Why the Right Went Wrong: ConservatismFrom Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond (16 page)

None of this meant that Reagan was unpopular. In fact, his flexibility and his personality were keys to his success in winning over voters who did not necessarily share his worldview. But his administration created an enormous disconnect between movement expectations and reality.

Libertarians were especially alive to this while Reagan was in office. Ed Crane, the founding president of the Cato Institute, an early Koch family venture that promoted the purest strains of libertarian thinking, edited and published volumes on the promise and reality of the Reagan presidency that found it falling short. Crane still feels that way.

“I remember when Reagan was elected, the Heritage [Foundation] folks were going all on about how, well, the battle is over, we won,” Crane told me. “I’m looking around and thinking: This is the same government. We didn’t get rid of anything after eight years of Reagan. . . . It’s this upward ratcheting of programs and spending that never ended. I guess Reagan slowed it down, but what did he abolish? He added to departments and didn’t get rid of any.”

In short: no politician has made the case for smaller government and lower taxes more effectively than Reagan did. That is why his ideological legacy endures. Yet a smaller government is precisely what he did not deliver. That is why conservatives remain frustrated. All these years later, House Republicans are still trying to get rid of the Export-Import Bank.

What made Reagan a success, Crane argued, were his gifts in responding to a country that badly needed a morale boost after the Carter years. “Reagan was a remarkable motivator,” Crane said. “The American people loved the idea: here’s this guy saying this is a great country, don’t tell me about malaise.”

When Perlstein published
The Invisible Bridge
in 2014, he was criticized by some reviewers for presenting Reagan as a kind of flimflam artist who prospered by telling the American people how good they were. Perlstein’s key line:
“People want to believe. Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.”

Perlstein’s view of Reagan is far richer than his critics have allowed because it in no way diminishes Reagan to view his presidency as successful precisely because, as Crane suggests, the country wanted and needed an injection of optimism at that moment. One might, indeed, summarize the politics of the period 1980–2000 by saying that Ronald Reagan stole optimism from FDR and the Democrats, and Bill Clinton stole it back.

And this is where Reagan is so confounding, to friend and critic alike: Reagan was an ideologue in his speeches, particularly before he became president, and he really believed the conservative gospel. But he was also intent on being both successful and popular. He would test limits, but not push beyond them if the political traffic could not bear what he had originally hoped for. This was obvious when he was governor of California. As Perlstein observed, when his proposal for a 10 percent across-the-board cut in every department’s budget proved impractical,
“he changed course, moved on, learned, adjusted, gladly dropping right-wing orthodoxy when more pragmatic solutions presented themselves.” Reagan wanted “to chalk up accomplishments.”
Perlstein notes that some conservative “purists” were so frustrated with Reagan that they launched a recall movement against him in 1971. It came to nothing—and did little to dent Reagan’s image in the eyes of conservatives around the nation.

It’s true that Reagan could live with a good deal of cognitive dissonance between his public statements and his practice. Reagan, as Freeman notes, “
thrived on . . . contradictions, declaring himself against abortion but doing nothing to end it; calling for a constitutional amendment to require balanced budgets while creating the largest peacetime deficits in history; and extolling family and community while promoting a deregulated free market that eroded both.”

But he could also make real choices. He was, for example, willing to pull back a third of his tax cut in 1982, courtesy of the attractively named Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act. At the time, as the historian Sean Wilentz notes, true-believing
supply-side conservatives felt they had been
“stabbed in the back” by “perfidious forces within the White House,” suggesting that Stockman and Chief of Staff James Baker were “purposefully undermining the president’s supply-side intentions.”

As Wilentz noted, they were “utterly mistaken.” Reagan was “fully involved in these decisions.” He was
“governing as he had done since his days in California, holding out as long as possible, compromising when necessary, protecting his important gains while preparing to fight another day.” Reagan’s central interest was in preserving his cut in the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent, and he did.

Reagan showed flexibility in other areas, as we’ve seen, dropping his Social Security cuts and instead creating a bipartisan commission with House Speaker Tip O’Neill to make the system more solvent. The combination of modest tax increases with modest benefit cuts passed without controversy.

No doubt Reagan was more moderate than he might have been, both as governor and as president, because he had to work with Democrats in the legislative branch. But his willingness to do so, celebrated by Chris Matthews in his book
Tip and the Gipper,
is a part of his legacy that contrasts so sharply with the approach of today’s Tea Party right.

By his second term, Reagan had run out of agenda. The historic tax reform passed in 1986 was at least as much a congressional and Democratic initiative (spearheaded by Senator Bill Bradley and Representative Richard Gephardt) as it was a White House plan. And while it was markedly “Reaganite” in bringing the top income tax rate down even further, to 28 percent, it was progressive in not only dumping loopholes but also shifting the tax burden from individuals to corporations. In a distinctly anti-supply-side move, the reform raised the capital gains tax from 20 percent to 28 percent by treating capital gains as ordinary income. It is difficult to see any conservatives agreeing to such a change at this point in the twenty-first century.

The electoral magic of the Reagan Coalition disappeared in the 1986 midterm elections as Democrats retook the Senate. It was the first election
in which the “Reagan Class” of Republican senators from 1980 was on the ballot, and its members fared badly. Republicans gave up their 1980 gains in Florida, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, both Dakotas, and Washington State. The conservative realignment seemed further away than ever. It was not so much a repudiation of Reagan as a sign of his increasing irrelevance. He had no new program to offer, and his themes were old. Democrats, in the meantime, focused on the parts of the country where Reagan’s “Morning” had not yet arrived. They attacked the “Swiss-cheese economy”—it was an economic recovery full of holes—and the “bicoastal economy,” a way of championing the cause of the heartland and turning old conservative charges of East Coast–West Coast liberal elitism on their head.

An upstart Republican congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich drew a lesson from 1986 that would stick with the right for many years to come.
“If voters see a race as a nice-guy Republican against a nice-guy Democrat, we lose,” Gingrich said. Republicans had not drawn the issues sharply enough and had been far too soft. It’s not a mistake they would make again.

Two years later, Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, won a solid victory over Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts by running anything but a nice-guy campaign. It looked like the triumph that would cement the new majority in place. It proved to be its undoing.

“I hope you’re all aware we’re Eisenhower Republicans here.”

When the history of modern conservatism is recounted and old war stories are told,
Lee Atwater is well remembered by the political cognoscenti of a certain age. But his role in building a conservative majority and keeping it alive in 1988 is often underplayed or even forgotten. Atwater’s political career came to an abrupt and tragic end when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor that took his life in 1991, at the age of forty, just three years after he helped make George H. W. Bush president. Atwater, the crafty campaign manager, was not there when Bush had to face the voters again in 1992. His absence was felt.

Because Atwater’s political tactics were unapologetically hard-edged, many in Bush’s governing inner circle preferred not to highlight how important this brash, blues-guitar-playing South Carolinian had been to Bush’s 1988 victory. Bush himself drew a sharp line between campaigning (the sometimes ugly things you had to do to gain power) and governing (the
responsible things you try to do once you have it). Atwater was entirely associated with the first, grubbier imperative.

In my days as a day-to-day political journalist covering campaigns, and particularly the campaign of 1988, I confess to having had warm feelings toward Atwater personally, even if I was appalled by so many of the things he did. Typically (though not always), he owned up to his bare-knuckle tactics. More than that: he took responsibility when others ran away.

When the criticism of Bush’s 1988 attacks against Democrat Michael Dukakis got increasingly fierce, many of Bush’s friends expressed dismay and some of his aides held their tongues. Not Atwater. He was quite ready to claim full ownership of the campaign’s nastier side, to explain why the assaults made tactical and strategic sense, and to be clear on his own role in formulating them. Atwater’s close associates were disturbed that he had to take much of the blame for the campaign’s negative cast while the campaign chairman, James A. Baker III, took credit for its success. Atwater, who had been working for years on a Ph.D. thesis on the dangers to candidates of high negative ratings in the polls, insisted this never bothered him.

There could be no denying Atwater’s brutal side. In 1980, his candidate for Congress, Representative Floyd Spence, a South Carolina Republican, was opposed by Tom Turnipseed, a former campaign official for George Wallace and one of the more rococo figures in southern politics. Atwater reportedly planted a reporter at a Turnipseed press briefing who said he understood Turnipseed had once had psychiatric treatment and electroshock therapy.

When Turnipseed attacked Atwater for spreading the report, Atwater told a journalist he did not want to comment on a statement by someone who was once
“hooked up to jumper cables.” Atwater later apologized, though he insisted that he never set the reporter up to ask the question. “That would be an insult to the press,” he told me when I asked him about this in 1988. He said it with a chuckle, although that summer there had been nothing funny about rumors spreading all over Washington that Dukakis had once had psychiatric treatment. Dukakis vehemently denied this, and Atwater said he was not responsible for them.

But beneath the proud, tough-guy image, Atwater was very sophisticated in understanding where the conservative movement stood in 1988, and how
it got there. He also understood his own candidate’s shortcomings and challenges. Bush was in no way a movement conservative, and there was mistrust of him on the right; as Reagan’s main rival in 1980 he had been critical of Reagan’s views on taxes and economics.

Atwater knew exactly how much the Republican Party had been changed by Reagan—but also how Reagan had been changed by governing and by having to lead the whole GOP. “What we had in 1988 was a party that Ronald Reagan had brought more to the right, and in effect there was no longer a classic moderate wing of the party,” he explained at a postelection campaign manager’s conference at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in late 1988. “But by the same token, the party brought Reagan more to the center. The new nominating wing of the party would be what I termed, for lack of a better word, the mainstream wing of the party, which would be about 70 percent of the vote.”

Immunizing Bush started with an embrace of Reagan, but didn’t end there. “I felt there were only two things Bush needed to do other than stick with Reagan that would preempt anybody from ever being able to get to him on the right,” Atwater said. “One was to be hard-core on taxes, which as you all know he was. Number two was to be hard-core on the anticommunist cluster of issues. If he did those two things, no one could ever move out on him on the right. . . .”

Atwater was also clear about what Bush needed to do to defeat the Democrats. He was under no illusions that the Republican majority in the country was secure—the 1986 midterm elections had cured party realists of such fantasies. Atwater’s view was that most Democrats who had strayed to Reagan in 1984 wanted to go home to their old party. The swing voters, he believed, were “conservative populists,” responsive to Democrats on lunch bucket economics but to conservatives on social and cultural issues. If such voters did not see great differences between Bush and Dukakis, Atwater said candidly,
“Guess what? They would have gone back and been Democrats again.” This squared with what he had told me during the campaign itself: “Our task,” he had said, “is to show that there are differences.”