Democrats preferred not to face the evidence that their guiding light of half a century—the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt and its successor mutations from Truman through Carter and Mondale—had been all but snuffed out by the voters as the preferred framework for governmental policy at the national level.
—JACK GERMOND AND JULES WITCOVER, WAKE US WHEN IT’S OVER
Those Democrats who are seriously interested in the future of their party should be ready to consider the fact, however unwelcome, that it is the Republicans who in recent years have been appealing to masses of voters who have considered themselves disenfranchised.
—HENRY FAIRLIE, THE NEW REPUBLIC, APRIL 25, 1983
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, the year George Orwell made ominous, is remembered politically as the year of Ronald Reagan’s triumphant landslide reelection, in which he won forty-nine states and 59 percent of the popular vote. The magnitude of this win—the fourth-largest landslide in history—obscures the fact that, in contrast to his 1980 victory, Reagan had short coattails. Republicans picked up only fourteen House seats and lost ground in the Senate. In this respect Reagan’s landslide was like Nixon’s solitary landslide in 1972, and unlike the landslides of FDR in 1936 and Lyndon Johnson in 1964, both of which translated into significant party gains that enabled major policy changes in their aftermath. This anomaly attracted little notice among journalists at the time, and with few exceptions has escaped the scrutiny of political scientists and historians since.1
Reagan had better instincts about the matter. At a campaign stop on November 3 in Little Rock, he said:
I’m telling you quite frankly that if a gypsy were to look into her crystal ball and say, “Mr. President, you can either win easily on Tuesday, or win with fewer votes, but with a Congress that will help you,” I would choose the latter, because if we’re to solidify our gains, the gains we’ve made in these past 4 years, we’ll need a Congress that will allow us to move forward—a Congress that won’t insist on going back to the bad old days and the bad old ways.
This kind of sharp partisan argument was rare, however, and with the outcome of the election beyond doubt by late October, it received little national media attention. Reagan’s political team, meanwhile, never incorporated such partisan appeals into the campaign strategy or advertising messages; instead, like Nixon’s team in 1972, they campaigned for a personal victory for the president, and a personal victory is exactly what they got. It was a sound, prudent, and sensible political strategy from a conventional point of view. It was also a mistake of historic proportions. The strategy of the 1984 Reagan campaign to run a defensive campaign—the political equivalent of the four-corner stall in basketball—represents one of the greatest lost opportunities in American politics to break the opposition party and bring about a lasting and fundamental realignment. A closer look at the political dynamics of that infamous year shows how and why.
* * *
THERE WAS A Groundhog Day element to the beginning of 1984. Once again, Congress and the White House were facing a bleak budget cycle, with a deficit projected for the next fiscal year approaching 5 percent of GDP—a peacetime record. A grim fact was inescapable: the Reagan administration was not having much luck containing the growth of federal spending. Reagan’s proposed budget for fiscal year 1985 projected an 8 percent increase in total spending at a time when inflation was less than 4 percent. Much of this was driven by automatic entitlement programs beyond the easy reach of the president, but there was no mood in Congress to reform these programs. Many conservatives were restless. Republican senator William Armstrong of Colorado complained: “What’s the sense of having a Republican administration and a Republican Senate if the best we can do is a $200 billion deficit?”
Democrats attempted to make the budget deficit an issue for the upcoming presidential campaign, but Republicans, fearful of playing into the hands of the fairness issue, declined to put up much of a fight about reducing federal spending. Some of Reagan’s top aides, such as James Baker, Richard Darman, and David Stockman, felt defensive about the record deficit, since Reagan’s 1980 promise to balance the budget by 1984 now looked ludicrous. On January 2, the president’s chief economic adviser, Martin Feldstein, sent Reagan a memo (which was promptly leaked to the Washington Post) calling for tax increases of up to $50 billion a year for the next three years. Conservatives and supply-siders stepped up their public demand that Feldstein be fired. Senator Bob Dole wanted to reprise his role in the 1982 tax increase, proposing a dollar-for-dollar package of spending cuts and tax increases. Reagan wasn’t going to bite on that sucker’s deal again. Newt Gingrich complained: “People like Dole and Domenici spend all their time running around trying to feed the liberal welfare state they inherited.”
Yet the deficit issue was a lost opportunity. One poll from the time found that 59 percent of the public thought Congress was more responsible than the president for the budget deficit, suggesting the vulnerability of Congress should Reagan have decided to attack. And the White House had a tool in hand for carrying on such an argument. Early in the year the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, chaired by legendary businessman J. Peter Grace, produced a forty-seven-volume, twenty-three-thousand-page report detailing $424 billion in potential savings without cutting any social programs.2 Calling the federal government “the worst-run enterprise in America,” the Grace Commission, as it was known, itemized more than twenty-seven hundred examples of poor management and idiotic waste. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was paying Medicare benefits to more than eight thousand dead people; the army spent $4.20 to issue each payroll check, compared to $1 in the private sector; the Government Printing Office wasted $96 million a year in postage sending publications (including such indispensable titles as How to Serve Nuts) to incorrect addresses; the Justice Department failed to deposit seized drug money in interest-bearing accounts; the Veterans Administration spent more than $100 to process a single medical claim, compared to $3 to $6 for private insurance companies. If all the Grace Commission’s recommendations were followed, the deficit would fall by half.3
Reagan mentioned the Grace Commission findings in his State of the Union speech in January but did not return to the theme in the fall campaign.
The White House staff was never enthusiastic about the Grace Commission. At the announcement of one early meeting, an anonymous White House aide (probably Darman or someone in his office) told the Washington Post that he hoped the meeting would be held in Siberia. David Gergen, who left his job as White House communications director at the beginning of 1984, remarked to the media in March, “The [Reagan] Administration in the second term must either raise taxes and stretch out defense increases or face an end to recovery.” But the president didn’t get the memo. “Stockman & Feldstein plus others want a tax increase,” Reagan noted in his diary on January 9. “I think they are wrong as h—l.”
The rapidly expanding economy overshadowed deficit anxiety. Unemployment was still above 7 percent but had fallen for thirteen months in a row by the start of the year. Moreover, the recovery had gained so much speed in 1983 that by the end of the year, four million new jobs had been generated, the largest one-year jump in employment in the nation’s history. It was more jobs than Canada had created since 1965, more than the British economy had generated between 1950 and 1982, and as many as Japan had created during the entire decade of the 1970s. The Index of Leading Economic Indicators rose in eleven of the twelve months of 1983. As the new year opened, it appeared economic growth was still gaining speed. First-quarter 1984 growth came in at an annual rate of 7.2 percent (for the full year, real GDP growth would clock in at 6.8 percent, the fastest rate of growth in thirty-four years); housing starts were at their highest level in six years, up 28 percent over a year earlier. Inflation remained tame, running at less than 3 percent.
Looking ahead to the election, Dan Rather gratuitously pointed out on the CBS Evening News that by the end of a second term Reagan would be seventy-eight, the same age at which Churchill was “senile” but presiding over the decline of the British Empire in the mid-1950s. But more Americans took in Reagan on the cover of Parade magazine lifting weights in the White House gym shortly before his seventy-third birthday in February. Parade skipped over the fact that the president had begun wearing a hearing aid in one ear. Since the assassination attempt in 1981, Reagan had added nearly two inches to his chest from his daily workouts on a weight machine. The bulletproof vest he wore under his shirt for public appearances added to his upper-body profile. Reagan’s mood matched the vigor of the economy. He wrote in his diary in late January: “I’m embarrassed even writing this but I feel good at the same time. There is a respect for the U.S. abroad that wasn’t there just a few years ago.” A few days later, on January 29, Reagan formally announced his candidacy for reelection.
With the economy clearly heading into a vigorous boom during the second half of 1983, Reagan was now a strong favorite for reelection. A New York Times/CBS News poll taken early in the new year found that for the first time in nearly a decade a majority of Americans thought things were going well and would improve in the future.4 Reagan’s approval rating was up sharply; one poll had his approval rating at 56 percent, the highest for a fourth-year president since Eisenhower in 1956. “This recovery was unprecedented,” public opinion specialists Charles Ostrom and Dennis Simon wrote in Public Opinion Quarterly. “For the first time in the history of the Gallup poll, a president fell below 40% and then rose to sustain a level above 50%.”5
The coming year would see a number of milestones. Pete Rose got his four-thousandth hit, and Reggie Jackson hit his five-hundreth home run. Milk cartons became bulletin boards for photos of missing children. Chrysler, rejuvenated from its near-death condition in 1979 thanks to large, federally guaranteed bank loans (which had been repaid ahead of schedule), brought the first minivan to the market, the Dodge Caravan. Bruce Springsteen rejected a large offer from Chrysler to allow his hit single “Born in the USA” to be used in an ad campaign for the Caravan. Reagan would make reference to “Born in the USA” in his fall campaign, much to the annoyance of the very Left-minded Springsteen. Cell phones were starting to become available, but at a retail cost of several thousand dollars. Clarkson University in New York became one of the first institutions of higher education to require that all incoming freshmen purchase a computer. Sometime around midyear, McDonald’s sold its fifty-billionth hamburger. The median price of a new home reached $100,000 for the first time. The One Minute Manager, a 106-page speed read that was perfect for the short attention span of fast-paced yuppie junior executives, was a surprise bestseller. Newsweek declared 1984 to be the “Year of the Yuppie.” Major publications such as the New Republic began imitating a fashion that began in academia of using she instead of he as a generic pronoun. The Cosby Show, starring comedian Bill Cosby, was the top-rated TV show; in portraying blacks as middle-class professionals, it was distinct from The Jeffersons in the 1970s, and was taken as a sign of the declining salience of race in American culture, despite the histrionics of Jesse Jackson. In Hollywood, twenty-seven-year-old first-time director James Cameron was readying a high-concept time travel story to be called The Terminator, and the production studio was considering O.J. Simpson for the starring role. Simpson was rejected because, according to a studio executive, “People wouldn’t have believed a nice guy like O.J. playing the part of a ruthless killer.” Instead they cast Austrian bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, fresh off his first major movie role in Conan the Barbarian.
* * *
WHILE THE TERMINATOR represented the latest iteration of the recurrent phobia about technology and progress that stretched back at least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the rollover of the calendar to 1984 made it inevitable that another such dystopian vision would become topical—George Orwell’s famous novel of that year. A brief excursion into the intellectual contortions that the book’s anniversary prompted offers a useful window into the decayed Cold War-weary state of Western thought on the eve of Reagan’s reelection campaign.
Intellectuals on the left tried to leverage Orwell’s socialist sympathies to suggest that he would have been a Cold War dissenter (even though Orwell may have originated the term), an implausible case that would collapse completely in the 1990s when it emerged that Orwell had quietly named names of Communist sympathizers to Britain’s counterintelligence service.6 There was the predictable refrain that 1984 was “really about us too,” but it takes a high degree or moral obtuseness to equate the situation in the United States with Communist totalitarianism. The West German author Johanno Strasser was up to the job, writing: “Whoever reads Orwell’s book again nowadays cannot comfort himself so easily any more with the thought that all this has nothing to do with the reality in which we live…. Is this not the world that is planned and developed in the head offices of large corporations and in government bureaucracies? … [W]e must read Orwell quite differently nowadays. The menace hovering over the eighties is not total dominance by some fanatical party elite, but rather the progressive undermining of democracy by the silent dictatorship of forces inherent in our society.”7 Other writers pointed to Watergate as an example of Orwell’s nightmare come to life in the West, conveniently forgetting that America’s constitutional order quickly and peaceably righted itself.
This is exactly the kind of obfuscating exegesis that Orwell set himself against during his lifetime. Writing in Harper’s, Norman Podhoretz argued that Orwell would have become a neoconservative: “If he were alive today, he would find the very ideas and attitudes against which he so fearlessly argued more influential than ever in left-wing centers of opinion: that the freedoms of the West are relatively unimportant as compared with other values; that war is the greatest of all evils; that nothing is worth fighting or dying for; and that the Soviet Union is basically defensive and peaceful.”8
Ordinarily these kinds of arguments cannot be resolved, but in this case popular culture trumped arguendo Orwell in the most unlikely of venues—the Super Bowl. Apple Computer placed a lavishly produced sixty-second ad during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII in late January, directed by Ridley Scott, fresh off his feature film triumphs Alien and Blade Runner. The ad featured an auditorium of gray-clad men with shaved heads listening hypnotically to an Orwellian Big Brother figure on a large theater screen:
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification of Thought is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people. With one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!9
The trance is broken when a woman in orange shorts and white tank top (the only character in color) runs to the front of the auditorium and throws a sledgehammer through the theater screen, whereupon the voice-over narrative says, “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”
The ad almost did not air. Some of Apple’s board of directors were nervous about the ad and wanted to scrap it, but Apple’s management went ahead. It was an obvious slap at IBM (though Apple denied this): Big Blue’s new mainframe was supposed to be the technological equivalent of Orwell’s Big Brother. Though the ad ran nationally only this one time, Advertising Age would later name the spot “Commercial of the Decade.” Ironically, in 1984 there began to come into view the liberating effect of technology, which would play a role in the downfall of the Soviet tyranny that had inspired Orwell’s dark vision.
That the argument over Orwell’s meaning and legacy was not merely a literary and intellectual sideshow was made evident in February when the Oxford Union hosted a debate on the question of the moral equivalence of East and West: “Resolved—that there is no moral difference between the world policies of the United States and the Soviet Union.” Ordinarily an Oxford debate would pass without much notice in the wider world (excepting the infamous wrongheaded resolution from 1933 that “this House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country”), but one of the debaters against the resolution happened to be the defense secretary of the United States, Caspar Weinberger. Against the wishes of the State Department and some White House political advisers, Weinberger accepted the Oxford Union’s invitation, thereby ensuring that the event would receive wide attention.
Weinberger showed up in the Oxford Union standard black tie, while his principal opponent, the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson, disdained formal wear and appeared in his professor’s garb instead. Thompson told Weinberger that he considered black tie another mark of class distinction, and Weinberger scored the first debating point before the formal program began by replying, “On the contrary; my father used to say that black tie was the most democratic of all costumes, because everybody wore exactly the same thing.”
Thompson and his team, which included a rising Oxford student named Andrew Sullivan, made the usual leftist point that U.S. support for authoritarian rulers such as Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines was no different from Soviet rule over Eastern Europe, along with the standard refrain about militarism. Weinberger effectively parried by noting that a debate such as this was not possible in the Soviet Union, and that democratic nations could control their foreign policies through the ballot box. The audience voted Weinberger the winner, rejecting the motion by a vote of 271–232. The frivolous posturing of 1933 was not going to be repeated. It was a significant win in the arena of public argument.
* * *
THERE WAS AN obvious irony to Weinberger’s core argument that democracies can change their foreign policy through the ballot box. This was exactly what most concerned Reagan’s political team. Polls showed continuing nervousness among voters about Reagan’s foreign policy acumen. One Gallup poll early in the year reported that 49 percent disapproved of Reagan’s handling of foreign policy, with only 38 percent approving. (The same polls, however, showed that a majority of voters agreed with Reagan’s assessment of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.”) A bumper sticker popular with the Left read: REAGAN ’84/WAR ’85. Pollster Daniel Yankelovich commented: “Reagan has proved that he can be tough, but he has not yet proved that he can be a peacemaker. It is unlikely that this issue will escape bitter and partisan debate in an election year.”
Reagan, however, was about to move on to a new phase of his diplomatic strategy that would begin to assuage public anxiety. On January 16, he gave a major televised speech (broadcast at 10:00 a.m. so that it could be viewed in prime time in Europe) in which he broke noticeably with the tough tone of his speeches from the previous year. Its overall rhetorical emphasis was on conciliation and flexibility. For example: “We must and will engage the Soviets in dialogue as serious and constructive as possible…. We will negotiate in good faith. Whenever the Soviet Union is ready to do likewise, we’ll meet them halfway.”
As Reagan explained in his diary entry for that day, “The speech was carefully crafted by all of us to counter Soviet propaganda that we are not sincere in wanting arms reductions or peace.” The reference to “all of us” is significant, because Reagan wrote the peroration at the end of the speech that was its most memorable part: an imaginary conversation between an American couple and a Soviet couple in which the fundamental political differences between the two regimes dissolved into irrelevance.
Just suppose with me for a moment that an Ivan and an Anya could find themselves, oh, say, in a waiting room, or sharing a shelter from the rain or a storm with a Jim and Sally, and there was no language barrier to keep them from getting acquainted. Would they then debate the differences between their respective governments? Or would they find themselves comparing notes about their children and what each other did for a living? Before they parted company, they would probably have touched on ambitions and hobbies and what they wanted for their children and problems of making ends meet. And as they went their separate ways, maybe Anya would be saying to Ivan, “Wasn’t she nice? She also teaches music.” Or Jim would be telling Sally what Ivan did or didn’t like about his boss. They might even have decided they were all going to get together for dinner some evening soon. Above all, they would have proven that people don’t make wars. People want to raise their children in a world without fear and without war…. Their common interests cross all borders.
This vintage Reagan fable is clearly problematic—while Ivan would tell Jim what he didn’t like about his boss, would he feel as free to tell Jim what he didn’t like about his rulers? It was this and other qualities that led observers across the political spectrum to interpret the speech as a pure election-year gambit to address Reagan’s political vulnerabilities on foreign affairs. “Ronald Reagan is making fools of the American people,” the New Republic editorialized about the speech. “Politics is all that the President’s reasonableness is about…. The public knows when it is being pandered to.”10 The Nation huffed: “No Nielsen [rating] will say whether it played in Novosibirsk, but the show must have got good numbers in Nebraska.”11 Henry Kissinger would write a while later that “the administration is now involved in an essentially irrevocable process indistinguishable from what used to be called détente.”
This interpretation of the speech was understandable, given that Reagan’s “evil empire” phrase was still reverberating in countless media treatments of Reagan and the Soviets (and would continue as a dominant media theme for the rest of Reagan’s presidency). No one outside a tight circle of aides knew of Reagan’s growing worry over the possibility of an accidental war and his sincere—and intense—desire to engage a Soviet leader in face-to-face talks. The January 16 speech had, in fact, been in the works at least since November and is said to have been intended for delivery before the end of the year, but was delayed at the recommendation of Mrs. Reagan’s astrologist.12
Moreover, a close reading of the speech indicates that Reagan saw that his grand strategy of waiting patiently for the rebuilding of American credibility had paid off and that he was ready to move on to a new phase. The speech opened with a recitation of the Soviet arms buildup of the 1970s, now matched by the United States. Reagan then said: “America’s recovery may have taken Soviet leaders by surprise. They may have counted on us to keep weakening ourselves. They’ve been saying for years that our demise was inevitable. They said it so often they probably started believing it. Well, if so, they can see now they were wrong.” To reverse Reagan’s famous formula, now that the strength part of the equation had been addressed, it was possible to move on to the peace side of the ledger.
The Soviets, not for the first or last time, adopted the same line as the Western press and dismissed the speech as a political stunt, despite Reagan’s various direct overtures to open a quiet back-channel means of resuming diplomacy. The following day the Conference on Disarmament in Europe opened in Stockholm, where Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko delivered what George Shultz called “a truly brutal speech” excoriating the United States: “The incumbent U.S. administration is an administration thinking in categories of war and acting accordingly. Naturally, those who have assumed a course of war have no interest in reaching arms limitation agreements.” In a previously scheduled five-hour face-to-face meeting at the Soviet embassy, Shultz told Gromyko that his language was “outrageous,” “beyond the pale,” and “unacceptable.” “It was an ugly dialogue,” Shultz recalled, but Gromyko blinked on a couple of points: he agreed to return to Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks on conventional forces, and he also opened the door a crack to resuming missile negotiations. Shultz sensed that the Soviets were looking for a way of coming back to the table without losing face. Despite the lingering bitterness, “[T]his had been my best meeting with Gromyko by miles,” Shultz judged afterward.13
The question of where U.S.-Soviet relations were headed was made freshly acute just a few weeks later, on February 9, when Yuri Andropov died. Reagan again declined to make the trip to Moscow for the funeral; some of his political advisers thought it would seem like a crass election-year gesture, while Reagan said simply, “I don’t want to honor that prick.”14 So Vice President Bush had to pack his bags again. The Left used Andropov’s death as an occasion to blame Reagan for the tense state of relations. The Nation editorialized: “If Yuri Andropov’s fifteen-month leadership of the Soviet nation was anything more than a blip on the world historical screen, it was because of the extraordinary explosion of American enmity in that period.” George McGovern, then in the midst of making a nostalgic run for the Democratic presidential nomination, channeled the Nation with this encomium to the former KGB chief: “It is a modern tragedy that one of the Soviet Union’s most intelligent and realistic leaders has served and died during the Administration of the most ill-informed and dangerous man ever to occupy the White House. We can only hope and pray that a realistic leader will come forward in the Soviet Union and that the American people will end Ronald Reagan’s reign of error in 1984.”
Seventy-three-year-old Konstantin Chernenko was quickly anointed as Andropov’s successor. His background was every bit as unnerving as Andropov’s: Chernenko had been a commissar in Stalin’s NKVD secret police organization between 1938 and 1941, where, according to some accounts, he presided over several mass executions. Though not quite as obviously frail as Andropov had been, he suffered from emphysema and had trouble standing through Andropov’s lengthy funeral ceremonies. A popular joke around Moscow had it that Chernenko’s staff held a mirror to his nose every morning to determine if he was still breathing. Kremlin watchers assumed Chernenko was a caregiver, with a younger generation of Politburo members maneuvering for the top job after him. He didn’t seem a likely reformer. Chernenko had told the Central Committee in June 1983: “There are some truths which are not subject to revision, problems that have been solved long ago and unequivocally.” But Vice President Bush and the American delegation that met with Chernenko found him lucid, loquacious, and forthcoming about negotiating with the United States.
Ten days later Reagan received a letter from Chernenko, warmer in tone than any of Andropov’s letters but containing no new concrete ideas. Reagan scribbled in the margin: “I think this calls for a very well thought out reply and not just a routine acknowledgment that leaves the status quo as is.” Reagan wrote in his diary on March 1 of his “gut feeling” that the time had come for a face-to-face meeting with his Soviet counterpart, and the next day he wrote, “I’m convinced the time has come for me to meet with Chernenko along about July.” The State Department produced a seven-page letter for Reagan’s signature with the standard Foggy Bottom talking points about negotiating flexibility and proposals for “confidence-building” agreements. Reagan transmitted the letter to Chernenko on March 7 but included a handwritten postscript in which he assured Chernenko that “neither I nor the American people hold any offensive intentions toward the Soviet people” and proclaimed his desire for a summit.15
Chernenko—or rather the Foreign Ministry writing in his name—wrote back less than two weeks later, slamming the door on a summit and resuming the frosty tone of Andropov’s communiqués. Moscow also rebuffed efforts to open a back channel for quiet diplomacy, rudely treating several American intermediaries whom Shultz had been led to believe would be received seriously. Jack Matlock, then serving on the NSC, observed, “The Soviet leadership had obviously decided not to deal seriously with Reagan during the 1984 election year lest they inadvertently help his campaign for reelection.” In fact, the KGB was instructed to do whatever it could to impede Reagan’s reelection and attempted a number of dirty tricks worthy of Nixon’s campaign goons, including producing carefully doctored tapes of Reagan purporting to threaten U.S. nuclear strikes on our European allies. In May the Soviet Union stepped up the pressure, announcing that it would boycott the Summer Olympics being held in Los Angeles—retaliation for the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympics in 1980.
Reagan’s overtures for a summit and a back channel for quiet diplomacy had been orchestrated with the strictest secrecy inside the White House to prevent leaks to the media. Meanwhile, Walter Mondale had criticized Reagan for being the first president in decades not to have held a summit with a Soviet leader, saying in January, “If I were President, I’d get on that hot line and I’d say this: ‘Dear Mr. Andropov, please meet me in Geneva this afternoon, and let’s sit down and do some work to bring some easing of tensions.’” No one outside the White House knew how hard Reagan was trying to do exactly that.
* * *
SOVIET RELATIONS WERE not Reagan’s only foreign policy vulnerability heading into the election. In February Reagan decided to cut his losses in Lebanon. The Lebanese government and its army were collapsing under the pressure of Syrian-backed Shiite militia violence, and in the aftermath of the Beirut barracks bombing the previous October, U.S. Marines were living underground in dispersed locations, an ineffective fighting force. As the New Republic commented, “[T]he President sent in too few Marines to fight and too many to die.” American attempts at retaliation for the bombing came to nothing, while Syria killed one American airman and captured another in a halfhearted aerial bombing raid. Reagan suffered the embarrassment of having the airman’s release brokered by Jesse Jackson.16
More important politically was that the American presence in Lebanon was increasingly unpopular at home. Polls showed rising public opposition to keeping marines in Lebanon, and congressional Democrats, most of whom had voted back in September to authorize the policy for eighteen months, opportunistically changed their mind. Congressional Republicans were also nervous and communicated their anxiety to the White House. (One of the Republicans most vocally apprehensive was freshman Arizona congressman John McCain, who had voted against the House resolution backing the Lebanon deployment.) House Speaker Tip O’Neill, whose support of the mission had been crucial just three months before, now promised to support a House resolution calling for the “prompt withdrawal” of the United States from Lebanon. Reagan initially reacted sharply: “He may be ready to surrender, but I’m not.”
But Reagan’s foreign policy team had almost unanimously reached the opposite conclusion, including Shultz, who had hitherto been the strongest voice in favor of the American military presence. Lou Cannon records Shultz remarking in a National Security Council meeting, “If I ever say send in the Marines again, somebody shoot me.”17 Reagan reluctantly agreed with his national security team’s recommendation that the marines be “redeployed” to navy ships offshore. This term of art fooled no one. “Redeployment” was understood as a euphemism for withdrawal. The last marines left Beirut on February 26.
There is no doubt that ending the unpopular deployment was a short-term political boon to Reagan, but the president understood the costs of withdrawal. Before reversing course Reagan had warned, “If we get out, it means the end of Lebanon…. If we cut and run, we’ll be sending one signal to terrorists everywhere.” The New Republic, for once nearly as hawkish as the conservative press, warned that “as with Vietnam and Iran, the United States will also suffer long-term consequences, in terms of shaken confidence among allies and encouragement to U.S. enemies.”18 Over on the right, Human Events lamented that “this country has virtually given up the struggle to create a viable, pro-Western Lebanon…. The results are likely to be a bitter blow to the West.” Indeed, Islamic radicals took to heart the lesson that delivering a blow to American forces would suffice to drive them from the region. In the fullness of time Osama bin Laden and the post-2003 insurgents in Iraq would show that they had learned the lesson.
But the United States didn’t have to wait that long for its troubles in Lebanon to intensify. Two weeks after the last marine departed the shores of Beirut, Islamic terrorists kidnapped Jeremy Levin, CNN’s Beirut bureau chief. A larger blow hit the following week, when the CIA’s station chief, William Buckley, was kidnapped. Over the coming weeks the CIA frantically tried to locate and rescue Buckley, without success. The agency couldn’t even manage to track down top Islamic militants implicated in the kidnappings. Twelve more Americans would be kidnapped in Beirut over the coming months; it was a slow-motion Middle East hostage crisis for Reagan.
Reagan had thought he was extricating himself from Lebanon. He would soon recognize that he could not.
* * *
CENTRAL AMERICA WAS the other festering foreign policy problem. In January the Kissinger Commission issued its report, which affirmed three things of particular concern to Reagan: that Central America was a “vital interest” to the United States, that El Salvador should receive increased military assistance, and that Nicaragua was a destabilizing force in the region (the members of the commission had visited Managua and been shocked at the Sandinistas’ brazen portrayal of their strategic orientation).19 Despite the last conclusion, however, the report avoided addressing the “highly controversial question” of Contra aid. Instead, the most eye-grabbing part of the report was its recommendation that the United States devote at least $8 billion in economic aid to Central America over the next five years—a Central American Marshall Plan. The idea was dead on arrival in a supposedly deficit-conscious Congress, though it had the value of calling the bluff of liberals who claimed that addressing economic “root causes” should be the cornerstone of U.S. policy.
In the end the Kissinger Commission report, despite the group’s prominent Democratic members, did little to soften liberal opposition to Reagan’s Central American policy. Senator Ted Kennedy, for instance, demanded that El Salvador invite the Communist insurgents into a coalition government. Liberal opposition to aiding El Salvador prompted one of Shultz’s better-controlled outbursts of anger. Before a House committee in March, Shultz rebuked Democrats who opposed aid: “I really don’t understand you people. Here we have an area right next to us which a cross-section of Americans, a bipartisan commission, have studied very carefully, and concluded is in the vital interest of the United States. Now there are problems there, we all know that, and what you’re telling me is, ‘Because there are problems, let’s walk away.’”
Events on the ground would prove decisive. In late March El Salvador held another round of elections, and the centrist government of José Napoleón Duarte—with considerable campaign assistance from the CIA—narrowly held off the surprisingly popular right-wing candidacy of Roberto d’Aubuisson, who was implicated in supporting the death squads that were wreaking havoc on American designs. A d’Aubuisson victory would have provided liberals an excuse to cut off U.S. military aid to El Salvador, but on May 10 House majority leader Jim Wright defied Tip O’Neill and corralled fifty-five Democratic votes in support of continued aid.
Just two weeks after the House approved aid to El Salvador, it voted 241–177 against funding the Contras. “Central America has turned into a political game, and Democrats tend to play it irresponsibly,” the New Republic observed in an editorial. Tip O’Neill referred to the Contras as “marauders, murderers, and rapists.” While the Contras were unquestionably guilty of savage violence and disagreeable deeds, it is nonetheless striking that similar behavior by the American-supported Afghan mujahadeen did not receive similar scrutiny from liberals in Congress. For that matter, the deplorable human rights record of the Sandinistas got a complete pass from most liberals. (The occasional liberal who spoke out against Sandinista human rights abuses, such as Paul Berman or human rights activist Nina Shea, was greeted with ferocious denunciations from the Left.)
The continuation of Contra aid depended entirely on the Senate. At the end of 1983 a House-Senate conference committee on the budget had restored Contra funding that had been cut off by the House in the spring, but support for Contra aid remained paper-thin. Then, in mid-March, Barry Goldwater, with Pat Moynihan’s support, got $21 million in Contra aid approved in the Senate Intelligence Committee by a surprising 14–0 vote. The full Senate would approve Contra aid in early April by a vote of 76–19.
The Contras had become a serious fighting force inside Nicaragua. Their numbers had grown from about one thousand in 1981 to about six thousand by the end of 1983, and they had staged a number of successful sustained offensives (in part because the CIA was resupplying them by air drops), briefly capturing entire towns and holding swaths of territory deep inside Nicaragua. After the U.S. invasion of Grenada—and stiff warnings from the Americans—the Soviets were suddenly less forthcoming with promises of further aid to the Sandinistas and failed to deliver previously promised MiG fighter planes. Late in 1983, the Sandinistas capitulated to a key American demand, agreeing to hold elections late in 1984. Unable to contain his revolutionary bravado, however, a senior Sandinista leader made a speech confessing that the elections were “a nuisance” because “what a revolution really needs is the power to act,” such power being “the essence of the dictatorship of the proletariat.” Elections, another Sandinista directorate member admitted, “were a tactical tool, a weapon.”20 Such transparency would have made Lenin blush.
The White House did not think time was on its side, and the usual factions debated fiercely how to press the issue to a faster conclusion. Despite Contra successes, there was little chance that they could topple the Sandinistas without direct American intervention, which Reagan privately (but never publicly) ruled out. The State Department wanted to pursue direct negotiations with the Sandinistas, despite a high-ranking Nicaraguan defector who had reliably informed Washington that Sandinista policy regarded “the negotiations process as a tool to buy time for the revolution.” Shultz actually made a stop in Nicaragua to meet with Daniel Ortega, though he was not optimistic about success. A group of Central American nations had proposed a regional framework for negotiations that became known as the Contadora process, but the proposal for a freeze on arms shipments and limits on the size of military forces was unacceptable to the Sandinistas. While Contadora was a substantive dead end, it aided the American aim of isolating Nicaragua diplomatically.
The Pentagon proposed massive military exercises near Nicaragua and Cuba. Reagan, showing his usual good sense, asked in an NSC meeting, “How do we stop Castro with exercises?” But he approved the plan anyway until Shultz, who was not consulted, threatened to resign after he found out about it following a leak to the New York Times.
The CIA had more luck pressing for aggressive covert operations, sponsoring small but effective motorboat attacks on docks and oil storage facilities in Nicaraguan ports. The CIA also began mining Nicaraguan harbors with nonlethal mines designed to frighten foreign ships away. The mines were designed more to damage the courage of shipping insurers than the hulls of the ships themselves. At least seven ships in the Pacific Ocean port of Corinto—Nicaragua’s largest—had struck mines, including a Soviet oil tanker, and export goods were beginning to stack up on the docks for want of shipping. But in this success lay the seeds of political catastrophe for Reagan.
In early April, the morning after the Senate approved aid to the Contras, the CIA’s mining of Nicaraguan harbors leaked to the press. In their best imitation of Claude Rains in Casablanca, senators in both parties professed themselves outraged that the CIA would engage in such behavior, and the Senate voted 84–12 a few days later to condemn the mining. “It’s an act of war!” indignant senators complained. Intelligence Committee chairman Gold-water fired off an angry letter to CIA director William Casey that opened with the decorous phrase “I am pissed off!” Moynihan ostentatiously resigned as vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee.
It was typical Capitol Hill theater. Casey had fully briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee on the mining operation, and there had been no objections. Twice in March, according to committee transcripts, Casey had told the committee that “magnetic mines have been placed in the Pacific harbor of Corinto and the Atlantic harbor of El Bluff, as well as the oil terminal at Puerto Sandino.” Senators now claimed that Casey had either mumbled or misled them by not saying exactly who was laying the mines. Goldwater’s excuse was slightly better: he had missed the briefings.
Nicaragua brought a lawsuit against the United States at the World Court, whereupon the administration announced that it would not recognize the World Court’s jurisdiction—a position allowed under treaty, but which looked bad in the higher court of international public opinion. (Very few media accounts noted that prior to Nicaragua’s case, no Communist nation had ever accepted the World Court’s jurisdiction. Some legal scholars argued that the Reagan administration had a strong argument that the mining activities were legal under international law.) More embarrassments were to follow in the months ahead, including disclosure in the fall of a purported assassination manual that the CIA had produced for the Contras.21
The result was a collapse in political support for Contra aid. In June the Senate reversed course and rejected further Contra aid by a lopsided 88–1 vote. This time Reagan could not rely on the Senate to bail out his policy in a House-Senate conference committee. More trouble was coming from the House, where a new, much more restrictive Boland Amendment (call it Boland III on your scorecard) was heading toward easy passage. This version of the Boland Amendment prohibited any military assistance to the Contras, direct or indirect, from the CIA or the Pentagon: “During fiscal year 1985, no funds available to the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, or any other agency or entity of the United States involved in intelligence activities may be obligated or expended for the purpose or which would have the effect of supporting, directly or indirectly, military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua by any nation, group, organization, movement or individual.” Did these restrictions extend to the president and the White House staff? Such an interpretation would be constitutionally dubious, as it would imply a restriction on the president’s ability to conduct diplomacy—for example, forbidding the president from asking a foreign government to provide aid to the Contras. The Boland Amendment was attached to a stopgap twelve-hundred-page continuing resolution necessary to keep the federal government running, and Congress sent it to Reagan in mid-October. Vetoing the bill because of the Boland Amendment would have involved shutting down the government three weeks before the election.
One reason Reagan didn’t take the risk of vetoing Boland in the fall was that a fallback strategy had begun to take shape early in the summer. With their Nicaragua policy in tatters and current funds about to run out, Reagan and his national security team huddled to decide how to go forward. In a long National Security Council meeting at the White House on June 25, Shultz argued that continuing good-faith efforts at negotiations with Nicaragua was the only possible way to salvage Contra aid. Reagan sided with Shultz, though he was realistic about the prospects for negotiations, saying it “is so farfetched to imagine that a Communist government like that would make any reasonable deal with us, but if it is to get Congress to support the anti-Sandinistas, then it can be helpful.”
At the same meeting, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Cap Weinberger said they wanted a more public fight against Democrats on behalf of Contra funding, but also wondered whether Contra funding from other countries (possibly Israel) might be arranged. Shultz objected that brokering funds from private sources or third countries was “very likely illegal;” he added, in fact, that James Baker (who was not present at this meeting) thought it would be “an impeachable offense.”22 Vice President Bush and others disagreed.
Everyone knew they were treading on sensitive ground. Reagan allowed that “if such a story gets out, we’ll all be hanging by our thumbs in front of the White House until we find out who did it.” He later said this comment referred to leaking, rather than the substance of the issue itself. Normally quiet in NSC meetings, Reagan was an active participant this time. He gave Shultz the green light to pursue the Nicaraguan negotiations (with some limits on terms), and he also encouraged the independent Contra funding track.
Unknown to everyone in the June 25 meeting except Reagan, Robert McFarlane had already arranged outside funding for the Contras. Reagan had told McFarlane sometime earlier—later McFarlane could not place the exact date—to find a way to keep the Contras together “body and soul.” National Security Council staffer Colonel Oliver North had seen to the details: Saudi Arabia would transfer funds to the Contras’ Miami bank accounts. Reagan and McFarlane kept the details closely held. Attorney General William French Smith subsequently advised that he saw no legal obstacle to discussing Contra funding with other nations, though neither he nor any other administration lawyer produced a written opinion on the matter.
Reagan was correct that negotiations were fruitless; the Sandinistas rebuffed American overtures. Efforts to gain Contra funds from more Third World countries, unfortunately, would soon become more successful.
* * *
THE POLITICAL THEATER over Nicaragua was not limited to embarrassments for the administration. The spring also witnessed a spirited counterattack on the Democrats when Newt Gingrich publicized a sympathetic letter that ten House Democrats, including majority leader Jim Wright, had sent to Daniel Ortega in April.
The “Dear Comandante” letter, as it became known, began: “We address you in the spirit of hopefulness and goodwill.” It made plain that the Democrats opposed President Reagan’s policy and sought symbolic concessions from the Sandinistas that would enable their opposition at home to be more successful. “We regret the fact that better relations do not exist between the United States and your country,” the letter read. “We have been, and remain, opposed to U.S. support for military action directed against the people or government of Nicaragua.” The letter also criticized “those responsible for supporting violence against your government, and for obstructing serious negotiations for broad political participation in El Salvador”—obvious euphemisms for Reagan and on behalf of a coalition government in El Salvador. The letter asked Ortega to take steps to “strengthen the hands of those in our country who desire better relations.”
Gingrich called a debate on the House floor, where he charged that the letter was illegal and possibly unconstitutional. “This statement crosses the bounds from legitimate opposition to American policy to a deliberate communication of that opposition to a foreign government,” he argued. By offering essentially to negotiate with the Sandinistas, Gingrich added, the letter arguably violated the seldom-enforced Logan Act, which prohibited diplomacy by anyone other than the executive branch. Only one signatory to the letter, New York representative Steven Solarz, defended the communication, saying it was meant chiefly to encourage free elections in Nicaragua, for which the Sandinistas had repeatedly expressed scorn. Typical of conservative commentary was Pat Buchanan: “In the war between Western democracy and Castroism for Central America, Jim Wright and the Democratic leadership are on the side of the Sandinistas.”
Gingrich’s attack on the “Dear Comandante” letter was merely one skirmish line in the intensifying bitterness and partisanship in the House. In 1984 Gingrich and about a dozen other House Republicans began using the special-orders period at the end of the day and in the evening, when House members may give longer speeches to be included in the Congressional Record, to launch a sustained attack on Democrats. Typically there were no Democrats present to engage in debate, so the attacks went unanswered. However, because C-SPAN broadcast the special orders, the Republican criticism was reaching a wider public audience and was beginning to attract notice. By rule, C-SPAN cameras were tightly fixed on the individual speaker in the House well and did not convey that the House chamber was virtually empty during special orders. House Speaker Tip O’Neill, annoyed at Gingrich’s tactics, ordered C-SPAN cameras to pan the House during Special Orders to show up the Republicans.
Republicans cried foul, charging O’Neill with a “dirty trick” and an “arrogant and arbitrary abuse of power.” Invoking “personal privilege,”
Gingrich took the House floor to rebut O’Neill’s claim that Republicans had unfairly used special orders to attack Democrats without notice. Gingrich had in fact sent letters to House Democrats informing them of the arguments and issues Republicans would present during special orders, and inviting them to debate. O’Neill lost his temper and made a rare trip to the well of the House to take on Gingrich, where he promptly blundered. O’Neill charged that Gingrich’s tactics were “[u]n-American … It’s the lowest thing I’ve heard in my 32 years here!”
But O’Neill’s personal language was a violation of House rules. Republican House whip Trent Lott pounced; he interrupted with a parliamentary inquiry. The House parliamentarian sided with the Republicans, informing the House chair (O’Neill’s fellow Massachusetts Democrat Joe Moakley) that O’Neill’s words had to be “taken down.” It was a stunning rebuke to O’Neill, who sat down red faced as nearly the entire Republican caucus gave Gingrich a standing ovation.
The episode quickly became known as “Camscam,” and Gingrich’s triumphant face-off against O’Neill made the news on all three broadcast networks that night and the front page of the Washington Post the next day. One Republican who conspicuously did not join the ovation was minority leader Bob Michel, who played golf regularly with O’Neill and disliked the partisan rancor that Gingrich and his insurgents had brought to the House. This was precisely the problem with Gingrich’s point of view—the Republican minority had been too accommodating for too long. “Democrats have been in the majority for almost 60 years, cheerfully fighting in public,” Gingrich told the Washington Post. “Majorities worry about gathering the energy of conflict in order to dominate.” Now, Trent Lott said, Republicans were “absolutely united” in their anger over the heavy-handed way Democrats ran the House and resolved to be more aggressive in opposition.
As the Washington Post laconically commented, “During the fiery arguments on the floor yesterday, the GOP’s center of gravity appeared to be moving toward that view and away from House Republican leader Michel.” It was a genuine watershed moment in the political course of the 1980s; the friction between the parties, and within the parties, in the House would grow steadily worse over the next few years. The following year, in fact, there would be two near-fistfights on the House floor as partisan rancor reached a new high.
* * *
ALTHOUGH REAGAN’S REELECTION seems a forgone conclusion, there is still much to be learned from a closer examination of the election campaign as it unfolded. Campaigns tell us much about the disposition of the two parties and the ever-changing center of gravity in American politics. The internal arguments of a party can be more significant than their clashes with the other party. Political scientist Theodore Lowi wrote early in 1984: “The ideological cores of the two parties are a great deal more distinct and further apart than at any time before.” Harvard political scientist Harvey Mansfield thought the two parties had now become distinct, as partisans of entitlement (Democrats) or opportunity (Republicans): “Americans have not yet chosen—they have not yet been compelled to choose—between these parties.” Would the voters perceive this fundamental choice in the 1984 election?
The question for Republicans was whether they would extend the Reagan Revolution in the face of internal and external pressures—especially the federal budget deficit—to reverse course or at least trim their sails. This internal fight within the GOP would play out in the fight over the placement of a single comma in a key sentence of the party platform at its convention in August.
The challenge confronting Democrats, meanwhile, was whether they were capable of reforming themselves in light of Reagan’s challenge to their governing philosophy. This would unfold in a more protracted manner in the Democratic primaries and requires unbundling the personalities and ideas that contested for the Democratic soul. The threshold question for liberals was whether Reagan’s election was a fluke, whether the old New Deal coalition could successfully reassert itself under the banner of fairness coupled with fanning fears of Reagan’s ostensibly dangerous foreign policy. Nearly every Democrat thought the answer to these questions was, to one degree or another, a resounding yes.
Eight Democrats would contest for the nomination to face Reagan, but for the true-believing New Dealers, former vice president Walter Mondale was the obvious man to carry the party’s banner. Mondale was a purebred liberal of the old school—the New Republic’s Henry Fairlie correctly pegged him as “a renovated Hubert Humphrey”—who did not believe that America had turned away from liberalism in any fundamental way. Time’s William A. Henry observed that “Mondale insisted on trying to lecture the public out of its rejection of paternalistic government.” Mondale had been the clear front-runner from the moment in 1982 when Ted Kennedy announced he would not run—an event that left many liberals bereft. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. lamented: “His withdrawal leaves the country without the all-out challenge to Reaganism that the miserable state of our affairs demands.”23
To be sure, Mondale lacked Kennedy’s supposed charisma and rousing public presence. Mondale was only fifty-six, but he seemed much older. “I got the bags under my eyes the old-fashioned way,” he boasted at one point; “I earned them.” Everything about Mondale seemed to prompt relentless put-downs. “Mondale,” Jeffrey Hart quipped, “sounds like the name of a Los Angeles suburb.” Eugene McCarthy had the ultimate dismissal, saying Mondale “has the soul of a vice president.” National Review’s Richard Brookhiser wrote that Mondale’s nose looked like a failed design for a can opener. Mondale’s plodding, nasal speech and haggard visage caused Sidney Blumenthal to write that he “has the vibrant exhaustion of one who has spent too many nights in Holiday Inns. His speech is half battle cry and half dirge.”
In an ironic reversal of what was said to explain Reagan’s success (that his telegenic personality obscured his retrograde politics), Mondale’s lack of public personality was said to undermine the appeal of his liberal ideas. This is unfair to Mondale, who is one of those unfortunate political figures (like Richard Nixon and Al Gore) for whom public exposure in the modern media age is unkind. Mondale came across as monochromatic in a Technicolor world. The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page editor, Robert Bartley, who knew Mondale personally from serving with him on the board of the Mayo Clinic, wrote: “The great mystery of the man is how and why he contrived to keep his personal wit and humor, readily apparent in even short conversation as vice president, from showing itself on the campaign trail.”24
Although a deficit of public personality is a handicap in modern American politics, Mondale’s real problems were substantive. He attempted to couch his old-school liberalism in the patina of consensus, and in doing so lost the élan of liberalism as it was expressed by FDR and John F. Kennedy. Mondale, by contrast, embraced jejune slogans such as “daring to be cautious.” Jack Germond and Jules Witcover found it telling that Mondale once bunted in a staff softball game. The New Republic’s Richard Strout chided Mondale when his campaign “formally unveiled ‘leadership’ as a political issue for the fall, the way General Motors might unveil a new car, after extensive market research and design.” Following the 1980 election Mondale announced with great flair that he was taking a year off to reexamine his beliefs, “a gesture so goofy,” Time magazine’s William Henry wrote, “that few people took it seriously enough even to mock it.” Especially since Mondale’s reexamination yielded no new beliefs or ideas.
Mondale set about to secure the Democratic nomination the same way FDR or Lyndon Johnson would have done it, by appealing to the discrete and insular interest groups that constitute the modern Democratic Party. In Time, Evan Thomas wrote that Mondale “approaches great national issues not with overarching vision, but like a train conductor punching tickets.” But Mondale did not betray the slightest recognition that it was precisely the metastasizing of interest-group liberalism that had contributed, as much as inflation and Jimmy Carter’s ineptitude, to the declining electoral appeal of the Democratic Party. By adroitly catering to the various liberal interest groups—especially organized labor—Mondale secured unprecedented early endorsements and organizational support in key primary states. The AFL-CIO endorsed Mondale in the fall of 1983, months earlier than it had ever issued an endorsement.
But Mondale’s solicitousness got out of hand, with plaintive professions of sympathy piling up faster than the national debt. Before the National Organization for Women (NOW) he professed to be a feminist; NOW responded by giving him the first presidential endorsement in its history. Before labor unions, he endorsed domestic-content mandates for manufacturing, which was a clever euphemism for trade protectionism. Before education groups such as the National Education Association (NEA), he promised more federal spending. Before ethnic minority groups, he pledged fealty to affirmative action and quotas (though calling them “verifiable measurements” instead of quotas). At one point Mondale professed himself to being the candidate of “the sad,” even though depressed Americans were not (yet) an organized constituency. It was all too much for Wall Street Journal political reporter Albert Hunt, who wrote that he wouldn’t be surprised if Mondale “soon endorses government-subsidized kosher lunches for gay left-handed unemployed schoolteachers.”25 Sidney Blumenthal worried that “the longer the [nomination] process lasts, the more likely it is that he may be seen as the public affairs director of the AFL-CIO.” A bumper sticker read: HONK IF MONDALE HAS PROMISED YOU SOMETHING.
Mondale and the Democratic Party establishment that fell in behind him thought he had the nomination sewed up months before any votes were cast in primaries or caucuses. But Mondale’s close embrace of liberal interest groups became the opening by which Democratic rivals successfully attacked him. Senator John Glenn said that Mondale had turned the Democrats into “a party that can’t say no to anyone with a mailing list.” South Carolina senator Fritz Hollings, whose own presidential campaign proved abortive because too many voters confused his name with a trucking company, complained that Mondale “is a good lapdog; he’ll lick every hand.” When challenged in a candidate debate to name a single issue on which he differed from the AFL-CIO, Mondale couldn’t come up with an answer. It took his campaign two days to supply one.
Yet the charge of pandering is unfair because Mondale believed in the agendas of the liberal interest groups. So did most of his Democratic rivals, who were merely frustrated that Mondale had monopolized their support. None of his rivals, with one partial exception to be considered shortly, offered much of an alternative to Mondale’s liberalism. The three slightly conservative Democrats in the race—Glenn, Florida’s ex-governor Ruben Askew, and Hollings—got nowhere, showing that the Scoop Jackson wing of the party was extinct. (Glenn was the Democrat Reagan’s political team feared most.) To Mondale’s left were California’s Alan Cranston and Jesse Jackson, who generated the most excitement in the race, partly because of his talent at rhyming schemes: “From the outhouse to the courthouse … from the slave ship to the championship … from disgrace to amazing grace!” While this field displayed some width on the Democratic ideological spectrum (Glenn and Hollings had voted for Reagan’s tax cuts, and they had supported higher military spending as far back as the Carter years), they were united in supporting the nuclear freeze—in fact, the chief point of contention on foreign policy was trying to claim to have supported the freeze first.
Political scientist Theodore Lowi observed: “In 1984 at least, the leading Democratic alternatives to President Reagan looked like the same Democrats who gave us the collapse of liberalism in the 1970s. Despite the talk about new ideas inside the Democratic Party, these are difficult, if not impossible, to find.” Liberal intellectuals, however, sensed that something was wrong with business as usual. Just as the rise of neoconservatism had given a boost to Republicans in the 1970s, now leading thinkers on the Left were casting about for a commensurate version of neoliberalism. Just as neoconservatives had journals (Commentary and the Public Interest most especially), nascent neoliberalism found a journalistic home at the Washington Monthly, whose maverick editor, Charles Peters, attempted to push a “neoliberal manifesto.”26
For a while, would-be neoliberals peppered their speeches with the term high-tech, which acted as a rhetorical talisman. A handful of liberals labeled themselves “Atari Democrats” after the market-leading computer game maker, but the label became an embarrassment when Atari moved to Taiwan and cut more than seventeen hundred jobs in the United States. A spate of books and articles grudgingly acknowledged that the old-time liberal religion of largescale government intervention was dead; the liberal economist Robert Kuttner wrote that “Keynesian full employment remains intellectually out of fashion for liberals” and that liberal thought on social and economic problems “is an ideological shambles.”27
Beyond a welcome attitude of self-criticism, was there anything really neo about neoliberalism, or was it merely the old liberalism repackaged for the high-tech age? Economist Melville Ulmer observed, “[T]he more acceptable to the public did the Reagan program appear in action during the past two years, the more resolutely did the entire spectrum of liberals move to the Left…. [E]ach upward notch in the present business expansion elicited new and more flamboyant assaults on Reaganomics, and new and bolder stratagems for the future.”28 The most prominent of the new stratagems was industrial policy. This amalgam became the flavor of the month for liberalism, and the rage for know-it-all newspaper editorial writers. The core of industrial policy was … well, it was hard to say. It lacked a central idea, beyond an implicit distrust of markets and a residual confidence in bureaucrats and government economic planning.
Some liberals, including economist Lester Thurow, wanted the government to invest in sunrise industries in the high-tech sector. Others, such as investment banker Felix Rohatyn, wanted the government to revive struggling basic industries such as steel, rubber, auto, and manufacturing. Rohatyn proposed a federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation that would invest billions to “turn losers into winners.” Robert Reich, whose bestselling book The Next American Frontier “occupies a position with liberals not dissimilar to that of Das Kapital with Marxists,” according to Ulmer, went beyond Rohatyn in proposing the formation of a National Planning Board and an Industrial Redevelopment Bank to direct capital into more-promising enterprises. To the threat of inflation, the industrial policy advocates blithely offered wage and price controls. The liberal economists such as Kuttner, Reich, and Thurow were writing as though Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek had never existed, let alone won Nobel Prizes for their robust challenges to liberal orthodoxy.
In other words, at best industrial policy was merely a spiffed-up version of the old Keynesian interventionism, based on the hubris that government planners can allocate capital and resources better than the market and regulate any undesirable outcomes. At worst, it was a fancy dress for extending subsidies to favored industries. Under any understanding, it was hardly a crowd stirrer. Kuttner commented that industrial policy “has too many contradictory meanings, too slender a constituency, and in any case it is one lousy bumper sticker.”
There were some specific, narrower variations that came to the fore in this discussion. Some liberals were intent on passing plant-closing legislation that would require companies to adopt long lead times before closing or relocating an old factory—“fugitive industries,” such companies were revealingly called in the liberal lexicon. Feminists were pushing the idea of comparable worth, which would have involved the government in superseding the labor market in the setting of wage levels between jobs that the market valued differently; for example, librarians should be paid like truck drivers because the labor market unfairly undervalued female-dominated occupations. Liberal commentator Mickey Kaus referred to comparable worth as “one of the really bad ideas from the comic book era of interest-group liberalism.”
For a party that was supposedly looking for a way to move beyond New Deal liberalism, its leading policy ideas seemed frozen in amber from 1933 and betrayed a lack of perception of how the American economy was rapidly reforming itself through the dynamic process Joseph Schumpeter had called “creative destruction.” Contrary to liberal rhetoric about deindustrialization, 1.1 million of the 4 million new jobs generated in 1983 were in the manufacturing sector. In the industrial heartland, where the 1982 recession had been most severe, unemployment had fallen dramatically in some hard-hit places: unemployment in the state of Michigan dropped from 17.3 percent to 11.9 percent; in Youngstown, Ohio, from 20.3 percent to 13.7 percent; in Rock-ford, Illinois, from 19.8 percent to 11.1 percent; in Dubuque, Iowa, from 13.6 percent to 8.3 percent. Private sector capital investment soared 30 percent during 1984, to $715 billion.
Meanwhile, as the United States was reinvigorating its industrial sector, liberals cast their gaze across the ocean to Japan and its vaunted Ministry of International Trade and Development (MITI). The refrain that America needed to emulate the Japanese became louder as the decade went on, and MITI was held out as proof that centralized industrial policy worked. Japan was a bad example, as the collapse of its “economic miracle” at the end of the decade made evident. Even in 1984 the signs were evident to the discerning eye. Japan’s economic growth, which had run as high as 10 percent a year in the 1970s, had slowed to a more normal 3 percent per year by 1983. While Japan’s exports to the United States were dominated by conspicuous consumer goods from cars to televisions to computers, the fact was that exports made up a smaller share of Japan’s total economy than they did for most European nations. As many of Japan’s basic industries started to erode, Theodore Eismeier of Japan’s Institute for Policy Science concluded, “The best evidence suggests that the Japanese miracle has been more a matter of private than public initiative, and that the attempted outguessing of the market that has received so much laudatory publicity has in fact had relatively little to do with Japan’s singular record of postwar growth.”29
For a while in 1983 and early 1984 it appeared that Democrats might embrace the one economic reform idea that would have enabled them to outflank Reagan and redefine liberalism: tax reform. A handful of Democrats, especially Representative Richard Gephardt and Senator Bill Bradley, proposed a sweeping tax reform plan that would have flattened income tax rates and simplified the tax code. The Bradley-Gephardt plan proposed a new top income tax rate of 30 percent (down from about 46 percent at that time) while eliminating a wide range of deductions and exemptions. For most middle-class Americans, it would have involved a tax cut. Reagan’s political team was alarmed, not wanting to cede the tax issue to Democrats. But Reagan needn’t have worried. Bradley and Gephardt tried to talk Mondale into making tax reform a centerpiece of his campaign, but Mondale rejected the idea. Imposing high tax rates on the rich held too much sway. He couldn’t see a way of combining tax cuts with his central campaign theme—fairness. He had no interest in reforming liberalism, telling a Washington Post reporter: “I think there’s always been this neo-liberal approach that disdains what I view to be a fundamental and sacred objective of the Democratic Party, which is to pursue fairness.”30
On foreign policy Mondale retained the residue of the older Cold War liberalism, but it was nearly impossible to detect in his public pronouncements. Mondale’s public posture reflected the demoralized state of liberalism in its post-Vietnam paralysis, and at nearly every step of the way Mondale caved to the dovish base in the party. Instead Mondale jumped on the nuclear freeze bandwagon and attacked the Strategic Defense Initiative. He resisted calls in his party to cut defense spending, but he wanted a much lower rate of increase than Reagan did. On defense the Democrats now assumed the position Republicans had long occupied on domestic policy: whereas Republicans were low-budget liberals in the 1960s and 1970s, Democrats were now low-budget hawks, promoting schemes for smaller aircraft carriers, cheaper airplanes, and no new strategic weapons systems. Reagan delighted in pointing out that he was spending a smaller share of the federal budget on defense than John F. Kennedy had. Most Americans were outraged by inaccurate stories of $435 Pentagon hammers, but they weren’t ready to buy the low-budget liberal alternative.
* * *
THE ONE PARTIAL exception to the lockstep old-school liberalism of Mondale and his rivals was Colorado senator Gary Hart, and he brought drama to the campaign as well as the only real threat to Mondale’s coronation parade. On the surface Hart looked to be the ideal champion for neoliberalism, and from time to time he even appeared to be a genuine departure from Mondale’s New Deal liberalism. Hart seemed to have a clue that the old interest-group liberalism had become debilitating in practice as well as in theory. He wrote in a campaign book, A New Democracy, that “American liberalism was near bankruptcy.” His signature campaign theme was that the party needed “new ideas and new leadership.” At one point Hart said that his generation of Democrats was not “a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys” and that they “were not automatic regulators, new-agency creators, and higher tax-and-spend people.”
But this novelty collapsed on closer inspection. Arthur Schlesinger called Hart’s attempted neoliberalism “a hoax from the start.” Richard Reeves wrote that Hart “was offering not much more than the idea that he was open to new ideas,” and Henry Fairlie scoffed that “Hart runs so hard to appear up to date that, when he catches up with it, he is as out of date as last year’s Time covers.”
Hart’s “new ideas” theme turned out to be more a skillful way of exploiting Mondale’s weaknesses and making a generational appeal to baby boomers than any genuine innovation in liberal thought. He was surprisingly vague and superficial when pressed for details about the substance of his new ideas, a point Mondale adroitly hammered in a debate when he invoked a currently popular TV commercial for Wendy’s hamburgers. “You know, when I hear those ‘new ideas,’” Mondale smirked, “I’m reminded of that ad, ‘Where’s the beef?’” Hart lamely replied the next day by putting a copy of his book A New Democracy between the two halves of a hamburger bun. Even on his signature economic theme—industrial policy (which he never defined with any clarity)—Hart appeared insincere. In 1979 he had voted against federal loan guarantees for Chrysler, an example of pro-industry government intervention if there ever was one.
Other “new ideas” bordered on silly. He proposed to engage the Soviet Union by challenging the Kremlin “to a crusade to eliminate hunger for every child on this planet in the 1980s,” and calling for the United States and the Soviets to establish somewhere in Europe a joint missile-tracking center where, Time magazine reported, “each side could see pictures of what the other’s satellites were showing and explain any activity that looked threatening.” He said the United States wouldn’t need to defend Persian Gulf oil shipping routes because, as president, he would achieve energy independence. When the Washington Post asked Hart whether he considered Cuba a totalitarian nation, Hart answered, “I don’t know.”
He proposed instituting a White House Council on Emerging Issues, to go along with the Council of Economic Advisers. When asked the hypothetical question of what he would do if a Czech airliner strayed over a U.S. military installation, Hart replied that he would instruct American pilots to look in the aircraft windows to see whether the occupants were wearing military uniforms before ordering the plane to be shot down. This drew a hearty snort from former fighter pilot and astronaut John Glenn, who was appalled at Hart’s child like grasp of military realities. Somehow Hart enjoyed a reputation as a serious person on military affairs, yet his Senate record revealed him to be a standard-issue liberal, opposing every weapons system currently in production in favor of hypothetical systems always years away. Hart cast votes against or voiced opposition to the MX missile, the Apache helicopter, the Bradley armored vehicle, the Patriot surface-to-air missile system, the B-1 bomber, the F-18 fighter, the F-15 fighter, and radar-guided air-to-air missiles—in other words, nearly every system that would be integral to American military operations over the next two decades, culminating especially in the two Gulf Wars.
The more Hart talked the more it became apparent that he did not represent any real departure from liberalism; in fact, as the campaign went on he appeared increasingly fraudulent. One of his leading boosters, actor Warren Beatty, explained his enthusiasm for Hart thusly: “He stands for ‘new ideas.’ And ‘new ideas’ mean, ‘You pay, motherfucker.’”31 When Hart did exclaim directly about issues, he was usually to the left of Mondale. He explicitly backed racial quotas, and on foreign policy he was distinctly McGovernite (he had been McGovern’s campaign manager in 1972)—“eager,” George Will wrote, “to get U.S. forces out of Oklahoma and prepared to sacrifice economic growth for the convenience of lesbian snail darters.” Morton Kondracke called it “jacuzzi-generation foreign policy.”
Just as Jimmy Carter in 1976 had the insight that in the aftermath of Watergate a significant block of voters would swoon over a candidate who taught Sunday school, Hart perceived correctly that many baby boomers would respond to a generational appeal. (Mondale received less than 30 percent of the Democratic primary vote from voters under thirty.) Like Carter, Hart ran against or aloof from the Democratic Party establishment. He engaged in a calculated imitation of the vigorous and youthful imagery of John F. Kennedy, right down to thrusting his hands in his coat pockets. “The Kennedy nostalgia,” Morton Kondracke reported, “was heavily contrived—tested out, in fact, in focus groups supervised by Hart’s pollster, Dottie Lynch.” Johnny Carson mocked Hart on the Tonight show: “I like his slogan, ‘Vote for me, I have Kennedy hair.’” George Will observed that “Hart is Jay Gatsby in politics: He is his own work of art.”
Hart’s Peter Pan act worked early on. Eight days after finishing a distant second to Mondale in the Iowa caucuses (garnering only 14.8 percent of caucus-goers’ votes), Hart scored a stunning upset in the New Hampshire primary.32 An NBC News survey a week before the Iowa caucuses had found that 87 percent of Democrats had never heard of or had any opinion about Gary Hart, and even the morning of the New Hampshire primary, a New York Times poll had Mondale winning with 57 percent of the vote and Hart finishing fourth with 6 percent. Such is the magic of small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, where personal appeals have more leverage with voters than a big campaign organization. In a telling indication of the problems with Mondale’s campaign, half of Democratic voters in New Hampshire told exit pollsters that Mondale had made too many promises to special-interest groups.
In the two weeks after New Hampshire, Hart trounced Mondale in Florida, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Washington, Wyoming, Oklahoma, and Nevada, even though he had barely campaigned in some of these states and his organization was thin. Hart was suddenly the front-runner, and campaign contributions instantly surged. Fresh opinion polls showed him drawing even with Reagan in a head-to-head matchup. So many things were going wrong that Mondale contemplated dropping out of the race; a campaign aide prepared a memo for the logistics of withdrawing. Had the 1984 primaries been as front-loaded as they are today, it surely would have meant Mondale’s quick end. But in 1984 Mondale still had a small window of time to recover.
Presidential candidates who rise from obscurity tend to be like half-baked soufflés: they collapse just as quickly. With success came intensified media scrutiny, and soon it emerged that Hart was … weird. It turned out his given name was Hartpence; he had shortened it to Hart in college, but gave contradictory accounts of why he had done so. He had radically changed the style of his signature well into adulthood. And there was an odd discrepancy about his age: Hart claimed to be forty-six, and his campaign biography said he was born on November 28, 1937, but in fact he was born in 1936. He had studied for a divinity degree at Yale but, curiously, omitted this fact from his various biographies such as those in Who’s Who and the Congressional Directory. Hart’s only new ideas, one of his campaign aides quipped, were his name and his age. While it was not apparent to voters who only saw Hart on TV, Hart made little or no eye contact with audiences; Hart’s speaking style is to look over the heads of crowds. Rumors about his womanizing—he had been separated from his wife twice—reached the news media; the stately David Broder made an oblique reference to this gossip in a column that speculated whether Hart’s interest in feminist issues derived from his “many women friends.”
Hart’s bizarre explanations for these biographical oddities set off a media feeding frenzy and unnerved a lot of Democrats. “What the public held against Hart,” Ronald Steel wrote later, “was not his lack of solutions, but his lack of authenticity.” Numerous leading media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the TV networks ran prominent features on Hart’s peculiarities. On the CBS Evening News in early March, shortly before the next round of big primaries, Dan Rather led a segment thus: “Who is this man, this Gary Hart?” On NBC the following night, Roger Mudd asked: “How old is Gary Hart? And why did he change his name?” NBC wasn’t done. Two nights later, NBC’s John Dancy offered another Hart segment that began: “Who is Gary Hart, anyway, and what does he believe?” Tom Brokaw dismissed Hart as “this season’s hit rock-’n’-roll single.” Roger Mudd practically taunted Hart in an interview: “Why do you imitate John Kennedy so much?” CBS’s Bruce Morton kept up the theme: “Gary Hart is the hottest political property around, at least this week. But who is he?” ABC was not left out, with Jack Smith delivering a devastating syllabus of Hart’s strangeness: “He’s even fudged the year of his birth.” The troubled state of Hart’s marriage became fodder for media analysis. The only thing missing was an analogue to Chappaquiddick. (That would come three years later.)
The hypothesis must be entertained that the media, having been caught off guard by Hart’s surprise emergence, were out to exact retribution. The New York Times and the three TV networks don’t like it when they proclaim before the first primary that Mondale is the all-but-certain nominee, only to have the pesky voters defy them. Who gave Hart permission? “His candidacy had made a fool of Washington insiders,” Time’s William A. Henry wrote. “No one, no matter how long his memory, was able to recall anything in politics to compare with the mania of exuberance about Gary Hart that swept America. Prairie fire, Hart’s delighted partisans called it.” (Curious that Hart’s boosters used the same catchphrase Reagan had been using for twenty years.) The media did their best to put the fire out.
Hart compounded the fresh doubts about his character with several miscues in the next round of primaries, which happened to be in the big unionized, Mondale-friendly states, including Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Mondale’s campaign was suddenly rejuvenated and skillfully exploited Hart’s vulnerabilities. The most devastating hit was the “red phone” TV spot, which never mentioned Hart. Instead, the camera panned in slowly on a blinking red telephone, meant to evoke the mythical hotline to Moscow, with a voice-over saying: “The most awesome, powerful responsibility in the world lies in the hand that picks up this phone. The idea of an unsure, unsteady, untested hand is something to really think about. Vote as if the future of the world is at stake, because it is. Mondale. This President will know what he’s doing, and that’s the difference.”
Mondale’s superior organization and party support sufficed to put him over the top by a small margin at the end of the primary season in June, though it wasn’t pretty or convincing. “Mondale still had no coherent message to present to the electorate on why he should replace President Reagan,” Germond and Witcover wrote. A Mondale speechwriter admitted, “We had a hell of a time putting down on paper what this campaign was going to be all about.”33 Hart had won more primaries (the score was sixteen for Hart, eleven for Mondale), but Mondale won slightly more total votes (39 percent to Hart’s 36 percent). After the last primary, Mondale said, “I never want to be called a front-runner again as long as I live.”
Although Hart’s challenge made Mondale a marginally better candidate, Mondale headed toward the convention with the albatross of the third-place finisher—Jesse Jackson. Jackson won 18 percent of the primary vote but did disproportionately well in states with a large black vote (and, not coincidentally, depriving Mondale of likely votes). Well and truly could it be said that the “Jackson wing” of the Democratic Party now meant Jesse, not Scoop. Jackson, whom the New Republic called “the great ambulance chaser of American politics,” expressed every leftover radical sentiment of the 1960s New Left inventory. During the long primary season he referred to the United States as a “repressive regime,” said the Sandinistas were “on the right side of history,” referred to his boyhood home state of South Carolina as an “occupied zone,” claimed that George Washington ran a “military dictatorship,” said “Reagan is closer to Herod than he would be to the family of Jesus,” and in an especially careless moment even for him referred to New York City as “Hymietown.” His all-time chart topper may have been his remark about Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge: “Unfortunately sometimes the best of people lose their way.” When the primaries ended, he went to Nicaragua to embrace the Sandinistas and then to Cuba to visit with Fidel Castro, where Jackson toasted Che Guevara and taught Castro to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Yet none of his rival Democratic candidates ever called him out for his egregious statements and attacks.
This restraint is usually attributed to the Democrats’ fear of offending the crucial black constituency Jackson purported to lead, but the deeper problem was that the self-styled Rainbow Coalition of minorities-as-victims was merely an extreme variation of the fairness theme central to Mondale and other mainstream liberals.34 This put liberals in the awkward position of not being able to push back without risk of contradicting or rendering incoherent their own principles. Jackson’s noisy, media-hogging presence on the Democratic stage was symptomatic of a wider radical strain at the heart of the most motivated Democrats, and it was going to require a large measure of appeasement to tame. Mondale thought he saw a way to do so to his advantage: he would put his legendary caution to the side and go with an unconventional pick for a running mate—a woman or a minority.
To the delight of the stakeout brigades in the media, Mondale had prospective running mates come calling at his Minnesota home. Hart ridiculed it for resembling “the old Hollywood World War II movies, where you had one of everything in the lifeboat.” Mondale’s prospect list included a few white males, including Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, Arkansas senator Dale Bumpers, Georgia senator Sam Nunn, Florida governor Bob Graham, New York governor Mario Cuomo, and—Mondale’s first fallback choice—Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. But he spent far more time considering such figures as Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley (black), Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode (ditto), and San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros (Hispanic). Notably missing from the list was Jackson, who dismissed Mondale’s public vetting process as “a PR parade of personalities.” Jackson was behaving with extreme truculence, demanding more delegates to the convention as well as a prime-time speaking slot and consultations on cabinet posts, even as he continued to trash Mondale publicly.
One of the key segments of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition was the feminist movement, and feminist leaders had been browbeating Mondale for months to choose a woman as a running mate. The president of NOW threatened a floor fight at the Democratic convention if Mondale didn’t pick a woman running mate, and she expected that President Mondale would appoint women to half of his cabinet posts. A Washington Post/ABC News poll before the convention found that seven out of ten delegates favored a woman running mate (though a Gallup poll found that among Democratic voters at large, 59 percent preferred Hart to be Mondale’s running mate). Jesse Jackson embraced the idea, as did House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Three women emerged as serious possibilities: San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein, Kentucky governor Martha Lane Collins, and—O’Neill’s recommendation—New York congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro. Feminist groups vetoed consideration of a fourth woman, Louisiana congresswoman Lindy Boggs, because she wasn’t fully pro-choice on abortion.
Mondale settled on Ferraro, who had already impressed the party establishment as chair of the Democrats’ platform committee in 1984. A former prosecutor, Ferraro came from a House district in Queens that had gone for Reagan in 1980. But she had bucked the Reagan tide, running with the slogan “Finally … a tough Democrat.” As an Italian Catholic, she was thought to have appeal with religious and ethnic constituencies where Democrats were showing weakness. But a closer look at her House voting record, as reflected in the vote tally ratings of various interest groups, revealed that she was to the left of 99 percent of the House membership.
While Ferraro was a historic choice that excited the media and the Democratic Party base, it also reinforced the impression that Mondale was in thrall to liberal interest groups. Then there was the Democrats’ choice of city for their nominating convention: San Francisco, the city least representative of the suburban, growth-oriented political culture of the Sunbelt. To the contrary, it reinforced all of the liberal stereotypes of what the post-1960s Democratic Party had become. “Democrats,” Newsweek observed on the eve of the convention, “will be hard pressed to put on a show inside the convention center to rival the one San Francisco puts on outside.” The day before the convention opened, ten thousand marched in a gay pride parade down Market Street, bearing placards like FREEZE NUCLEAR FAMILIES/ABORT PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY AND LESBIAN/GAY LIBERATION THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST FEMINISM. But for the huge numbers and well-known local leadership including Sister Boom-Boom, the transvestite “mother superior” of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (Boom-Boom had received twenty-three thousand votes in the last election for city supervisor), one might have thought the spectacle was a Republican dirty trick. A Republican observing the street scene said, “In 1972, Nixon paid his dirty-tricksters to do this—now they’re doing it for us,” and a New Republic editor remarked, “Sister Boom-Boom on TV is the best thing that ever could have happened for the Republicans.”
Inside the convention hall the political equivalent of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence was threatening floor fights if Mondale didn’t yield to platform demands. Most voters and even political junkies in the media tend to ignore party platforms, though this is a mistake, as they are an excellent barometer of the state of a party’s mind amidst the crosscutting pressures of intra-party divisions and the larger public opinion. The overarching principles of the platform were “the Democratic commitment to an activist government” and “the Democratic tradition of caring.” The platform opposed a balanced budget amendment and pledged to repeal the third year of Reagan’s income tax cut, defer income tax indexing, raise corporate income taxes, and adopt a more progressive tax system.
Overall one would have thought from the platform, as well as the proceedings from the convention podium, that the nation had returned to the conditions of the Great Depression. New York governor Mario Cuomo electrified the delegates with his superbly delivered keynote address, in which he appropriated the imagery of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to revivify the core liberal idea of class division. So successful was the speech that several journalists wrote the following day that the convention should dump Mondale and nominate Cuomo in his place. In the biting words of conservative Democrat Joshua Muravchik, however, a close reading of Cuomo’s text leads to the view that Democrats have a “penchant for hollow rhetoric,” while historian Ronald Radosh called it “the swan song of the old liberalism.”35 Time’s William A. Henry acerbically commented: “Cuomo and all the Democrats were affirming that the central concern of government was ministering to life’s losers.”36 Among Cuomo’s aphorisms was praise for the nuclear freeze movement because the freeze understood “that peace is better than war because life is better than death.”
On foreign policy, Mondale had to beat back popular proposals calling for cuts in defense spending and a “no first use” policy for nuclear weapons, but he did have to acquiesce to a plank eschewing intervention in Central America and other hot spots. Neither in speeches nor in the platform did the Democrats offer any coherent alternative national security policy. Mondale also caved to Jesse Jackson’s opposition to including a statement in the platform condemning anti-Semitism. Jackson and his allies derided such a statement as “unnecessary” and “very divisive.” Jews were virtually the only interest group that Mondale stiffed.
Feminists wanted a revived commitment to the Equal Rights Amendment and a nod to the policy of comparable worth. Gay rights activists demanded, and got, a gay rights plank. Jesse Jackson pushed for a platform plank that mentioned racial quotas explicitly with the implication that some quotas were acceptable. (Jackson’s exact draft language—and this is important when we consider in due course the Republican equivalent—was: “The Democratic Party opposes quotas which are inconsistent with the principles of our country.”) Mondale compromised on language endorsing “the use of affirmative action goals, timetables, and other verifiable measures.”
Jackson also wanted a Fairness Commission to deliver higher numbers of black delegates to future conventions. The composition of the delegates was already skewed away from the rank-and-file profile of the party; most had gone to college or graduate school and enjoyed household incomes twice the national average. Time’s William Henry remarked, “If times were as bad as their party said, for most of the delegates that knowledge would have to be an article of faith.”37 Congressional Quarterly noted how the unrepresentative profile of the delegates contributed to the party’s ever-leftward tilt; there were no longer “those centrists and conservative forces that are the source of party strength in many regions of the country. Nobody at this convention called for the construction of the MX missile, nobody defended income tax indexing, nobody publicly disputed the gay-rights plank in the platform. The people who used to do that, with a few notable exceptions, no longer attend Democratic conventions.” According to a Washington Post poll of convention delegates, just 22 percent agreed with the statement “The United States should take all steps, including the use of force, to prevent the spread of Communism;” by contrast, 63 percent of Democratic voters at large agreed with this statement. Joshua Muravchik lamented, “In 1984 the McGovernization of the Democratic Party was completed.”38
Mondale compounded his party’s liberalism-über-alles with the pledge to raise taxes in his acceptance speech: “Let’s tell the truth. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.” According to Dan Rostenkowski, who was on the stage with Mondale at the conclusion of the speech, Mondale quipped: “Look at ’em; we’re going to tax their ass off.”39 Throughout the campaign Mondale also called for the repeal of income tax indexing.
Republicans couldn’t believe it. Reagan’s chief campaign strategist, Stu Spencer, said, “I was in ecstasy. The political graveyard is full of tax increases.” His campaign colleague Lee Atwater said, “I thought I was dreaming. I thought I had fallen asleep and was dreaming.” Newt Gingrich, in San Francisco to hold daily press conferences attacking the proceedings, promptly canceled the next day’s session, explaining that Republicans thought it best not to get between Mondale and the American people. “He hadn’t read the public right,” was Reagan’s subdued reaction.40 Many Democrats, caught by surprise, were as dismayed as Republicans were gleeful. Displaying the shrewdness that became evident a decade later, Bill Clinton urged that Mondale pledge to put any new revenue from a tax increase into a trust fund to reduce the deficit, or else voters would think that Democrats would just spend the money on more social programs. Clinton’s suggestion fell on deaf ears.
Mondale’s choice of words on foreign policy also reinforced liberal stereotypes. He complained about Reagan’s arms buildup and the lack of negotiations with the Soviets: “But the truth is that between us, we have the capacity to destroy the planet. Every president since the bomb went off understood that and talked with the Soviets and negotiated arms control. Why has this administration failed? Why haven’t they tried? Why can’t they understand the cry of Americans and human beings for sense and sanity in control of these God-awful weapons? Why, why? Why can’t we meet in summit conferences with the Soviet Union at least once a year?” Mondale’s nasal twang made this paragraph sound weaker and whinier than it reads.41
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REAGAN AND HIS campaign strategists enjoyed the luxury of sitting back and watching the internecine fighting and ideological nervous breakdown of the Democrats. The economic winds were blowing at Reagan’s back (second quarter growth in 1984 came in at a sizzling 7.4 percent with inflation at 3.2 percent; as of July 1, the U.S. economy had experienced the strongest four quarters of growth in a generation), and he had addressed his vulnerabilities on foreign policy with his January 16 speech on Soviet relations. Consequently, the polls looked strong during the first half of the year except for the brief Gary Hart boomlet. Some polls showed Reagan ahead by more than 20 points; “It looks so good it’s frightening,” a top campaign aide said in March. While Hart and Mondale were prolonging the Democrats’ prenomination agony in early June, Reagan was in Normandy, France, observing the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings with the kind of imagery and adulation for which he was the unequaled master among modern American presidents.42 Reagan’s 1984 campaign stands in marked contrast to his aggressive 1980 effort. The conventional wisdom of political science is that elections featuring an incumbent are always referendums on the incumbent, compelling the incumbent to run a defensive campaign. But with the exogenous factors such as the strong economy along with the disarray of the Democrats, Reagan had more latitude to go on offense than many other incumbents. This is the strategy Franklin Roosevelt followed in the 1936 election—his object was not just reelection but the delegitimization of the Republican Party. Reagan had the opportunity to follow this approach; in fact, he was always at his best when on offense against liberalism, and seldom worse than when he assumed a defensive posture.
Instead of emulating FDR, however, the president’s team went into a defensive crouch, deliberately adopting a generic campaign based on Reagan’s record and personality, and especially on the renewed sense of optimism among Americans—“It’s morning again in America,” went the opening line of a Reagan ad that became the campaign’s signature theme. Generally absent was any articulation of his principles. “There is to be no discussion of issues in this campaign,” one of Reagan’s political strategists informed the senior White House staff early in the year.43 The political strategists would later blame the White House staff for the lack of specific new ideas to use in the campaign. “They don’t have a goddamn thing in the pipeline,” Stuart Spencer said in a tape-recorded campaign strategy meeting in June.44 Maybe, Spencer thought, Reagan could talk about “acid rain and all that stuff,” while others thought he might try talking about women’s issues. Above all, abortion, Social Security, and—amazingly—tax reform must never be mentioned. The plain mistake here, on the part of both the White House staff and campaign strategists, was to think in terms of narrow issues rather than broad long-term partisan strategy.45
In any event, as Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus wrote in their book on Reagan’s second term, Landslide, “[T]he Reagan campaign resorted to the political equivalent of mood music.” William F. Buckley Jr. called it “the blandification of Ronald Reagan.” After the election, Lou Cannon noted that “Reagan originated nothing in the campaign that produced his lopsided victory. He proposed no new programs and discussed no new ideas.”46 James MacGregor Burns wrote of FDR’s 1936 reelection: “Roosevelt had fought the campaign on a highly personal basis. And he had built a winning coalition around himself—not the Democratic party, not the Democratic platform, not the liberal ideology—but around himself.”47 As it happens, Burns’s view of FDR’s 1936 campaign is mostly wrong—but substitute Reagan for FDR and it would be spot-on for 1984.
The bitter fruits of this defensive strategy would become most evident in the fall during Reagan’s extremely poor showing in his first head-to-head debate with Mondale in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 7. Despite five debate practice sessions, the decision to cram Reagan with facts and figures to try to rebut Mondale’s unfairness charge deprived Reagan of his chief asset as a critic of liberalism.48 The conventional thinkers of his team had, in other words, turned him into a low-budget liberal, conceding the premises of liberalism about the role of government—a role he could not convincingly act. Reagan knew he’d done poorly and was furious with himself afterward. RNC chairman Paul Laxalt said, “He was brutalized by a briefing process that didn’t make any sense.” The media missed this aspect of the matter entirely, instead marching in lockstep on the theme that Reagan’s age had caught up with him. (The Wall Street Journal opened the floodgates with its page-one feature: “New Question in Race: Is Oldest U.S. President Now Showing His Age?”) Not surprisingly, when Reagan showed up in the second debate in a mood to attack, he did much better. In fact it was precisely the media’s superficial coverage of the campaign that set up Reagan’s showstopping one-liner in the second debate: “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”
According to Lou Cannon, Reagan chafed at the bland scripts his campaign team prepared for him and wanted to go harder after Mondale and the Democrats.49 On a few occasions Reagan slipped the leash and got off some good general shots at Mondale and Democrats. “[Mondale] sees an America in which every day is tax day, April 15,” Reagan quipped. “Well, we see an America in which every day is Independence Day, the Fourth of July.” In his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Dallas he said, “America is presented with the clearest political choice of half a century. The distinctions between our two parties and the different philosophy of our political opponents are at the heart of this campaign.” Except that they weren’t. Reagan never made a serious or sustained case against the Democratic Congress, never argued that he couldn’t govern unless the Democratic Congress was turned out. Although he had called repeatedly in his previous policy speeches for giving the president a line-item veto to control spending, he did not make this a campaign issue in the fall of 1984. He never mentioned his Strategic Defense Initiative or attacked Democrats for their opposition to this popular idea. (To the contrary, Reagan personally intervened to prevent the GOP platform from including a plank calling for the near-term deployment of missile defense.) Political scientists Marc Landy and Sidney Milkis, authors of Presidential Greatness, observed that “Reagan’s 1984 campaign was a marvel of anti-partisanship…. Congressional Republican challengers, eagerly grasping after Reagan’s coattails, were hard put to claim that they were more ‘pro-morning’ than their Democratic adversaries who were obstinate in their refusal to endorse the afternoon.”
It is useful to contrast the language Reagan used in his standard stump speech in 1984 to appeal for Democratic votes with the language FDR used in 1936. On the surface their language seems similar—both appealed to members of the other party to “join us.” FDR:
There are two ways of viewing the government’s duty in matters affecting economic and social life. The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman. That theory belongs to the party of Toryism, and I had hoped that most of the Tories left this country in 1776. But it is not and never will be the theory of the Democratic Party. This is no time for fear, for reaction or for timidity. And here and now I invite those nominal Republicans who find their conscience cannot be squared with the groping and the failure of their party leaders to join hands with us. (Emphasis added)
Notice especially that in equating Republicans with Toryism, FDR is arguing the Republican Party out of the mainstream of American politics. He also appeals to the class of “nominal Republicans” to switch parties.
By contrast, Reagan’s approach to the other party was more ambiguous and less partisan. His appeals to Democratic voters were soft, never offering any positive reasons for voting Republican (or for Democrats and independents to become Republicans), nor did the president attempt to argue the Democratic Party out of the mainstream of American politics, as FDR had tried to do to the GOP. For example, a passage from Reagan’s standard campaign stump speech reads:
To all those Democrats, and I hope there are many here, who have been loyal to the party of FDR and Harry Truman and JFK, people who believe in protecting the interests of working people, who are not ashamed of America’s standing for freedom in the world—we say to you: Join us. Come walk with us down that new path of hope and opportunity. I was a Democrat most of my adult life. I didn’t leave my party and we’re not suggesting you leave yours. I am telling you that what I felt was that the leadership of the Democratic Party had left me and millions of patriotic Democrats in this country who believed in freedom. (Emphasis added)
Indeed, Reagan seldom referred to the Republican Party by name in his stump speeches, a fact not lost on perceptive observers on the left. Sidney Blumenthal noted in the New Republic, “The ancient ADAer never evoked the glorious past of the Grand Old Party. He ran for reelection as the true heir of Roosevelt.”
Reagan’s transpartisan appeal left open the possibility of a reformed Democratic Party being worthy of returning home at some future date, which turned out to be the successful strategy of Bill Clinton eight years later. Political scientist Charles Kesler observed: “Reagan, in short, was reluctant to create the serious political division that was required to shatter and humiliate the Democratic Party, and to reform the Republican Party.” Harvey Mansfield wrote in a similar vein: “Reagan’s failure to demand anything of the American people may have improved his own chances of re-election, but by reducing the size of the task, it softened the argument for voting for his party.” Landy and Milkis offered a harsher judgment: “Indeed, his conduct was so politically feckless as to raise doubts about the degree to which Reagan himself was a Reaganite.”50
The Republicans’ reluctance to go for the jugular is all the more astonishing in retrospect given the large opening that the Democrats’ disarray presented. As was the case with McGovern’s candidacy in 1972, many members of Congress and other lower level Democrats dissociated themselves from the national ticket. Peter Schramm observed: “Democratic candidates showed great creativity. Some were able to be out of town, visiting relatives, or even checking their poultry farms in the northern part of the state, when Mondale was in town.”51 A few local Democratic organizations built wooden platforms wide enough for candidates to appear out of camera view from Mondale if they wished. Some went so far as to obfuscate their party preference deliberately. In Iowa, the very liberal Democratic congressman Tom Harkin accused his Republican opponent of being a “big spender.” New York congressman Tom Downey, another of the most liberal House members, sent out a mailer showing a photo of himself with Reagan, along with the slogan “Return Tom Downey to Congress where he can continue to work with President Reagan.” Downey was narrowly reelected. Here the paradox of the 1984 campaign can be most fully appreciated: when one party eschews partisan appeals, it enables the other party to do the same thing.
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REAGAN’S DEFENSIVE STRATEGY obscured the lingering divisions within the Republican Party, which manifested themselves at the party’s convention in Dallas. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick gave a rousing keynote speech in which she coined the phrase “San Francisco Democrats,” defined as those who always “blame America first.” Behind the scenes, party moderates had opposed the selection of Kirkpatrick for the keynote and tried to limit her time at the podium. A compromise was struck whereby a dual keynote address was given by U.S. Treasurer Katherine Ortega in an attempt to appeal to Hispanic voters. Which party was flirting with quotas now? Her address was as forgettable as she was obscure.
Six Republican senators from the liberal wing of the party convened a rump platform session in Dallas to argue for a more liberal Republicanism, and seldom has the slang term rump been more appropriately employed.52 This effort naturally attracted laudatory media. The Los Angeles Times editorialized that the liberal senators were “six of the most constructive Republicans in the U.S. Senate” and “are among the true party conservatives, not least for seeking to conserve the virtues that have made the Republican Party great.”
Like the Democrats’ platform fight over racial quotas, there was a revealing platform fight in Dallas that illuminated the split between the moderates, or old-guard pragmatists, and the conservative young Turks who wanted a more aggressive ideological party appeal.53 The moderates argued in the platform committee hearings for an open-ended plank that could accept tax increases to curb the federal deficit “as a last resort.” There was a certain coyness here, as moderate Republicans such as Bob Dole surely thought the last resort was inevitable.54 As such, the proposed plank was a huge concession to Mondale’s argument about the need for a tax increase.
Supply-siders vehemently disagreed, and there followed the Republican equivalent of the Democrats’ fight over the deliberately ambiguous language about racial quotas in their platform. A compromise statement was offered: “We therefore oppose any attempts to increase taxes which would harm the recovery and reverse the trend toward restoring control of the economy to individual Americans.” Hold on a moment, a few gimlet-eyed observers said. Note in this language an ambiguity of Talmudic subtlety: it is possible to imply that there might be forms of tax hikes that would not harm economic growth. The supply-siders were on guard against the evasive locutions such as “revenue enhancement” and “loophole closing” by which politicians describe tax increases.
Texas congressman Tom Loeffler proposed a change in punctuation to clarify the party’s position: “We therefore oppose any attempts to increase taxes, which would harm the recovery …” Adding a comma after taxes sealed off this thin opening by making it categorically clear that it was Republican philosophy that any tax increase would harm economic growth and that therefore the Republican Party opposed all tax increases. The moderates objected, but Loeffler’s amendment passed, aided in part by the platform committee chairman, Mississippi congressman Trent Lott.55
There were similar language fights elsewhere in the platform process. The 1980 Republican platform had endorsed the goal of U.S. military superiority over the Soviet Union, but now Senator John Warner, chairman of the platform committee on national security, pushed to delete the word superiority, arguing that it was not necessary for deterrence. While Warner won this change in his committee, the young Turks struck back in the full platform committee, inserting language asserting that the United States shall be “stronger than any potential adversary” so that “in case of conflict, the United States would clearly prevail.” The young Turks won other victories over the old-guard establishment, including beating back attempts by a handful of moderates to revive Republican support for the Equal Rights Amendment and reiterating or even expanding pro-family planks from the 1980 platform. These victories ensured, though did not immediately achieve, the conservative future of the Republican Party.
The significance of the intraparty divisions was lost on the media, which portrayed the Republican convention as a uniformly extremist affair. The biased coverage of GOP conventions is not exactly a man-bites-dog story. In a survey of CBS and NBC News coverage published in Public Opinion magazine after the convention, William C. Adams found that “together, both CBS News and NBC News called the Republican Party, its platform, or its dominant leaders by conservative labels 113 times. They called the Democrats by liberal labels 21 times and moderate labels 14 times…. Republicans were measured in ideological terms, with their distance to the right discussed and calibrated. Democrats were seldom evaluated by such criteria. The terms ‘right-wing’ and ‘right-winger’ appeared repeatedly in covering Republicans; the terms ‘left-wing’ and ‘left-winger’ were never used by CBS News or NBC News reporters covering Democrats.” A separate study by Michael J. Robinson of the Media Analysis Project at George Washington University found “eight times as many references to the far right as to the far left in network coverage of the campaign.”56
Overall, Robinson concluded after the election, the three TV news networks were three times more critical of Reagan than Mondale. The media were nearly as frustrated as Mondale that they couldn’t get voters to come around to their point of view. A few days before the election, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote, “Not since the days of H. L. Mencken have so many reporters written so much or so well about the shortcomings of the President and influenced so few voters.”57 Newsweek, for example, wrote before the election that “[Reagan] is neither especially acute nor especially driven, neither especially knowledgeable nor especially well prepared for the most powerful job in the world.”
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IF THE REAGAN team’s generic campaign strategy failed to take advantage of the strong Republican position and the Democrats’ severe vulnerabilities, its most prominent theme—“Morning in America”—did manage to bring out the worst of liberal pessimism. Democratic representative Richard Gephardt said in response to the slogan: “It’s getting closer and closer to midnight.” The Democrats had stopped playing FDR’s favorite anthem, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” so Republicans played it at their convention.
The Democrats’ reaction to “Morning in America” was remarkably tone deaf, as there was a palpable resurgence of patriotism among Americans in 1984. The full depth and dimensions of this were revealed by the way the nation turned a cosmopolitan event—the Olympic Games—into a patriotic rallying point. It was somehow fitting in the Age of Reagan that the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games were the first wholly managed as a private sector effort, and LA Olympic organizer Peter Ueberroth thought it would be a great marketing tactic to have the Olympic torch conveyed from Greece to Los Angeles by a circuitous relay involving thousands of runners who would each carry the torch for a few hundred yards. The torch procession took eighty-two days to wend its way through the United States, attracting large crowds even in the middle of the night.
On June 4, the New York Times carried a front-page story about how the torch procession had become a surprising cultural phenomenon. “More than Olympic Flame Crosses America,” read the Times headline. Filing his story from Loose Creek, Missouri, Times reporter Andrew Malcolm observed that “something unusual and unplanned is also happening as the Olympic torch makes its way slowly across the nation…. For, unseen by most of the country, as the flame moves through places like Useful, Linn and Knob Noster, Union, Sedalia and Festus, it seems to be igniting some special feelings less tied to the Olympics and more to patriotism. They show themselves in many ways, often producing tears for spectators and participants alike.”
Although the Times reporter didn’t make the connection, it is plain that many people associated the torch with the Statue of Liberty, which during 1984 was shrouded in scaffolding during renovations, with its torch temporarily removed. The Olympic torch did nicely as a substitute and a catalyst, and it had the advantage of being mobile; after all, much of the U.S. population had never seen the Statue of Liberty in person. Flag-waving crowds everywhere would spontaneously begin singing “God Bless America” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “I never expected it,” one relay official told the Times. “But there’s all these feelings pent up. And a special chemistry. And when people see that torch, they relate it to patriotism. There’s a hunger for that in the land. And for a hero.” Eventually all three TV networks, the major news weeklies, and large metropolitan papers followed the Times’s lead and took notice of this outpouring of patriotic sentiment over the torch. Reagan made sure to attend the opening ceremonies in Los Angeles in July.
The point is, there was more than just national pride at work in the American mind in 1984. For all of the legitimate caveats and reservations that can be made about American exceptionalism, there is no avoiding the conclusion that Americans were feeling exceptionally exceptional in 1984, perhaps in overcompensation for the years of doubt and decay in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever its exact nature and meaning, the phenomenon was not fully lost on the Democrats; the Mondale campaign made sure there was an American flag placed on each seat for the final night of the San Francisco convention. They were a McGovernite party at heart, but they were shrewd enough not to want to look like one.
Reagan’s skillful exploitation of the nation’s improving mood contrasts sharply with the harshness of Democratic rhetoric. Indeed, the artless harshness of Democratic partisanship played into Reagan’s hand. Tip O’Neill let fly with this: “The evil is in the White House at the present time. And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America, and who likes to ride a horse. He’s cold. He’s mean. He’s got ice water for blood.” Geraldine Ferraro, taking heavy fire from Catholics for her pro-abortion views, fought back by saying that Reagan was not a good Christian, while Mondale argued that God was not a Republican. Senator Alan Cranston said, “Reagan is a trigger-happy President [with a] simplistic and paranoid world view leading us toward a nuclear collision that could end us all.”
Just as the Democratic attack on “Republican unfairness” misread the reality and mood of a majority of Americans, their line on Reagan as a warmonger failed to gain traction for the same reason. A careful reading of public opinion polls would have revealed the subtle and dissonant state of Americans on the question of war and peace, but ideology and partisan enthusiasm blinded liberals and the media from perceiving that Reagan’s theme of “peace through strength” easily trumped the Democrats’ emphasis on peace through talk. Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin, detected this subtlety in his polls and crafted a strategy to gain the initiative over the Democrats.
One result of Wirthlin’s more subtle reading of the dissonance in American opinion was a memorable campaign ad that gently deflected the worry about Reagan on foreign policy and attacked Democratic weakness at the same time: the “Bear in the Woods” TV spot. Narrated with the relaxing dulcet voice of Hal Riney (who also voiced the “Morning in America” ads) over an image of a grizzly bear on the prowl, the ad said: “There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?” The spot climaxes with the bear backing off from the silhouette of a man (Reagan?) whose firearms are not apparent.
The “Bear in the Woods” ad coincided with the release of a surprise summer hit movie, a film about a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the United States called Red Dawn, in which a band of high school students mounts a guerilla campaign against the brutal occupation. (Alexander Haig provided technical and plot advice for the film.) The very premise of the movie made most critics sneer. The New York Times’s Janet Maslin called it “rabidly inflammatory” and “incorrigibly gung-ho.” Vincent Canby, writing also for the Times, wrote that Red Dawn “provides an unusual glimpse into the mind of a certain kind of contemporary archconservative … [I]t exposes for all to see the cockeyed nightmares of those on the lunatic fringe.” TV Guide, once owned by Reagan’s friend Walter Annenberg, called it “infantile right-wing fantasy” and the “cinematic embodiment of the paranoid delusions of militarists, survivalists, and television evangelists; definitely a film for the Reagan era.” The Financial Times wrote: “Red Dawn is a slice of gung-ho anti-Communism cut fresh and quivering from the American body paranoiac.” Once again it was difficult to distinguish American media from Soviet media. Pravda called Red Dawn “a monstrous anti-Soviet concoction filled with so many bloody scenes, a film so primitive, and so relentlessly false.” Soviet television didn’t bother with the heavy lifting of original criticism; it simply quoted American reviewers. As is often the case with movies the critics widely dislike, Red Dawn did big box office over the summer, and therein lies another parable of establishment liberalism misreading the public.
The tactic of portraying Reagan as a warmonger might have gained some traction in August when, during a microphone check before the president’s regular Saturday radio broadcast, Reagan quipped: “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.” Reagan forgot—not for the first time—the Washington adage that all microphones should be assumed to be live, and despite the audible guffaws from the people in the room making it clear it was a joke, the news media played it up with grim satisfaction. Snap polls showed a hiccup in public support for the president.
Then, inexplicably, the Soviets gave Reagan an assist. After saying that it could not deal with Reagan and tasking the KGB to do everything possible to impede Reagan’s reelection, the Kremlin suddenly began sending feelers to resume some kind of contact. The Soviets had probably concluded that Reagan was a sure bet for reelection and wanted to begin figuring out a face-saving way to resume arms negotiations. A Soviet diplomatic blunder in late June may have contributed to their about-face. The Soviets proposed a new round of arms talks focusing on “the militarization of space”—an obvious gambit to undermine SDI—expecting the United States to refuse and hand the Soviets a propaganda club. But when the United States quickly accepted, with the proviso that space weapons ought to include missiles that travel through space, the Soviets clumsily backed away from their own offer.
In early September the Kremlin accepted Reagan’s invitation for Andrei Gromyko to visit the White House following Gromyko’s annual address to the United Nations, even though the Soviets knew that Reagan would press hard on human rights. Reagan prepared for the meeting as though it were a full-blown summit, having meetings with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Reagan recorded in his diary three days before the meeting: “Henry K. came by with more insight re Gromyko. I found we are tracking very close on the approach to take.” The State Department produced a set of talking points for Reagan, but he spent the weekend at Camp David writing several pages of talking points of his own, much to the surprise of Shultz and Foggy Bottom.
Gromyko and Reagan sat down in the Oval Office on Friday, September 28, and the media demand for photographs was so immense that photographers had to be brought through in shifts. After the media were finally excused, Reagan and Gromyko got down to three and a half hours of talks culminating with lunch in the formal dining room. As he had with Dobrynin and in his correspondence with other Soviet rulers, Reagan put forward his view that the Soviet Union was philosophically and practically an expansionist power, but that the United States did not seek conflict or to change the Soviet system (although NSDD 75 came close to declaring regime transformation to be the goal of U.S. policy). Gromyko naturally demurred, and asserted that while he believed in the Marxist dialectic that all the world would eventually become socialist “as a historical process,” the Soviet Union did not seek to spread its ideology by force. He also refused to be drawn into discussion of human rights in the Soviet Union, which he said were none of the United States’ business.
But for all the appearances, the meeting was not the usual standoff. Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer observed: “It quickly became apparent that Gromyko had not come to Washington to negotiate the details of agreements but to size up Reagan for the Soviet leadership on a philosophical level, which the Soviets themselves call the ‘level of principle.’” Oberdorfer added the obvious point: “Reagan was most comfortable at precisely this level of broad generality: the fundamental reasons for the West’s belief that it was threatened by the Soviet Union’s ideology and actions.”58 Despite the sour statement Gromyko later issued wondering “whether Washington is going to correct its line of policy,” he is thought to have recognized Reagan’s sincerity about improving relations. For his part, Reagan made a curious diary entry about the encounter: “I figured they nursed a grudge that we don’t respect them as a superpower.” It was to be Gromyko’s last visit to the White House.
Gromyko met briefly with Walter Mondale later the same afternoon to avoid the impression of favoring Reagan and to cause as much mischief as possible. Mondale, according to the New York Times, told Gromyko that if elected he would unilaterally freeze all new weapons development for six months as an incentive for the Soviets to hold a summit. The Soviet press heralded Mondale’s attitude in what was tantamount to an endorsement, but the effort could not match the boon Reagan received from the home field advantage of the Oval Office.
Gromyko’s White House visit removed the last possibility that Mondale could effectively exploit fears of Reagan’s foreign policy, and the die was cast for the election. After late October, when Reagan dispatched Mondale with his memorable one-liner in the second debate about his opponent’s “youth and inexperience,” there was no drama about the outcome. Relentless polling showed that very few voters—perhaps 10 percent or less—changed their mind in the course of the fall campaign. When it appeared that a fifty-state sweep of the electoral college might be possible, Reagan made a last-minute visit to Minnesota in an attempt to wrest Mondale’s home state away from him. Mondale closed out the campaign in a state of disbelief and denial; he couldn’t perceive how political conditions had changed. “I don’t believe that the American people are selfish,” he said repeatedly before the election, as if charitable sentiment was possible only through partisan liberalism. Margaret Warner of Newsweek commented: “To him, those were the possibilities: to be selfish or vote for his kind of Democrat. He could not recognize that something was changing in the relationship between individuals and government.”59
Mondale managed to hang on to his home state by the slight margin of eight thousand votes (making Minnesota the only state that never voted for Reagan even once), while Reagan swept the other forty-nine states, collecting the largest electoral college margin ever. Reagan racked up 59 percent of the popular vote—the fourth-largest popular vote landslide in presidential history, and a figure that no candidate has come close to matching since. He carried nearly every demographic except blacks, Hispanics, and Jews. He carried 61 percent of independents, a quarter of registered Democrats, and three-quarters of young first-time voters. Despite the presence of a Catholic woman as a running mate on the Democratic ticket, Reagan carried 56 percent of the Catholic vote and 54 percent of the women’s vote. The gender gap facing the GOP was—and still is—an unshakeable media theme, though one wonders whether the media have it backward: Reagan pulled 62 percent of men, suggesting that the gender gap is as much a problem of Democrats failing to attract the votes of men as Republicans falling short with women.60
Despite the magnitude of Reagan’s landslide, he had no coattails. Reagan received seventeen million more votes than Republican House candidates. Before the election Reagan’s campaign manager, Ed Rollins, said: “If we don’t gain Republican seats in Congress, the Reagan Revolution is over.”61 Most analysis predicted a twenty-to-twenty-five-seat gain for Republicans in the House, but on election day the GOP picked up a paltry fourteen seats, compared to thirty-three in 1980, most of which gain had been lost in the 1982 mid-term election. Nine of the Republican House pickups were in two states—Texas and North Carolina—where the Republican Party ran integrated campaigns, presenting a united front to voters. Nationally the popular vote for the House was almost exactly equal (Republicans actually received a majority of total votes cast in contested seats), but because of gerrymandering Democrats would enjoy a comfortable 253–182 margin in the House. Ninety-six percent of House incumbents were reelected; the incoming Ninety-ninth Congress had one of the lowest numbers of new representatives in decades. One of the newcomers was Tom Delay of Texas, elected in a Houston district once held by Vice President George H. W. Bush.
Action on the Senate side was more interesting. Judge Mitch McConnell in Kentucky upset incumbent Democratic senator Dee Huddleston after trailing by more than ten points in pre election polls. Illinois’s liberal Republican senator Charles Percy, who had been a thorn in the side of Reagan’s foreign policy, lost to a liberal, Representative Paul Simon. Other notable newcomers to the Senate included John Kerry in Massachusetts and Albert Gore Jr. in Tennessee, who won the seat vacated by retiring Republican Howard Baker. Victor Ashe, the Republican candidate Gore defeated, said of Gore: “He’s bright, intelligent, and will be on the national ticket within a decade.”62 Republicans ended up losing two Senate seats, narrowing their advantage to 53–47.
The election result left the ideological divisions in Congress more raw than ever, especially in the House, where a dispute over an Indiana congressional district is said to have been a turning point in the partisan fury of the people’s chamber. A Republican had been certified as the winner after two recounts of a close contest, but House Democrats voted to seat the Democratic candidate instead. House Republican whip Trent Lott said, “I think we ought to go to war,” while Representative Henry Hyde said, “This has put a breach in the House like nothing I’ve seen in my ten years here.” House Republicans would continue to be, in the words of the National Journal, “the Rodney Dangerfields of American politics—no respect.”
The Republicans’ middling results on the congressional level also enabled Democrats and the media to deprecate the magnitude of Reagan’s landslide. Speaker Tip O’Neill said: “There is no mandate out there.” A New York Times headline conferred its blessing on O’Neill’s line: “Poll Finds Reagan Failed to Obtain Policy Mandate.” Political scientist Theodore Lowi wrote that Reagan’s victory “was a personal triumph—broad, nationwide, but shallow. The majority was large but weak.” It was, he added, not a victory of “a conservative majority, but of a Reagan majority.” Representative Tony Coelho: “The people gave him a personal victory. But they let us keep effective control of the House to counteract his extremism.” Coelho went on to tell Hedrick Smith of the New York Times: “If the White House had not been so selfish and had not worried about trying to carry fifty states and if they had gone out after key Senate races and key House seats, we would be in much worse shape. Reagan did not win a party landslide and that is what his party needed.”63
Newt Gingrich displayed his instinct for the political jugular with his comment that “Reagan should have prepared for reelection by forcing a polarization of the country. He should have been running against liberals and radicals…. Reagan should have focused more on changing the nation than on governing.” Ed Rollins later acknowledged the strategic error of the campaign: “We’d run an issueless campaign. There was no second-term plan.” Marc Landy and Sid Milkis concluded: “Morning in America dimmed into the twilight of de-alignment.”
But dismissing Reagan’s landslide as a mere “personal victory” ironically enabled many liberals to ignore their own mounting troubles and set them up for future disappointments. The cliché that voters liked Reagan’s personality more than his policies reassured dispirited liberals, who clung to the belief that all liberalism needed to do was ride out Reagan. A careful look at opinion research would have exposed liberalism’s wishful thinking: one study in Public Opinion Quarterly found that Reagan’s job approval rating was consistently higher than his personal approval rating, and that issue by issue, a solid majority of voters sided more with Reagan than Democrats.64 More ominous for liberal Democrats was the fact that Reagan and Republicans were noticeably more popular among younger voters, those under age thirty. Reagan’s highest approval ratings—a stunning 82 percent favorable in the fall of 1984—came from voters under age twenty-four, and Reagan’s best receptions on the campaign trail occurred on college campuses, a fact that astonished everyone who recalled Reagan’s adversarial relationship with “the kids” on campus in the 1960s. In fact, Rolling Stone magazine reported that a survey of its readers revealed a majority had voted for Reagan.
Most liberals who took note of these trends simply lashed out at the young. Alvin Schorr wrote in the Los Angeles Times that conservative young people were “cowards” lacking the “venturesomeness and excitement” of their 1960s predecessors. Ellen Goodman took Reagan’s showing among the young as a sign of “youthful selfishness,” and Arthur Schlesinger attributed it to a “cyclical retreat” from idealism to “privatism.”
Schlesinger’s “cycles of American history” thesis provided the warm blanket that chilled liberals needed. The following year Richard Reeves would offer this prediction in his book The Reagan Detour: “The Reagan years would be a detour, necessary if sometimes nasty, in the long progression of American liberal democracy…. [I] deas and issues will inevitably bring liberalism and the Democrats back into fashion and power—sooner rather than later.”65 A little bit of class warfare would do the trick, Reeves thought. As if on cue, a few days after the election the American Catholic bishops released a new pastoral letter on the economy that sounded like a clerical echo of the Democratic Party platform, calling for large government interventions on behalf of economic equality. The fairness issue was not going to go away, even though voters had repudiated it.
But a few liberals understood that the size and nature of Reagan’s landslide clearly indicated significant problems for the Democratic Party. Pat Moynihan said: “I’ll tell you what chills the blood of liberals. It was always thought that the old bastards were the conservatives. Now the young people are becoming the conservatives and we’re the old bastards.”66 Incoming Democratic Party chairman Paul Kirk, a former aide to Ted Kennedy, said forthrightly that Democrats needed to “shed the interest-group image.” Kevin Phillips said Mondale’s crushing defeat was “the death knell for the smokestack wing of the Democratic Party.” Moderates and thoughtful liberals founded the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in an effort to wrest the party back toward the center. One early enthusiast of the DLC was Bill Clinton, who said the council’s purpose was to create “a new middle ground of thinking on which someone can not only run for President but actually be elected.”67
Clinton said that the Democratic Party “knows it has to change” and told journalist Peter Brown, “If we lead with class warfare, we lose.” About Jesse Jackson, Clinton added presciently, “I have never believed Democrats need to distance themselves from him. I think Democrats need to disagree with him.”68 Sister Souljah acquired a bull’s-eye on her back, with a use-by date of 1992.
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EVEN IF THE 1984 election failed to be the decisive realignment that conservative partisans had hoped for, Harvey Mansfield judged that “[t]here were incremental changes favorable to the Republicans portending a future realignment, together with the continued, perhaps intensified division for now between a Republican presidency and a Democratic House of Representatives.” Running a campaign aimed at propelling party realignment would have required a high-risk audacity that is rare among political figures, and almost nonexistent among political strategists and operatives. Reagan conceivably could have lost had he attempted a high-risk strategy. The temptation to run a campaign playing to Reagan’s personal popularity and virtues along with the strong economy was overwhelming, especially when the overwrought pessimism of Democrats presented such an easy target.
In his election night victory speech (in which he deliberately neglected to mention Mondale because of his bitter feelings about Democratic attacks on him), Reagan signed off with what became a signature line of his fall stump speech: “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” Then he left to spend most of the remainder of November at the ranch, contemplating how to make good on this boast.