming victory in the electoral college, 489 to 49.

Reagan could also claim to have carried a good many Republicans into office on his coattails. Though the House remained Democratic—as it had been since the election of 1954—the GOP gained thirty-three seats in 1980. Most impressively, GOP numbers jumped from forty-one to fifty-three in the Senate, which in 1981 was to be under Republican control for the first time since January 1955. Several liberal Democratic senators, on conservative “hit lists” during the campaign, lost their seats. They included Frank Church of Idaho and George McGovern of South Dakota, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972. In Indiana, Senator Birch Bayh fell to a Republican conservative, J. Danforth Quayle.