Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980

by Rick Perlstein

Reagan’s standard stump speech insisted that Carter’s “economic policies have put two million Americans out of work,” and that “no amount of rhetoric can obscure the disaster those policies have inflicted.” New York Lieutenant Governor Mario Cuomo responded plaintively: “Why is it mean for Carter to say that Reagan is imprudent, and therefore dangerous, when it isn’t mean for people to say that Carter deliberately put people out on the street?”

Regarding that, Carter was downright indignant: “I don’t believe this country needs a president who believes that the best way to control nuclear weapons is to start a nuclear arms race and play a trump card against the Soviet Union.” Jules Witcover and Jack Germond were alarmed, too—about Carter. They detected “stridency, a note of desperation and pleading” in Carter’s voice. And when he attacked Reagan “specifically by name,” they reported, “in the roped off press section, jaws fell.”

He pleaded with his audience to expend more energy registering voters—because who wins would “determine whether or not this America will be unified, or, if I lose the election, whether Americans might be separated Black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban; whether this nation—” The press hardly heard the rest. “There were only looks of disbelief as the words ‘black from white…’ sank in,” Witcover and Germond observed. “Jimmy Carter was

back on the low road… outdoing himself.” Ronald Reagan sorrowed the next morning,

Then he blasted away: “You mean he’s really going to talk finally about how his administration has caused runaway inflation, unemployment beyond anything we’ve known since the ’30s, credit rising to the highest since the Civil War?… I can stay home maybe then.” Then, at a “Save Our Steel” rally in Steubenville, Ohio, he tossed a bomb in the direction of the Environmental Protection Agency, “who, if they had their way, you and I would have to live in rabbit holes or birds’ nests.” Nobody asked him to apologize for being mean. At Reagan headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, two big

Reagan’s base, Peter Bailey said, “enjoyed stylized associations—the Statue of Liberty, ‘God Bless America,’ waving wheat, farmers around a table, the governor choking up while speaking—but for the 15 percent we were targeting, the slightest hint of that

National Conservative Political Action Committee. “It’s the dirtiest campaign I’ve been involved in,” complained one of the targets of their Senate hit list, George McGovern. Even his opponent Jim Abdnor said he wished he had never heard of NCPAC—though he also claimed, rather dubiously, “I wasn’t aware this was going on.” Another target, Frank Church, also called it the dirtiest campaign he’d experienced. His race against Steve Symms was tied—but the days when he dreamed of restoring Idaho’s progressive populist heritage were but a memory. A visiting Eastern reporter stopped into a store to get his luggage repaired.

Reagan toured ravaged industrial towns in Ohio and Michigan, labeling himself an “old union man” and ratcheting up the economic attacks: “A few weeks ago, I said Mr. Carter’s

Reagan was also about to receive the nod from the seventeen-thousand-member Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization union, who said Carter had “mismanaged” the air traffic control system, while Reagan understood “the vital role of the professional controller”: the endorsement came in exchange for a pledge to appoint a new FAA administrator who had their approval—and might also have been motivated by knowledge that President Carter had a plan on the books to undermine their union should they strike when their contract came up for renegotiation the following year. Reagan

The most astonishing endorsement came the next day, from the pulpit of that church in Detroit: Ralph Abernathy, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who identified himself as “the

Hosea Williams, another legatee of Dr. King, said, “I was the closet Black to Governor Carter when he was governor of Georgia”—but now he said that “Jimmy Carter did not do as much for the Black people of Georgia as governor as Lester Maddox”—a segregationist—did, and that Ronald Reagan had done more for Blacks as governor of California than Carter had in Georgia, too. He said the Democrats were “taking Black people for granted”—comparing

Later that day, the National Association of Police Associations—the organization of police unions—announced that their organization, like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, was making Ronald Reagan the first presidential candidate they had ever endorsed.

subsequent Harris Poll revealed that Americans opposed releasing the hostages in exchange for spare parts by a margin of 46 percent to 39 percent. “Backlash,” Reagan campaign researcher Annalise Martin scrawled in a memo recording this evidence that the October Surprise plan was working.

Putting him onstage next to Reagan while the old man pulled keepsakes from his mental shoebox, uttered some alarming nuclear provocation—or simply forgot his lines: that was the royal road to setting up the costar of Bedtime for Bonzo for a Barry Goldwater–sized rout. And on the Reagan campaign plane, many shared that fear. They were on the way to New

Terence Cardinal Cooke took the podium, joked that joining these two men together “demonstrated a power even greater than the League of Women Voters,” and introduced Carter, who spoke first—and again violated the spirit of the event: he skipped the self-mockery. “For the last three and a half years I have faced the awesome pressures known only to those who occupy the Oval Office,” he began. Then, he indulged his

Then Reagan did what he did best: he slayed ’em with jokes. His best was that there was no truth to the rumor that he had attended the original Al Smith Dinner. In fact, he never felt younger. The trick was “riding older and older horses.” By that point, like the man once said, Reagan

Their work was helped by a remarkable ace up the Reaganites’ sleeve: a Carter briefing book on national security and foreign affairs that had somehow turned up at Reagan headquarters and let Reagan anticipate exactly what Carter might say in the debate. It wasn’t the first time the campaign had received unauthorized materials from within the bowels of the government. Earlier in October, an army sergeant walked

Several weeks later, the sergeant returned with Carter’s itinerary for the home stretch of

Reagan was in Louisville celebrating another astonishing endorsement: the antiwar 1968 Democratic presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy, who Reagan said he hoped would help convince people “I don’t eat my young.” Then he made his most direct attack in the Iran issue so far: “I don’t understand why fifty-two Americans have been

a Christian mother of four, I want my children to be able to pray in school. I don’t want them being taught that abortion and homosexuality are perfectly all right. I was sorry to learn that President Carter disagrees with me on all of these issues.… Because of this, I’m duty-bound as a Christian and a mother to vote for Ronald Reagan, a man that will protect my family’s values.” Another featured a gay pride parade in San

for the ad actually came from Jesse Helms’s Congressional Club, and didn’t, Carter’s campaign lawyer complained, “adequately identify its source, as required by the FCC.” But as Jesse Helms’s minions well knew, by the time they filed the paperwork, it would have

Independent groups spent more than $9 million trying to elect Ronald Reagan. There was virtually no PAC spending for Jimmy

Reagan’s debate with Anderson: “Bread up over 74 percent. Hamburger up over 114 percent. Milk up over 86 percent. Sugar up over 156 percent. Thanks to Carter’s runaway inflation, we pay more and the farmer makes less. Can we afford four more years of this?”

Another was the debate, which took place in Cleveland on Wednesday, October 28, exactly six days before the balloting. The polls were tied. The TV confrontation was anticipated as the tiebreaker—“the world heavyweight championship and

said, noting the pilfered briefing book that had helped him master the role. The revelation that Reagan was cheating was not reported on any network—including on ABC, where the conservative columnist George Will, who saw the stolen document while helping coach Reagan, was commenting on the debate—and in only one newspaper, covering Elkhart, Indiana.

9:30 EASTERN STANDARD TIME more than half the country—120 million viewers—flipped on their TVs, some with their phones at the ready: ABC had organized a poll, one fifty-cent 900 number to dial to “vote” for Carter, another for Reagan. The candidates crossed the big empty stage. Reagan continued past his podium to shake Carter’s hand. The president hadn’t been prepared for that. He appeared taken aback. Reagan won

That all the budget cutting that was required could easily be accomplished by eliminating waste and fraud. That the only reason he had ever questioned the minimum wage was because it crushed the hopes of Black teenagers, “doing away with the jobs that

WAS THE STRANGEST THING. No one on the Carter team seemed to have noticed that Reagan had well-practiced answers for all these attacks; no one had thought to do the work of preparing new lines of attack with which to effect ambushes. For a campaign strategy

It seemed never to have occurred to anyone in the White House that Reagan had years and years of rhetoric outside his campaigns and terms in elected office from which to compile ordnance to throw at him at just this moment. His biweekly newsletter

Reagan had won practically every debate he had participated in—going back at least to 1967, when he appeared on the same TV hookup with Robert F. Kennedy to discuss the Vietnam War, and twisted his opponent in such knots that Kennedy subsequently yelled “Who the fuck got me into this?” and ordered staffers never to pair him with “that son-of-a-bitch” ever again. A former speaker in the California assembly had warned

Reagan had stated perfectly plainly before a massive TV audience in 1964, that it was preferable to add “voluntary features” to Social Security in order to let citizens get a better return on their investment, oblivious to the simple actuarial fact that thus thinning out the pool of Social Security contributors would collapse the program. This was exactly what the Carter side had hoped Reagan would do: make things up.

President Kennedy’s proposal to extend Social Security to cover medical care for the elderly represented an opening wedge to a government takeover of “every area of freedom as we have known in this country,” predicting that if it were passed, “we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.” Reagan was fired from his job of hosting General Electric Theater in part for so prominently advocating this radical position.

delivered the knockout blow with an easy chuckle: “There you go again!” A burst of delighted laughter from the audience: Jimmy Carter was being mean again. Reagan’s

“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

Backstage, Carter people high-fived one

another. “Because we knew that was a lie,” Hendrik Hertzberg remembered. “And we thought that now the press would take him down.” Instead, he was lauded for his snappy comeback.

Still, Carter people weren’t worried. They counted up all the things Reagan said that weren’t so, which Carter could continue correcting through Election Day, and scored him the winner. A Freudian slip suggested that their boss

Two more epic endorsements came, both from outfits that had never backed a presidential candidate before: TV Guide,

circulation 18.9 million, whose publisher, Walter Annenberg, called voting for Reagan a “matter of conscience,” and the National Rifle Association, which praised Reagan as “a long-time member of the NRA” who had promised them that his Justice Department would “pursue and prosecute those in government who abuse citizens for the political ends of gun control.” The last

Carter flew to Chicago for a campaign event. ABC’s 7:00 newscast reported polls showing that a third of likely voters believed that Carter was exploiting the hostages for political reasons. At 8:43, Evans and Novak reported that some sort of handshake deal had occurred two weeks earlier between White House counsel Lloyd Cutler and Iranian emissaries in Geneva,

James Baker solemnly intoned, “A presidency built upon trust and integrity should fear no investigation

by the Justice Department. We call upon the president immediately to end his uncooperative tactics and cooperate fully as he has promised to do.”

But a vote is a vote, no matter with how much passion it is cast. Reagan won a bare majority of them, about 51 percent, with Anderson getting less than 7 percent. But on the electoral map, Reagan’s triumph was overwhelming: Carter and Mondale won only Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia, Rhode Island, the District of Columbia, and

their home states of Georgia and Minnesota, a mere forty-nine electoral votes; even Barry Goldwater had received fifty-three.

on Election Day, voters by a margin of 45 percent to 39 percent told the exit pollsters that they were more concerned with unemployment. That was the “liberal” answer to the question—the focus of all of Ted Kennedy’s passionate efforts to pledge in the Democratic platform that “a guarantee of a job for every American who is able to work” must “take precedence over all other domestic priorities,” meaning fighting inflation;

Well, Jimmy Carter had implored the electorate that nothing was more important to him. But of that 45 percent plurality who said jobs were more important, 60 percent voted for Reagan. Carter’s frenzied efforts to cut spending didn’t avail

George Bush had once called Reagan’s promise that uniform across-the-board tax cuts would both deliver jobs and a balanced budget “voodoo economics.” A plurality of the electorate, however, seemed to trust that Reagan’s promise was perfectly credible.

Another development cut against the victor: for the first time, there was a recognizable “gender gap” between the two parties. Carter got a slight majority of female voters; Reagan got 55 percent of men. This pattern proved enduring.

Given that the percentage of respondents saying minorities should “help themselves” was at an all-time high, eight percentage points greater than four years earlier—and the fact that there was no diminished support for spending on things like education, Social Security, crime control, and the environment—racial animus helps explain part of this electoral bounty; and also why, while in 1976 the Republicans managed no electoral votes in the South except for Virginia’s, this time they nabbed all but Georgia’s twelve. One of the victims of Reagan’s coattails in the South

she had no trouble gathering six times the required signatures for a referendum to ban tax dollars from “promoting any culture other than American, or any language other than English”—including in advertising for tourists. And now, with 60 percent of the vote, a city harrowed by the Mariel boatlift made English their “official language.”