Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (93 page)

88
. Hunter,
Culture Wars
; Alan Wolfe,
One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other
(New York, 1998).

89
. Many prominent American political figures since the 1970s have been Southern Baptists: Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Richard Gephardt, Trent Lott, Newt Gingrich, and Strom Thurmond.

90
. Daniel Williams, “The Cross and the Elephant: Southern White Evangelicals’ Commitment to the Republican Party, 1960–1994,”
Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association
(2005), 59–69.

91
. James Morone,
Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History
(New Haven, 2003), 450–55.

92
. Wills,
Under God
, 120–21.

93
. Erling Jorstad,
The Politics of Moralism: The New Christian Right in American Life
(Minneapolis, 1981), 48.

94
. Diamond,
Not by Politics Alone
, 62. Polls, however, tended to be imprecise on these matters. Some have suggested that white churchgoers in general did not turn strongly to the GOP until the 1990s. See
New York Times
, Dec. 6, 2003. In 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson, who had been divorced, probably suffered as a result. In 1964, Nelson Rockefeller went from likely GOP presidential nominee to also-ran (behind Goldwater) because he divorced his wife and married a woman who divorced and left her children to marry him.

95
. Smith,
Morality, Reason, and Power
, 115.

96
. Edmund Morris,
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
(New York, 1999), 4, 579.

97
. Pemberton,
Exit with Honor
, 28–29.

98
. For 670 of these, see Kiron Skinner et al., eds.,
Reagan, in His Own Hand
(New York, 2001).

99
. Edmund Morris, “The Unknowable,”
New Yorker
, June 28, 2004, 40–51; Greenstein,
The Presidential Difference
, 147.

100
. Wills, “Mr. Magoo Remembers,”
New York Review of Books
, Dec. 20, 1990, 29; Wills,
Reagan’s America
(Garden City, N.Y., 1988), 2. Maureen Reagan in Pemberton,
Exit with Honor
, 17.

101
. Collins,
More
, 158–60.

102
. Cited by Douglas Brinkley, introductory comments in
American History
38 (Oct. 2003), 7.

103
. Boller,
Presidential Campaigns
, 359.

104
.
World Almanac, 2001
, 40.

105
. Here and elsewhere in this book, turnout percentages cited are of the voting-
eligible
population, not of the larger voting-
age
population, which until fairly recently has been the population most often cited when pundits complain about low turnouts. America’s voting-age population since 1972 has been defined as “all U.S. residents 18 years and over,” but it includes many people who are ineligible to vote, notably non-citizens and (in most states) felons. Because the numbers of immigrants and felons have risen considerably since 1970, higher percentages of this “voting-age population” have become ineligible to vote. Turnouts of this population have therefore declined, especially since 1980, leading many pundits to bewail a falling-off of voting participation in the United States.

If one uses the voting-
eligible
population as the basis for measuring turnout, a slightly happier picture emerges. In presidential elections between 1984 and 2000, the turnouts of the voting-eligible population remained fairly stable, averaging around 56 percent—or between four and five percentage points higher than the average turnouts of the voting-age population. See Michael McDonald and Samuel Popkin, “The Myth of the Vanishing Voter,”
American Political Science Review
95 (Dec. 2001), 963–74.

106
. Evangelical Protestant voters appeared to split their votes between Carter and Reagan in 1980 but to come out in unusually large numbers for conservative congressional candidates, especially in the South, and therefore to be important in enabling the GOP to take control of the Senate in 1981. Butler, “Jack-in-the-Box Faith,” 1372–73.

107
. Michael Schaller,
Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its Presidents in the 1980s
(New York, 1992), 5.

108
.
Newsweek
, Nov. 24, 1980, 4.

1
. Robert Collins,
More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America
(New York, 2000), 192.

2
. The phrase “as a city upon a hill” was Puritan leader John Winthrop’s, delivered in 1630 on the ship
Arabella
as it sailed to what was to become the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At Reagan’s funeral in June 2004, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor read Winthrop’s words, emphasizing that Reagan often used them during his presidency.

3
. Mary Ann Watson,
Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience Since 1945
(Fort Worth, 1998), 255.

4
. Edmund Morris,
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
(New York, 1999), 586.

5
. David Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
(New York, 2001), 62–65.

6
. Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald Strober,
Reagan: The Man and the Presidency
(Baltimore, 1994), 131.

7
. Collins,
More
, 189.

8
. William Pemberton,
Exit with Honor: The Life and Presidency of Ronald Reagan
(Armonk, N.Y., 1998), 101.

9
. Collins,
More
, 192.

10
. Federal courts soon restored 200,000 of these to the rolls.

11
. James Patterson, “Afterword: Legacies of the Reagan Years,” in W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds.,
The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies
(Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 355–75; Gareth Davies, “The Welfare State,” ibid., 209–32.

12
. Donovan, “Reagan’s First Two Hundred Days,”
Fortune
, Sept. 21, 1981, 63.

13
. There were 187 work stoppages in 1980, down from a high of 424 in 1974. The number dropped to 96 in 1982 and to a low in the 1980s of 40 in 1988. In the 1990s, the number fluctuated between 17 and 45 per year. Stoppages as enumerated here involved 1,000 or more workers and lasted a day or longer.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 410.

14
. Pemberton,
Exit with Honor
, 107; Haynes Johnson,
Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years
(New York, 1991), 163.

15
. Collins,
More
, 203.

16
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 449.

17
.
Newsweek
, Jan. 9, 1989. See also Collins,
More
, 210–13.

18
. Johnson,
Sleepwalking Through History
, 20–21.

19
. Moynihan, “Reagan’s Bankrupt Budget,”
New Republic
, Dec. 26, 1983, 15–20; Alan Brinkley, “Reagan’s Revenge,”
New York Times Magazine
, June 19, 1994, 37.

20
. Edmund Morris, “The Unknowable,”
New Yorker
, June 28, 2004, 40–51.

21
. Pemberton,
Exit with Honor
, 112. For Reagan’s humor, see Lou Cannon,
President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime
(New York, 2000), 95–114.

22
. Richard Brookhiser, “Reagan: His Place in History,”
American Heritage
, Sept./Oct. 2004, 34–38.

23
. Cannon,
President Reagan
, 37.
The Sound of Music
(movie version) appeared in 1965.

24
. Morris, “The Unknowable.”

25
. Martin Anderson,
Revolution: The Reagan Legacy
(Stanford, 1990), 289–91.

26
. John White,
The New Politics of Old Values
(Hanover, N.H., 1990), 12.

27
. Michael Korda, “Prompting the President,”
New Yorker
, Oct. 6, 1997, 87–95. Reagan later wore contact lenses to correct his eyesight.

28
. Author’s conclusion, from exploring Reagan’s papers at the Reagan presidential library in California.

29
. Before the end of Reagan’s first administration, more than a dozen of his appointees faced charges of improper financial dealings.

30
. For oil prices, Alfred Eckes Jr. and Thomas Zeiler,
Globalization in the American Century
(New York, 2003), 90–93. The high of $1.38 per gallon in 1981 was the equivalent of $2.80 in 2004 prices.
New York Times
, Sept. 29, 2004. Gasoline prices then fluctuated between $1.20 and $1.30 per gallon until 1999.

31
. Michael Bernstein, “Understanding American Economic Decline: The Contours of the Late-Twentieth-Century Experience,” in Bernstein and David Adler, eds.,
Understanding America’s Economic Decline
(New York, 1994), 3–33.

32
. “Economists Assess the Presidency,” in Eric Schmerz et al., eds.,
Ronald Reagan’s America
(Westport, Conn., 1997), 759–82.

33
. For data concerning government social programs, see
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 342–57. See also John Scholz and Kara Levine, “The Evolution of Income Support Policy in Recent Decades,”
Focus
(Institute for Research on Poverty) 21, no. 2 (Fall 2000), 9–16. For Reagan and Social Security, see Martha Derthick and Steven Teles, “Riding the Third Rail: Social Security Reform,” in Brownlee and Graham,
The Reagan Presidency
, 182–208; Cannon,
President Reagan
, 212–15; and Collins,
More
, 200–201.

34
. Lawrence Friedman,
American Law in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, 2002), 536–37.

35
. The amendments also provided for the taxation—for the first time—of the benefits of high-income retirees and delayed payment by six months of annual cost-of-living (COLA) adjustments. These important changes greatly improved the financial health of the program.

36
. Payroll tax money not needed for benefits was commingled after 1983 with other federal revenues, thereby helping the government to pay for other programs but depriving Social Security of billions of dollars that it would need when the boomers retired. For later issues, highlighted in struggles over proposals to partially privatize Social Security, see
New York Times,
March 8, 2005.

37
. The number of Americans officially defined as living in poverty in 1981 (a recession year) was 31.8 million. The percentage of Americans in poverty declined slightly between 1981 and 1989, from 14 to 12.8.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 441.