Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
—Ronald Reagan
THE DAY RONALD REAGAN WAS SWORN INTO OFFICE, JANUARY 20, 1981, the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini set fifty-two American embassy employees free after 444 days of captivity. It was a bittersweet moment for Jimmy Carter, who had spent over a year negotiating the hostages’ release. The timing was clearly an affront to Carter, but the embassy staff, like Carter himself that day, was finally going home.
To his credit, Reagan took no responsibility for the release of the hostages, but he benefited nonetheless. The embassy captives had become emblematic of the last year of the Carter administration. The public saw a great superpower being held hostage by soaring gas prices, runaway inflation, towering interest rates, and Iranian thugs. The entire nation was in a sour mood. Now the hostages were free and a new, optimistic president was heading to the White House. Americans seemed ready for almost anything but the status quo.
Reagan’s signature legislation involved cutting federal spending while at the same time lowering federal tax rates. At the core of the Reagan plan was an economic theory called “supply-side economics.” This view claimed that cutting income taxes would eventually increase federal receipts. More money, the proponents argued, would be available for spending and investment, creating a “trickle-down” effect throughout the economy, producing more income for individuals and thus more tax revenue. To make up for revenue losses in the short term, significant budget cuts would be required to avoid further federal deficits that were already too high for most conservative Republicans. Reagan got most of the tax cuts he wanted, but the budget cuts were mostly accounting smoke and mirrors. In any event, Democrats (and many congressional Republicans) restored most of the Reagan budget cuts, especially money for entitlements.
Democrats didn’t like Reagan’s tax cuts. The major beneficiaries were in the high-income brackets and most of them were Republicans. They resisted rich people getting tax cuts while Social Security benefits were reduced. Social Security, the most important program that remained from the New Deal, affects more Americans than any other federal program. As far as Democrats were concerned, it was their legacy.
The battle between Democrats and Republicans over Reagan’s tax and budget cuts caused taxes and Social Security to dominate domestic politics, becoming polarizing issues for years to come. While taxes would serve as the rallying cry for Republicans, protecting social Security was at the heart of the Democrats’ domestic agenda.
The 1982 elections marked the twenty-eighth consecutive year the Republicans were a minority in the United States House of Representatives. Aging House Republican leaders had grown accustomed to this status. But in 1978 and 1980 a number of younger GOP members had been elected who were decidedly more conservative and impatient than their elders. These young conservatives were led by a firebrand congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich.
As their nominee for the 1984 presidential election, the Democrats chose former vice president Walter Mondale, but not before he faced a stronger-than-expected challenge from Colorado senator Gary Hart and the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Hart pounded Mondale as an old-fashioned liberal beholden to the party’s interest groups, especially organized labor. This was audacious considering that Hart had been George McGovern’s very liberal campaign manager in 1972. Jackson was the first black to run a major campaign for president, forcing Mondale to emphasize big government programs in order to appeal to Jackson’s base. Despite making a historic decision to choose the first female vice-presidential candidate—Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of New York—Mondale came to his convention tired and bloodied after a yearlong battle against Hart and Jackson.
Reagan was reelected in one of the greatest landslides in history. The Democrats lost seventeen seats in the House and two seats in the Senate. Despite the landslide, 1984 had the largest incumbent reelection percentage of any in history to that point. Of the 435 House members, 392 were reelected. In the Senate, 93 of 100 members returned to the next session of Congress. As we shall see, the reelection of incumbents would grow to unbelievable levels as Democrats and Republicans, in one of the few areas they could agree on, colluded to fix district lines for incumbents.
One Senate race that year in North Carolina pitted incumbent Jesse Helms—the unreconstructed right-wing Republican—against Democratic governor Jim Hunt. It was the first campaign in which negative television advertising by both sides outpaced positive ads. The ads of one candidate would be answered within twenty-four hours by the other. In the end, Helms, who won, spent nearly $17 million. Hunt spent almost $10 million. Both were records for a Senate campaign. The Helms–Hunt race led to the growing force of consultants and negative messages that were early indicators of the polarization in American politics.
The new Congress elected in 1984 would preside over the last major bipartisan legislative achievements before extreme partisanship settled in and stayed. Budget legislation for the first time set limits on federal spending with requirements to find cuts to match any spending increases. The most significant tax reform bill since 1961 dropped the highest tax rate on income to 25 percent, and closed major loopholes in the tax code. The Social Security Trust Fund, which was rapidly being depleted, was salvaged when President Reagan and Congress agreed on increasing Social Security taxes and gradually raising the retirement age. When Ronald Reagan signed this legislation, the president who hated taxes would approve the largest tax increase in history.
In 1986 an immigration bill that granted amnesty to the roughly 3 million illegal immigrants already in the country, and put sanctions on employers who hired illegals, was signed into law by President Reagan. Ironically, twenty years later immigration would reemerge as a pivotal issue in the polarization of politics. Amnesty, applauded by the conservative hero Reagan, would become the poll-tested, conservative catchword used to undermine immigration reform.
An important event in 1985 underscored a growing tolerance in America for different lifestyles. Actor Rock Hudson, the handsome leading-man heartthrob of millions of aging American women, announced that he was gay and dying of a then relatively new disease called AIDS. The public reaction, from Nancy Reagan to Americans across the country, was one of sympathy and support. Hudson’s announcement brought the AIDS virus to the public’s attention at a time when very few outside the gay community had even heard of the disease.
Prior to Hudson’s public disclosure, the Reagan administration had been under fire by liberals for ignoring AIDS. When the HIV virus began to spread in the early 1980s, it was thought to be a disease contracted only by gays. Given that gays were a solidly Democratic voting block and anathema to Christian conservatives, liberals charged that the administration had little interest in devoting resources to combat the disease.
There is some truth to the allegation, but Reagan himself was not at fault. He had been an actor for decades in California and counted among his good friends many gay actors. Reagan was never as intolerant as the left portrayed him. On the other hand, he did cultivate the conservative Christian community, which made their feelings known about AIDS, or the “gay plague,” as the Reverend Pat Robertson and some other Christian leaders referred to the disease. Given the influence of conservative churches, liberals might be excused for suggesting a conspiracy of silence by some in Reagan’s administration.
The cultural tolerance that pervaded America in the 1980s was in stark contrast to the great cultural divides of the sixties and seventies. The public seemed to adopt a disposition of live and let live. America was becoming more culturally diverse and people were much more accepting of different lifestyles as long as those lifestyles did not negatively affect them, their families, or their community.
What Americans were witnessing in these few years was not the end of the storms that had swept across the country during the previous two decades, but rather a brief respite before the unpredictable turbulence that would follow. Like the eye of a hurricane, which can give an amateur a false sense that the storm has passed, Americans began to convince themselves that they were secure. In fact, they had survived the dangerous outer bands that precede a hurricane’s calm center only to be catapulted back into the storm still raging just beyond the calm of the eye.