The Working Class Republican

by Henry Olsen

  Reagan’s retrospective explanation for why he ran in 1980 provides further support for this view. The problem with the Democrats under Carter was that they wanted “national economic planning.”86

  That meant one thing to me: The Democrats wanted to borrow some of the principles of the Soviets’ failed five-year plans, with Washington setting national production goals, deciding where people worked, what they would do, where they would live, what they would produce.87

  Whether Carter or the Democrats actually wanted to do that is beside the point. The point is that Reagan was taking aim at an excess of government control best described in the 1948 Progressive Party interpretation of the New Deal rather than the New Deal itself. Government help would be fine; government control and direction would not.

  He also criticized the Democrats’ commitment to a “‘fairer distribution of wealth, income, and power.”88 Those were “code words that to me meant a confiscation of the earnings of people in our country who worked and produced, and their redistribution to those that didn’t.”89 Again, whether Reagan’s characterization is fair is not the issue. What is at issue is what Reagan saw as the problem with government. His answer, as it was decades before, was that government should not give money to people who did not contribute or deserve help. As his many other statements always showed, people who could not work or provide for themselves deserved government assistance. The problem came when government chose to use its power to create a society that was fairer primarily in the eyes of government planners and experts.

  Reagan did not break any new intellectual ground in his race for the nomination, nor was his nomination ever really in doubt except for a very brief period in February 1980. That period indirectly shows why Reagan believed what he did, as the political experts were proved wrong twice and the power of individual initiative and character was shown to make all the difference.

  Reagan’s age and conservatism, not to mention his two previous defeats, meant that other ambitious Republicans were not hesitant to take him on. Some ran to his right, like Phil Crane, while the others ran to varying degrees to his left. Pundits, however, quickly settled on his two most important challengers.

  The former Texas governor and treasury secretary John Connally was one. A Democrat turned Republican like Reagan, Connally was a favorite of the corporate set. He easily raised what was then a tremendous sum of money, $11 million, and as a southerner with extensive experience, he looked like the man who could steal the conservative South from Reagan.90

  Senate Republican leader Howard Baker was the other. He had been an important figure in the Watergate hearings, regularly asking witnesses, “What did the President know and when did he know it?”91 His Washington experience and leadership meant that many thought he could attract the type of moderate conservative who had backed Ford in 1976.

  The experts were wrong about both men. Neither caught on with Republican voters, and both faded quickly from the scene. Instead, Reagan’s primary competitors became two men who had registered as mere asterisks in the polls in the summer of 1979 but whose drive and ingenuity impressed voters.

  George H. W. Bush caught fire first. The Yale-educated son of a Republican senator from Connecticut, he was a two-term congressman from his adopted Texas who had since held a series of political appointments, ranging from chairman of the Republican National Committee to ambassador to China to director of the CIA. Bush modeled his campaign on Jimmy Carter’s successful challenge in 1976. He virtually camped out in Iowa, intending to use a victory there as a springboard to national attention just as Carter had.92 He was moreover the sort of Republican moderate conservatives tended to like: experienced, nonideological, socially moderate, and eternally geared toward balance. He was, for example, in favor of the ERA, was pro-choice on abortion, and criticized Reagan’s plan for a major tax cut while increasing defense spending as “voodoo economics.”93 His campaign strategy initially worked, as he decisively defeated all other contenders and narrowly edged out Reagan to win the Iowa caucuses.

  What happened next has gone down in political lore as one of the greatest political comebacks in history. Reagan abandoned the aloof strategy that his campaign manager, John Sears, had advised, and hit the campaign trail in New Hampshire with gusto. A few days before the primary, Reagan and Bush were scheduled to debate in Nashua at an event sponsored by a local newspaper. The newspaper was short of funds, however, and turned to the Reagan campaign to pay the bill. Effectively in charge, Reagan decided he wanted to invite all the contenders for a multicandidate debate rather than the one-on-one favored by Bush. At the debate, with most of the other contenders quietly lined up behind them, Reagan publicly fought with the moderator to have all the candidates included. Bush sat sheepishly by. When the moderator told the engineer to turn off Reagan’s microphone, the candidate exploded with anger. “I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Green [sic],” he shouted.94 The contrast between Reagan and Bush—one man confidently in charge, the other standoffish and silent—told Republican voters all they needed to know. Three days later Reagan swamped Bush by 27 percent, 50–23.

  Reagan’s second surprise challenger then emerged, Illinois congressman John Anderson. While Anderson had started his career as a conventional small-town Republican, he had steadily moved to the political center over the 1970s. He was running as the most liberal of all the candidates, a man whose signature proposal was a fifty-cent-per-gallon tax hike on gasoline—at a time when gas had just hit a new high price of over a dollar a gallon. Anderson caught the eye of urban liberals unhappy with Carter and started to attract national attention, including a long-running feature in the comic strip Doonesbury. Moderates looking for an alternative to Reagan started to look at Anderson, and he proceeded to split the non-Reagan vote with Bush. This allowed Reagan to win decisive victories with pluralities in moderate states like Vermont, Illinois, and Wisconsin. By the time Anderson dropped out to pursue an independent campaign in the fall election, he had fatally wounded Bush’s campaign. Bush would eke out a couple more narrow wins in moderate states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, but Reagan’s delegate lead was too large to overcome. The race was over by the time we Californians voted on June 3.

  “Third time pays for all,” Bilbo Baggins told Thorin Oakenshield when contemplating facing the dragon Smaug at the end of their quest. So too now did Ronald Reagan, finally victorious in his third time seeking the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, have to confront the final foe in his decades-long quest: the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter. General-election campaigns are never a good time to begin something entirely new. So it was no surprise that Reagan largely rehashed his longtime themes in his acceptance speech to the Republican convention. He had long told Americans that they faced a time for choosing, that they had a rendezvous with destiny that would forever determine whether freedom would endure. Only now he had one thing he had never had before: he and his vision were the choice he was asking Americans to make.

  This version of “A Time for Choosing,” like the version he delivered sixteen years earlier on behalf of Barry Goldwater, would be focused on the person whose votes he needed to become president: the disaffected New Dealer. So it was perhaps not surprising that he started not just by addressing the assembled delegates, but by also addressing “my fellow citizens of this great nation.”95 He went on to say he would carry his message “to every American, regardless of party affiliation,” and that his view of government placed trust “in those values that transcend persons and parties.”

  This might sound like just good politics, but Reagan’s opening few minutes broke with most other recent nominees’ traditions. Each of the last three Republican nominees had either specifically mentioned the word “Republican”; invoked past recent Republican heroes like Nixon, Eisenhower, or Hoover; or done both within the first few paragraphs. In contrast, Reagan did not mention any other living Republican throughout his entire speech. He did not even mention the word “Republican” until the four
teenth paragraph, and then mentioned it briefly by calling Abraham Lincoln “the first Republican president.” He would not mention the word “Republican” again until his speech was over a third complete—and then it was to tell his audience that “we Republicans believe it is essential that we maintain both the forward momentum of economic growth and the strength of the safety net beneath those in society who need help. We also believe it is essential that the integrity of all aspects of Social Security be preserved.” In short, he cloaked the GOP in the mantle of FDR, who had rested his New Deal on the proposition that he could deliver both growth and security.

  The next portion of his speech also stoked traditional Democratic themes rather than those Republicans were used to hearing. Instead of economic growth, he emphasized work, dignity, and jobs. Indeed, he did not use the phrase “economic growth” again, and he never mentioned entrepreneurs or called on job creators to make a better nation. Instead, he said it was “the American worker” who kept our economic system going. He pledged to cut taxes and reduce regulation, but not to create growth in the abstract: the result would be investment that would “put Americans back to work.” He even pledged to “restore hope” and to “make America great again.”

  Reagan concluded his speech with a more direct appeal to the disaffected Democrat. He mentioned the word “Republican” only once more, when he said he had “thousands of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans from all economic conditions and walks of life bound together in that community of shared values of family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” He said those people were the type of Americans Thomas Paine had in mind when he wrote, “during the darkest days of the American revolution—‘We have it in our power to make the world over again.’” Reagan then turned his attention to another famous American who roused the nation from its slumber during dark times to reclaim its heritage: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  He quoted FDR twice in the final part of his speech.96 Immediately following his quotation of Paine, Reagan again told Americans that they had a “rendezvous with destiny.” And to conclude he offered a long quotation from Roosevelt’s own first acceptance speech, delivered in July 1932, in which he pledged to “abolish useless offices, eliminate unnecessary functions of government” and make government solvent again. He concluded his speech by telling Americans it was time “to recapture our destiny,” to work together to carry out “these unkept promises,” and to “pledge to each other and to all America on this July day 48 years later that we will do just that.” Only those as old as Reagan or presidential historians would have realized that Reagan had just approvingly cited the speech in which FDR first used the phrase “New Deal.” But the message was nevertheless clear: Today’s Democratic Party has abandoned FDR’s course; I mean to get us back on course.

  I was listening to Reagan that night with many of my College Republican friends. While I was thrilled as ever to hear his words, what stuck in my mind for decades later came next. Reagan departed from his prepared remarks and talked about divine providence. He concluded with these words:

  I’ll confess that I’ve been afraid to suggest what I’m going to suggest. But I’m more afraid not to. Can we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of silent prayer?

  I was not then a particularly religious man, but the drama of the moment and the sense that we were all fighting together for a noble cause captured what I felt. It remained for many years my favorite passage from all of Reagan’s speeches.

  What I did not know then was that even here Reagan was interpreting Roosevelt. FDR had ended his speech on that July day forty-eight years earlier with an appeal for Americans to give him their help “to win in this crusade to return America to its own people.”97

  As Reagan left the podium to thunderous applause, the stage was set for his epic battle with modern progressive liberalism. But another force was mobilizing too. It would not be as powerful as Reagan, but it would attract the “conservative die hard” for whom nothing but a repeal of the New Deal would suffice. The Libertarian Party was moving, and it would offer a choice, not an echo.

  The choice it would offer would have been considered extreme even by the most hard-line Goldwater supporters. Its platform pledged to repeal all entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and to end all federal interference in the economy including the minimum wage and federal laws requiring employers to bargain with labor unions.98 It also called for an immediate 50 percent cut in tax rates (Reagan was calling for only a 30 percent reduction) and pledged to work for the eventual elimination of all taxation and the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing the federal income tax.99Add in the party’s call for the repeal of all of what Reagan had termed “sin laws” and its opposition to American involvement in any military alliance, such as NATO, and you have a recipe that was beyond the pale for most voters.

  The Libertarian Party nominated two lawyers for its ticket, Ed Clark for president and David Koch for vice president. It could not win, but it could deprive Reagan of enough votes in a close election to ensure President Carter’s reelection.

  This prospect did not trouble Clark, Koch, or other libertarians at all. They viewed Reagan the way Buckley used to view Dwight Eisenhower, as someone who offered the same old government solutions on the cheap. The party’s national chairman, David Bergland, told the Washington Post that Reagan “talks about free enterprise and lowering taxes, but his record as governor of California is just the opposite.”100 Clark would later tell one audience that Reagan was the worst of the candidates running.101 Much like Steffgen before him and many others during Reagan’s presidency, Reagan’s embrace of the New Deal’s core principles made him unacceptable to self-described true friends of freedom.

  The Clark-Koch ticket would end up garnering only a bit more than 1 percent of the national vote and did not cost Reagan a single state. While this was a higher level than any Libertarian candidate had received before or since until Gary Johnson’s 3.3 percent in 2016, it conclusively showed what Reagan had known all along: Americans of all stripes were not willing to cast aside the core principles of the New Deal.

  President Carter knew this too, and he spent the general election campaign trying to convince Americans that Reagan was in fact no different from Goldwater. He attacked Reagan’s prior opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Reagan’s subsequent invocation of “state’s rights” at a rally in Mississippi to revive Pat Brown’s allegation of racism.102 He argued that Reagan’s staunch and vocal anti-communism could cause a war with the Soviet Union.103 While Carter’s attacks were so harsh that they were condemned, they succeeded in rallying Democrats to his banner after a bruising primary campaign against a liberal challenger, Senator Ted Kennedy.104 The race was neck and neck as Carter and Reagan headed into their only debate, held one week before Election Day.

  The key moment of the debate came toward the end, when Carter brought up Reagan’s early opposition to Medicare. Carter had throughout the debate levied charge after charge against Reagan, trying to show that any Democrat who respected the accomplishments of FDR could not trust Reagan to keep them. But this final salvo pushed Reagan’s buttons a bit too far. He started his response with the line that most conservatives today love to repeat: “There you go again.”105

  Conservatives rarely recall the next few lines, but they are crucial to understanding why this moment was decisive. After putting Carter in his place, Reagan went on:

  When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one that was finally passed. I was not opposing the principle of providing care for them.106

  In the heat of the moment Reagan did not recall the name of the “other piece of legislation” he supported, but it was clearly the Kerr-Mills Act. Reagan had made clear all those years ago that he did believe that the
federal government should pay for needed medical care for people who couldn’t afford it themselves. He continued to make that clear in public and private for the entire time between those early days and the debate, as the 1979 letter to Professor Nikolaev clearly shows. When the chips were down, when the political battle was fiercest, Reagan won because he convinced the American people that he was what he said he was, the true heir to Franklin Roosevelt.

  Reagan continued his invocation of FDR in his closing statement. He framed the choice voters would make simply:

  Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls, will stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was four years ago? Is America as respected throughout the world as it was? Do you feel that our security is as safe, that we’re as strong as we were four years ago? [Emphasis added.]107

  Reagan’s questions neatly set up the best case for him. A majority of Americans felt they were worse off, and that America was worse off, than when Carter had taken office. What only the oldest of them would have recalled, however, was that this was not the first time they had been asked to make such a choice.

  Roosevelt had posed a nearly identical choice to Americans in his fifth fireside chat, given fifteen months after he took office. Compare Roosevelt’s framing with Reagan’s:

  But the simplest way for each of you to judge recovery lies in the plain facts of your own individual situation. Are you better off than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure? Are your working conditions better? Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?108 [Emphasis added.]