by Henry Olsen
Reagan didn’t just borrow the famous question from FDR, he took the entire structure of the passage. First, both men pose the nature of the choice. Second, they pose the framing question: Are you better off than you were in the past? Third, they both pose exactly four follow-up questions that re-pose the initial question in terms of the specific items Americans were concerned about. This cannot have been coincidence. When Reagan was making his final appeal to the American people in the most important moment up to that time in his political life, he chose to cloak himself in Roosevelt’s mantle.
The American people heard and understood. Private polls taken after the debate immediately showed Reagan rocketing ahead, although in that less technologically advanced time there were no public polls scheduled to show this. By the Monday before the election both candidates knew what was in store, but we who were following the race remained ignorant of what was to come.
I will never forget where I was and what I was doing a bit after 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Election Day. I was sitting in the student lounge running my College Republican club’s get-out-the-vote operation, watching NBC news report the early returns while waiting for club members to come get their assignments. Suddenly the news anchor, John Chancellor, announced NBC was ready to make its projection. “Ronald Wilson Reagan—of California, a sports announcer, a film actor, the former governor of California—is our projected winner.”109 Like Chancellor and the young Tom Brokaw, I was stunned. Unlike them, I was ecstatic.
Reagan would go on to win a decisive Electoral College landslide, crushing Carter by 489 electoral votes to 49. Reagan’s popular vote margin was also large, nearly 10 percent. Carter received only 41 percent of the popular vote, to this day the lowest level any incumbent Democratic president has ever received.110
The landslide was not just limited to Reagan, however. Republicans gained twelve Senate seats to take control of that chamber for the first time since 1954. They also gained 34 seats in the House to reach 192, the party’s highest total since 1968. Many of those seats came from historically Democratic working-class districts such as Toledo’s Ohio 9 and Providence’s Rhode Island 2. By the millions, working-class Democrats who thought of themselves as conservatives but who still supported the New Deal voted for Reagan and Republicans up and down the ticket.
Working-class Democrats provided the votes for Reagan’s margin just as they had done in his gubernatorial races in California. Their support was most evident in the South. The Democratic party had always had its electoral base in white, working-class southern regions from the days the party was founded in the 1830s. That support had eroded over time, but with a southerner at the top of the ticket the Democratic party was still very competitive in southern states. In fact, Carter had won in 1976 by sweeping all but one of the sixteen states in which slavery had been legal at the time of the Civil War.111
Reagan’s backing from white southerners was so strong that he beat Carter in all but two of the fifteen states Carter had carried just four years before. His share of the vote was substantially higher than Ford’s in every state, with increases ranging from 1.7 percent in the state with the highest percentage of blacks, Mississippi, to a high of 13.2 percent in Arkansas.112 Reagan often ran even with or behind Ford in affluent cities or black communities, but ran even farther ahead of him in the smaller, white rural counties that then and now dominate the South. His brand of muscular, traditional, New Deal–friendly conservatism was exactly what these voters wanted.
White working-class northern Democrats also flocked to Reagan’s banner. This is harder to discern in part because three states had a candidate on the ballot in either 1976 (Michigan—Ford) or 1980 (Illinois—Anderson; Wisconsin—former governor Patrick Lucey, Anderson’s running mate). The results on these states were surely affected by the presence of these favorite sons, and Ford ran ahead of Reagan in each even though Reagan won all three. Despite this, Reagan outpolled Ford in many working-class congressional districts in each state in areas like northern Wisconsin, suburban Detroit, and rural Illinois beyond metropolitan Chicago.
Reagan’s strength among working-class Democrats is best seen in other midwestern and northeastern states. He outpolled Ford in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa. He did particularly well in industrial counties like Luzerne (Wilkes-Barre), Lackawanna (Scranton), Lehigh (Bethlehem), Stark (Canton), and Summit (Akron). In these and other similar areas Reagan often ran 4 to 8 percent ahead of Ford. In more affluent counties, however, Reagan ran roughly even with or behind Ford.
The same patterns emerge from large northeastern states like New York and New Jersey. Reagan ran behind or roughly even with Ford in affluent or largely black communities, but ran well ahead of him in areas with large numbers of ethnic, working-class Democrats like Cumberland and Gloucester counties in New Jersey or the Catholic-dominated areas of Queens and Long Island. Reagan did especially well in Jewish neighborhoods in New York City, running as much as 20 percent ahead of Ford.113 No matter where you looked, you found the same results: habitual working-class Democrats had crossed party lines to hand the White House to Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Reagan had emerged from his wilderness years triumphant. All the hard work, all the effort, all the long flights and the endless browbeating from the press: all of it had been worth it. We’ll never know what he really thought at that moment when Nancy told Reagan while he was in the shower that President Carter wanted to speak with him.114 But he must have felt vindicated.
Like Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt, Reagan emerged from his time out of power because the nation was in crisis. Like those men, he also came to power only because he appealed to people who had long backed the other party. The four men all shared immense rhetorical gifts, but they also shared an ability to see big pictures when others saw only snapshots. Years before their competitors, they generated ideas that seemed out of place when they uttered them but which seemed completely natural when they had been proved right. And as with those men, the fight to get power was just the beginning.
Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt had faced either an economic crisis or a military crisis. Reagan faced both. Moreover, unlike those men, his allies would not be in complete control of the legislature. Despite the Republican gains, Democrats still held the House by a commanding margin. Many Republicans also did not share his beliefs: only twenty-three of the forty-two incoming Republican senators who had previously served in Congress had received ratings above 80 from the American Conservative Union (ACU).115 Seven had ACU ratings under 50, and six had ratings above 50 from the premier liberal ratings of the time, those of the Americans for Democratic Action.116 Reagan had been given a mandate, but a still-wary populace had not given carte blanche to his party.
There were still more scripts to be written, more sequels to be shot. Reagan had been given the role he had long coveted, but it remained to be seen whether this leading man could carry the film. The challenges would be overwhelming, but one thing was certain: Reagan would approach them with the same ideas and the same confidence that had taken him from the mashed potato circuit to the Oval Office.
Chapter 7
President Reagan
As if on cue, the sun burst through the morning clouds on January 20, 1981, just as Ronald Reagan stepped up to be sworn in as president of the United States. Reagan would go on to give a memorable speech, one that is still quoted decades later. But that morning all the world watched as the oldest man then ever to be elected president swore to uphold, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Perhaps more than any president in decades, Reagan had thought long and hard about what that oath meant. All of his intricately developed principles would be tested as he faced the challenges of the most powerful office in the free world. Moreover, he was taking office with the country faced by greater challenges, economic and military, than at any time since his boyhood hero, Franklin Roosevelt, had taken the same oath nearly forty-eight years before.
Reagan would meet those
challenges and more. His then-radical economic ideas to cut income tax rates, reduce regulations, trim nonessential social spending, and control inflation helped spur the American economy to the greatest peacetime expansion in decades. Aside from a small recession caused by the first Gulf War in 1990–91, and aided by the cooperation between Democratic president Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress in the mid-1990s, the economy grew rapidly for nearly twenty years. Tens of millions of jobs were created and incomes rose for people of all levels of education and income. But the economic miracle he unleashed was the least of his achievements.
Freedom and human dignity always mattered more to Reagan than wealth, and so the challenge of halting the Communist expansion was always foremost on his mind. When he took office, even his most rabid partisans were merely hoping that he could halt the decline in American might and prestige and restore hope that communism could be combated successfully. Instead, Reagan’s foreign policy produced the most stunning reversal in fortune imaginable. Less than a year out of office, the Soviet Union had lost control of its satellites in Eastern Europe. By Christmas 1991, the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist. The twin threats that had hung over the world for forty years, nuclear war between the world’s two superpowers and Communist domination of the planet, were gone.
Millions of words have been written about how he was able to do this. This work will not try to recount all of the many decisions he made or trace who influenced what. There are many biographies that do that quite well. Instead, we will look at something else: the influence of Reagan’s own ideas on the course of his administration.
Reagan displayed remarkable fidelity to these ideas even as he faced enormous pressure to cast them aside. His own staff would often pressure him to change course, but he would always refuse when doing so meant he would have to change his principles. This was as true of taxes as it was on fighting communism.
He would sometimes compromise or change course on specific actions. Thus he agreed to increase taxes as part of a deal to make Social Security solvent. More surprisingly, the old Cold Warrior would reach the most wide-ranging nuclear arms-control deal of any president when he signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. These changes often perplexed his friends who equated a change in tactics with a change in principle.
Reagan therefore faced revolts from self-anointed conservative leaders. Frequently decrying the influence of supposed liberals within the administration, these leaders would protest that these staffers were diverting Reagan away from conservative principles. Toward the end of his second term, even some of Reagan’s personal friends like Bill Buckley expressed misgivings over the INF treaty.
These leaders never understood the difference between principles and ideology. As Reagan had said in 1977, principles can adapt to new facts while ideologies cannot. For an ideologue every problem is a nail and every solution is a hammer. Reagan knew the hammer and the nail were merely means toward an end, putting two boards together. If he saw a different way to do that, he didn’t hesitate to adopt a different course.
That course often flew in the face of ideological categories. He was an ardent free trader, but frequently imposed penalties on Japan and other nations he viewed as engaging in unfair trade. He loved immigrants, but signed a compromise immigration bill that he thought would reduce the flow of immigrants because controlling the border was more important.1 He believed in lower taxes, but lower taxes for all, not just for the top 1 percent like the “supply-side” ideologues wanted. He could seek to cut unnecessary entitlement spending and also propose a government-financed catastrophic health insurance plan.
These supposed deviations often surprised people, no one more than the director of his Office for Management and Budget (OMB), David Stockman. Stockman’s differences with his boss came out in two highly publicized episodes, one in 1981 and the other in 1986. In the first, Stockman’s devotion to supply-side ideology led to public disagreement with Reagan. In the second, Stockman’s tell-all book about his time in the Reagan White House depicted the president as too sentimental and swayable to lead the supply-side, libertarian revolution Stockman thought he had signed on for.
Stockman may have been shocked, shocked to learn there was politics going on in Washington, but his deeper failure was that he never understood what Reagan’s principles were. Reagan had always said there is no such thing as left or right, there is only up or down. Armed with that belief, Reagan could and did act freely from ideological constraints in pursuit of his dream, the highest degree of liberty consistent with order and security. But to ideologues like Stockman, to whom only left or right mattered, Reagan was always a constant disappointment.
Reagan was never reliant on the people he had around him; he relied on his ideas. He had “come to Washington to put into practice ideas I’d believed in for decades,” that unique mix of New Deal liberalism and freedom-loving conservatism combined with his principled, nonideological way of looking at the world.2 With these principles, Reagan could retain popular favor when things looked darkest. He could navigate the rapids of politics, sometimes making mistakes but always keeping the ship of state on course. And with those ideas he could put together the political coalition of old-guard business Republicans, movement conservatives, and blue-collar Democrats and independents that he had first envisioned in the mid-1960s. The faith and love that Reagan had for America’s people and ideals are what united this coalition; they are why you are reading this book today.
That faith and love were on full display that bright and chilly January afternoon when Reagan stood to give his first inaugural address. That speech is today best remembered by his line “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”3 That along with his condemnation of high taxes, overregulation, and deficit spending have led many ideological conservatives and libertarians to claim Reagan as their inspiration. They say that he, like they, intended to assault the very pillar of the New Deal, the guarantee that the government would step in to protect the material comfort and spiritual dignity of average Americans even in the face of the private sector.
It was apparent, however, that using the government to protect the comfort and dignity of ordinary people was Reagan’s primary aim. He extolled America’s farmers, policemen, miners, factory workers, teachers, homemakers, and doctors as “a special interest group that has been too long neglected . . . Americans.” He said that “all must share” in both the “productive work” and the “bounty of a revived economy.” His most moving praise of the average American came later when he said:
Those who say that we’re in a time when there are not heroes, they just don’t know where to look. You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they’re on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity. They’re individuals and families whose taxes support the government and whose voluntary gifts support church, charity, culture, art, and education. Their patriotism is quiet, but deep. Their values sustain our national life.
Where too many conservatives, Republicans, or libertarians saw losers or “takers,” Reagan saw heroes.
These heroes came in all sizes and from all walks of life, and sometimes they needed government to help them out. Reagan told Americans that day that
it’s not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.
Later in his speech he elaborated on this.
We shall reflect the compassion that is so much a part of your makeup. How can we love our country and not love our countrymen; and loving them, reach out a hand when they fall, heal them when they are sic
k, and provide opportunity to make them self-sufficient so they will be equal in fact and not just in theory?
Has any Republican since Reagan used the word “love” so freely and so unselfconsciously to describe his political philosophy? No one who could speak so movingly about the need to care for his fellow citizens could have intended to repeal or even significantly threaten the public New Deal they held so dear.
It was not fitting for an inaugural speech to place specific flesh on these bones of principle, but he would soon do that when he launched his economic recovery plan. He did just that in two speeches in early February.
Reagan laid the blame for unemployment, inflation, and high interest rates squarely on the government’s doorstep. Decades of ever-increasing taxation, regulation, and deficit spending had created the economic witches’ brew that was consuming America.4 Drawing on themes he had first uttered decades earlier, he told Americans that bracket creep was decreasing the standard of living and that he meant to ignore those who said taxes shouldn’t be cut until spending was reduced. He did mean to cut spending, but only for “those who are not really qualified by reason of need.” He mainly meant to increase America’s capacity to produce by cutting tax rates by 30 percent for everyone and by eliminating government wage or price controls and dramatically cutting regulations.
Reagan knew that most Americans valued social spending by government that gave the average person security in retirement and all Americans protection against undeserved poverty. Accordingly, he told Congress a few days later that
we will continue to fulfill the obligations that spring from our national conscience. Those who, through no fault of their own, must depend on the rest of us—the poverty stricken, the disabled, the elderly, all those with true need—can rest assured that the social safety net of programs they depend on are exempt from any cuts.5
