Chapter 9
Tumultuous politics continued, 1974–present
Five salient factors shaped the context for post–Cold War politics: the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, booms and busts in the economy, increased polarization within the electorate, the continuation of low voter turnout, and the emergence of grassroots activist organizations not necessarily loyal to any political party. Given the large size of government and the growing importance of television, the presidency gained visibility and preeminence as Congress receded in political significance. Party competition remained intense, with both parties incorporating grassroots activist wings that encouraged leaders to take polarized positions.
The presidencies of Gerald Ford (1974–76) and Jimmy Carter (1977–81) represented a transition in American politics from the Vietnam and Watergate eras. Both presidents projected moderation in office; both presidents confronted opposition from a Democratic-controlled Congress; both presidents faced primary challenges in seeking another term; and both candidates lost reelection, Ford in a close election in 1976 and Carter in a landslide defeat in 1980.
Stepping into the White House after Nixon’s resignation, Ford sought to reassure a nation shaken by Vietnam and Watergate. Ford pursued his natural inclination toward centrism, but he found his presidency thwarted by Democrats in Congress. His continuation of Nixon’s foreign policy and his moderate domestic program created a vacuum on the right. Conservatives coalesced around Ronald Reagan, a former Hollywood actor who had won election as California governor in 1966. As a minority within a minority party, the New Right interjected new moral and national defense issues into politics. In doing so, they tapped into growing complaints among evangelical Protestants, traditional Catholics, and Mormons about a secular culture that had banned prayer in schools, promoted abortion rights, and challenged traditional family values.
Ford dismissed the threat from his right when Ronald Reagan challenged him for the party nomination in the 1976 primaries. Reagan voiced concerns that the nation was in moral, economic, and military decline. When he seized upon Ford’s proposed turnover of the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal to the Panamanians, he began winning Republican primaries. In the end, though, Ford got the nomination, but the bruising primaries damaged him in November.
Democrats turned to an outsider, the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, after he had winnowed a large field of primary challengers. A professed evangelical Christian, former naval officer, and former Democratic governor of a southern state, he appealed simultaneously as an economic liberal and a social conservative. As it was, Carter narrowly defeated Ford, while Democrats continued to control both houses of Congress. The Carter presidency proved, however, to be a missed opportunity. Republicans appeared to have become a permanent minority in Congress, a pitiful 142 to 292 in the House and 38 to 62 in the Senate. Yet even with a Democratic Congress, Carter proved ineffectual. Any popularity he might have enjoyed negotiating a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt was diminished by high inflation and high unemployment. Many wondered if America was in perpetual decline. In 1978, grassroots conservatives scored major congressional victories, even though Democrats continued to control Congress.
By 1980 Carter had alienated the left in his party, including feminists, antinuclear activists, and social liberals. Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts, the brother of John and Bobby, challenged Carter for the nomination. Kennedy’s bid failed but left Carter damaged. A takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran by militant students in which more than fifty Americans were held hostage on November 4, 1979, initially boosted Carter’s public approval ratings; as the Iranian crisis continued, however, Americans came to see Carter as incompetent.
After fending off a challenge from George H. W. Bush, a Washington insider, Reagan won the Republican nomination. A principled conservative and a pragmatist, Reagan selected Bush as his running mate. Carter, like others before him, underestimated Reagan’s appeal to the voters. On Election Day, Reagan won in one of the largest landslides in American history, beating Carter by 9 percentage points, winning 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49, and taking 44 states. Carter was the first Democratic incumbent president since 1888 to lose a bid for reelection. Reagan swept the South, transforming it into a Republican stronghold. Republicans won the Senate and made gains in the House.
Reagan accomplished much in his two terms in office, although the full extent of the “Reagan Revolution” remains a point of contention. The raising of interest rates by a Federal Reserve Bank intent on wringing inflation out of the economy caused a recession in his first year. Afterward, though, the economy boomed. Pragmatically working with congressional Democrats, the president achieved major reform in Social Security by raising contributions and raising the retirement age. In his second term, he undertook a major overhaul of the tax system. His administration pursued deregulation of industry, a policy begun under Carter.
Reagan did not downsize government, although he argued for it. Budget cuts reduced a few social programs, and a modest policy shift occurred through directing more federal funds to states, but a Democratic-controlled Congress (and public opinion) prevented deeper cuts. In 1982, Reagan accepted higher taxes. His hope to balance the budget by spurring economic growth by means of tax rate reductions (so-called supply-side economics) was dashed by huge increases in defense spending.
Reagan pushed for a massive defense buildup, doubling the size of the Pentagon’s annual budget. In 1983 he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an anti-missile-defense system based in outer space—quickly ridiculed by opponents as “Star Wars.” At the same time, his administration pursued a war by proxy against a radical pro-Cuban Sandinista government in Nicaragua—which also drew criticism from leftwing grassroots activists.
Reagan cultivated grassroots activists in his own party, especially evangelical Christians—the Christian Right—led by televangelist Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority organization, and Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition and Christian Broadcasting Network. The administration kept in close contact with antiabortion organizations and activists, even though attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973), a court decision legalizing abortion, failed.
Democrats at the national level remained divided over strategy and vision. Gains made in the 1982 midterms, including twenty-six seats in the House, reinforced a misperception that the general electorate had shifted to the left. Party liberals remained loyal to former vice president Walter Mondale even as a new breed of Democrats—Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas and Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts—called for new, less liberal, policies. Mondale won the Democratic nomination in 1984 and called for higher taxes to preserve social programs threatened by Reagan cuts. To add excitement to his campaign, Mondale selected congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, the first woman selected for a national ticket by a major political party.
Mondale’s attacks on Reagan came across as desperate. Reagan’s ad campaign focused on “Morning in America” and projected an image of a restored nation. He swept the Electoral College and the popular vote.
His second term followed the pattern of many second-term presidents—squandered opportunities. Reagan did achieve a major legislative victory by working with Democratic congressional leaders to pass the Tax Reform Act of 1986. The act reduced the number of tax brackets, dropped the top marginal rate, raised corporate rates, and removed millions of low-income people from the tax rolls by raising the personal exemption. His greatest achievement came in foreign policy, when he announced substantial nuclear arms reductions with reformed-minded Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
These achievements were marred, however, by reports that the Reagan administration had traded arms illegally with Iran to help fund the Contras, anticommunist counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua. This byzantine arrangement had been developed in the National Security Council by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and National Security Advisor John Poindexter. Although the scheme was not traced back directly to Reagan, the scandal placed the president on the defensive. Absorbed with the scandal, the administration failed to secure Senate approval for his Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, a staunch legal conservative and strict constitutionalist. Attacks on Bork in Senate hearings and the liberal press outraged grassroots conservatives. After Bork’s defeat in the Senate, Reagan secured the appointment of Anthony Kennedy to the court. There Kennedy joined the court’s first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed by Reagan in 1981.
Reagan’s popularity spilled over to Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush in 1988. Bush sought to reassure the Republican base that he too was a Christian who loathed abortion and loved small government. At the Republican convention, he promised the crowd, “Read my lips—no new taxes.” In the general campaign he faced Michael Dukakis, a Massachusetts liberal Democrat who made an easy target for Bush. The campaign took a particularly nasty turn when Republican operatives produced a TV spot that accused Dukakis of having given a prison furlough to a convicted felon, Willie Horton, who subsequently raped a young woman and tortured her and her boyfriend. On election night, Dukakis conceded defeat early when Bush won 53.4 percent of the popular vote and forty states.
Bush was the first candidate since Richard Nixon to win the White House while his party lost seats in Congress. His popularity soared when he launched an invasion to oust Panamanian dictator and drug lord Manuel Noriega in 1989. The next year Bush’s popularity reached even greater heights when he drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in the First Gulf War. After the war, he signed a new treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to reduce existing arsenals of ballistic missiles. By the end of the year, the Soviet Union had been dissolved.
Intent on showing that he was a conservative with a heart, Bush backed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which extended civil rights to the disabled. Faced with a $2.7 trillion national debt left over from Reagan and a budget deficit, Bush accepted the Democratic-controlled Congress’s proposal in 1991 to raise taxes and cut spending. By breaking his promise not to raise taxes, he earned the wrath of the Republican right and the general disgust of the public, especially when Congress did not cut spending. His appointment of the conservative black Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 failed to win back conservatives.
In 1992 Bush won his party’s nomination after a fierce fight against right-wing columnist Patrick Buchanan, who received 25 percent of all Republican votes cast in the primaries. To appease conservatives, Bush gave Buchanan a prime-time spot at the convention in which Buchanan declared a cultural war and turned off moderate voters.
Democratic primaries were equally fierce, resulting in the nomination of Bill Clinton, an obscure governor from Arkansas who had called for his party to move to the center. He sensed that with Bush having been pushed to the right by Buchanan, Democrats could appeal to moderates. His selection of border state Tennessee politician Senator Albert Gore Jr. as his running mate affirmed Clinton’s considerable political skills. He targeted Bush for being out of touch with America. A recession in 1991 imparted a resonance to the focus of the Clinton campaign’s catchphrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The emergence of a third-party candidate, Texas billionaire Ross Perot of the Reform Party, inflicted further damage on Bush. Perot’s campaign reinforced attacks on the incumbent administration as corrupt, elitist, and out of touch. When Bush’s negative ads attacked Clinton, voters shifted from Clinton to Perot rather than to Bush. Clinton carried 32 states in the most sweeping victory for any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964, although it was still only a plurality. Clinton won self-described independents and moderates, split the large baby boomer vote, and carried 84 percent of blacks. Single women turned out for Clinton, revealing a gender gap for Republicans. Perot’s 19 percent popular vote cut heavily into votes that Bush had won in 1988.
Clinton’s presidency reflected his experience as governor of Arkansas. During his governorship, he promoted pushing welfare recipients into the workforce through workfare and retraining programs. Welfare reform became one of his great accomplishments in his second term as president. National welfare reform under Clinton had been preceded also in Wisconsin, under Republican governor Tommy Thompson, thereby showing how states often provided the testing grounds for national agendas. During Clinton’s presidency, New York mayor Rudy Giuliani developed a community policing policy, which cut the crime rate dramatically. Other cities copied this concept of policing.
Although Clinton ran as a centrist Democrat, conservatives worried that he was not the moderate he claimed to be. Revelations during his campaign that he had a series of extramarital affairs reinforced their view that he lacked the character expected of a president. Clinton’s proposal to lift the ban on gays in the military (quickly withdrawn after Pentagon and public protest) and his proposal to nationalize health care through a program drafted by his wife, Hillary, convinced conservatives that he was a liberal hiding under moderate clothing. After twelve years of Republican presidents, Democrats were just relieved that they had reentered the White House, even if Clinton proclaimed he was a centrist in favor of a balanced budget, welfare reform, and only modest expansion of government.
An exceptionally adept politician, Clinton agreed to a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” compromise policy for gays in the military. He also retreated on national health insurance once it was clear it was not going to pass Congress. His major success came when he garnered Republican support to push through ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the fall of 1993, against the wishes of organized labor.
In 1994, Clinton found himself on the political defensive when he became ensnarled in three distinct scandals: a sexual harassment suit, an Arkansas land development deal, and allegations that his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, had benefited while in Arkansas from insider commodity trading. Conservatives exploited these scandals in 1994. At the same time, Newt Gingrich of Georgia and other conservatives in the House nationalized their campaign with the “Contract with America,” promising, if elected, to enact welfare reform, to balance the budget, and to downsize the regulatory state. Their campaign in the 1994 midterm elections drew support from a well-organized conservative movement and a cadre of right-wing talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh. The strategy paid off when Republicans captured both the House and the Senate. In this “Republican Revolution,” the party picked up fifty-four seats in the House and eight in the Senate. It was the first time in forty years they had a majority in the House. Newt Gingrich became Speaker.
Stunned by the midterms, Clinton moved to the right. At the same time, he skillfully attacked the Republicans’ proposed budget as hurting the poor. Clinton’s veto of the budget and the Republicans’ refusal to compromise caused a government shutdown, but an outraged public blamed the Republicans and forced them to back down. Gingrich had over-played his hand. In August 1996, Clinton signed a major welfare reform bill that barred mothers under eighteen from receiving benefits. This further weakened Republican charges that he was not a centrist.
Riding a crest of popularity against a weak Republican candidate, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, Clinton was reelected in 1996. He received, however, slightly less than 50 percent of the popular vote. (Ross Perot took 8 percent.) This defeat should have tempered conservatives. It did not. When investigators revealed that President Clinton had “inappropriate” relations with a White House intern—a charge he at first denied—House Republicans proceeded with impeachment charges. The American public, however, sided with Clinton. Americans were willing to forgive Clinton for his sexual transgressions, just as they had forgiven Grover Cleveland and Warren G. Harding earlier. In 1998, Republicans lost four seats in Congress, retaining a bare majority in both houses. Blamed for the defeat, Gingrich announced his resignation as House Speaker. After the election, the Senate voted not to convict the president, but the scandal left Clinton politically damaged. His greatest accomplishments were NAFTA, welfare reform, and balancing the budget, largely due to increased revenues from a booming economy.
Everyone knew that the 2000 presidential election was going to be tight. Few realized how tight until the final tally came in. George W. Bush, Texas governor and son of the former president, won the Republican nomination after brilliantly declaring himself a “compassionate conservative.” He understood that his base was conservative, while the public accepted the core of the welfare state. Democrats nominated Vice President Gore, the natural successor to Clinton. A booming economy favored Gore, but he refused to link himself closely to the Clinton administration because of the sex scandal. Instead playing on the strong economy, Gore frightened moderate voters by proposing thirty-nine new spending programs in his acceptance speech. He compounded his problems by fighting with Ralph Nader, who decided that Gore was a phony environmentalist and entered the race himself.
An additional 537 disputed votes in Florida would have given Gore the presidency. After three recounts, the election came down to a legal battle over ballots, resulting finally in a U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of Bush. Gore won the popular vote 48.4 to 47.8 percent but lost the Electoral College 271 to 266. The narrow margin of victory—and charges that he had stolen the election—damaged Bush from the moment he entered the White House. Democrats also ended up narrowly controlling the Senate. In this awkward political environment, the new president pushed a big tax cut and worked with Senator Ted Kennedy to draft the “No Child Left Behind” act linking federal education monies to educational performance standards.
On September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon changed the political landscape in America and had far-reaching global consequences. The following month, the United States and Western allies launched an invasion in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban Islamic regime, which had harbored Osama bin Laden, architect of the 9/11 attacks. While the regime fell, the allies became bogged down in a war of attrition and installing democracy proved difficult. The initial success in Afghanistan misled the Bush administration into thinking that an invasion of Iraq would lead to a similar quick result. The president’s forceful response to 9/11 and his rise in the polls carried over to the midterm elections of 2002, when Republicans regained the Senate. American troops, however, became bogged down in a sectarian war after Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein was overthrown.
In 2004, Bush won reelection against a weak Democratic candidate, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. The liberal Kerry’s claim to be a war hero in Vietnam came under withering attack from right-wing activists running negative television spots. Bush sailed easily into a second term, and Republicans increased their control of Congress. They appeared ascendant. Republicans in Congress, however, quickly squandered their modest mandate by pushing through self-serving legislation benefiting home districts. Bush’s perceived mishandling of a destructive hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico further hurt his public image. By 2006, Americans had grown war-weary. Democrats retook the House and effective control of the Senate in the midterms, a projection of things to come.
The drafters of the Constitution meeting in Philadelphia could not have imagined that more than two hundred years later Americans would elect a black to the presidency. The election was historic in other ways as well. The Democratic primaries pitted the first woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, against the first black, Barack Obama, seriously contending for the presidency. Tapping into strong antiwar sentiment, especially among youth, Obama won his party’s nomination. Republicans turned to U.S. Senator John McCain, a Vietnam War hero. On the campaign trail, the seventy-year-old, often fumbling McCain set a sharp contrast to the cool, highly articulate Obama. The Obama campaign raised record Wall Street money and outspent McCain two to one, micro-targeting voters. The election set a record for the most expensive in American history. Turnout increased, largely among minority voters.
Whatever chances McCain might have had were dashed in mid-September when the American financial system collapsed. The federal government merged several banks and took control of federally sponsored mortgage lenders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In the crisis, the Bush administration persuaded Congress to pass the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) that provided $700 billion to bail out troubled financial companies. Obama easily defeated McCain, receiving 365 electoral votes to McCain’s 173. Democrats expanded their control of the House and took the Senate. Obama’s share of the popular vote—53 percent—was high but not historic. Nonetheless he was the first Democrat to receive more than 50 percent since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. His campaign tapped into war weariness, environmentalism, national health care reform, and high hopes for a postpartisan, postracial country.
Obama entered the White House in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. With the support of a Democratic Congress, he undertook a bailout of automobile giants General Motors and Chrysler, passed a $700 billion-plus economic stimulus bill, and enacted a controversial compulsory health insurance plan, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He gradually drew down American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama’s program won widespread support among Democrats but outraged the grassroots right already angry about TARP and the bailout of Wall Street. These conservatives responded by organizing protests on the local level through Tea Party organizations, which used Revolutionary War images of American patriots dumping taxed British tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773.
The volatility of American politics was evident in the 2010 midterms when Republicans retook the House; they gained a historic sixty-three seats, giving them a majority of 262 seats. They also gained six seats in the U.S. Senate to hold forty-seven seats. Republicans now had their largest majority in the House since 1946, although Democrats kept control of the Senate. These Republican gains came at the expense of moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans, sharpening ideological polarization in Congress. As a result, Republicans in Congress moved farther to the right, heightening polarization in Washington.
10. In response to George W. Bush’s bailout of the financial industry in 2008 and Barack Obama’s Affordable Health Care and Patient Protection Act in 2010, grassroots protesters calling themselves the Tea Party challenged establishment Republicans and Democrats. These protesters played upon the theme of early American revolutionaries.
Obama won election in 2008 promising to end political polarization. In his bid for reelection in 2012, he reversed course to undertake a highly partisan attack on his opponent, Mitt Romney, a wealthy financier and former Massachusetts governor. Both parties blamed the other side for polarized politics, but whoever was to blame, there was no doubt that partisan politics remained as tumultuous as ever. Republicans in Congress, especially the House, had become more conservative, while moderate Democrats dwindled in their party caucus. Although the American economy had continued to sputter following the 2008 collapse, Obama convinced voters that things might have been worse if he had not provided leadership in this crisis. He downplayed the historic enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) to warn that Romney represented the return of George W. Bush, whose policies had gotten America into the mess it was in. He rallied his base of urban voters, single women, and ethnic minorities to win a close reelection with 51 percent of the popular vote. He faced languid economic growth, continuation of global financial problems, scandals within the administration, and gridlock in government.
The Founders feared factions and political parties as subversive to a harmonious representative republic. From an historical perspective, factions and parties appear to be an inevitable result of democracy. In the twenty-first century, America, it seemed, was entering into a new era marked by political and financial volatility and international turmoil. Many American voters appeared increasingly disenchanted with both political parties and anxiously awaited new leadership and new solutions in a world far different from the eighteenth-century world of the American founders.