Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  Wallace’s campaign pulls two things into focus about the election of 1968. First, it wasn’t all about the new politics and the new media. George Wallace did remarkably well without employing any Madison Avenue ad men or commissioning expensive polls or crunching demographic data. The unfiltered rhetoric was part of Wallace’s appeal. He gave traditional, red-meat speeches to big crowds, and because of his outrageousness the media covered him extensively without his having to buy many minutes of air time. In election cycles to come, this “free media” became a critical tool for candidates on the ideological fringe and short of campaign cash.

  Wallace’s candidacy also reveals how moderate, even liberal, the Richard Nixon of 1968 was in comparison to the Republicans who followed him. Nixon’s strain of conservatism was one that advocated ending the war in Vietnam, extending civil rights, and supporting the expansion of welfare programs and enhancing environmental protection. Nixon said little in public about social issues like homosexuality or abortion. Nixon’s talk of the “silent majority” was kinder and gentler than Wallace’s strident talk of “rights” and “freedoms.” Yet, in the decades to come, the terms Wallace used, his vilification of big government, and his disparagement of the “cultural elite” came to be central tenets of the way Republicans of all stripes ran for office. It was Wallace, not Nixon, who presaged where politics was headed.

  Two Novembers

  The voters made their ultimate choice on 5 November. Richard Nixon at last won the job he had been seeking for so many years, and that so many people had thought he’d never get. His message resonated from coast to coast; in contrast to the sea of blue states Johnson had won in 1964, Nixon won the upper South, much of the Midwest, the Great Plains and West, California, and Texas. Hubert Humphrey was more than 100 electoral votes behind. His candidacy had never recovered from the disaster of Chicago. The antiwar liberals saw him not only as a proxy for Johnson but as a symbol of all that was wrong and crony-ridden about the Democratic Party nomination process. All the passion on the Democratic side had existed in the insurgent campaigns of McCarthy and Kennedy. With those two men gone, the fire went out. George Wallace hacked away at the Solid South, winning five Deep-Southern states and their 45 electoral votes.

  The popular vote was much closer, reflecting the generally leftward tilt of the country and revealing the true impact of Wallace’s third-party insurgency. Less than 1 percentage point separated Nixon and Humphrey in the popular vote: Nixon got 43.4 and Humphrey 42.7 percent. Meanwhile, Wallace got 13.5 percent, a number achieved by siphoning off Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans. The electoral math was such that, unlike 1912, the presence of a third-party candidate did not change the ultimate electoral outcome. In fact, the Wallace voters would most likely have voted for Nixon. Yet the popular vote totals reflected the shakiness of Richard Nixon’s victory. Despite Democratic implosion, an unpopular incumbent, and the slick and expensive television makeover of the candidate, Nixon didn’t win over that many more voters than his chief rival.

  The results laid bare the degree to which the New Deal Democratic coalition fell apart in 1968. In its place was a fractured and often antagonistic identity politics divided along lines of race, class, and region. Americans on both left and right were questioning mainstream “big” party politics, just as they were questioning big science, big business, and big government. This was not the first time such impulses had risen to the fore. Earlier times of tumult had revealed similar processes. In 1912, the inequalities of industrialization had propelled a new progressive politics and a third-party charge that split the Republican Party in two. In 1932, massive economic crisis led Americans of all political stripes to question old assumptions and traditional leadership, making way for a reconstituted Democratic Party and a new conception of the role of government. Republicans had been on the losing side in these moments of political change. In 1968, the chief victims of the fracturing of America were the Democratic Party leaders who had been in charge.

  With this fracturing, the broad-based, business conservatism of the postwar Republican Party started to morph into the cultural conservatism of a post-civil rights era. The Religious Right was not yet a significant force, but the rhetoric and issues driving the 1968 election started to make cultural and moral topics fair game in politics in new and powerful ways. Similarly, trends in white working-class voting began to shift in important ways. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt appealed to these voters’ identity as Americans. He promised them jobs and homes and economic security—and they faithfully voted Democratic in return. Starting in the late 1960s, Republicans appealed to their identities as homeowners, suburbanites, or churchgoers. They promised the white working class law and order and a return to traditional values and protection of individual rights, and they began to vote Republican in return.

  Figure 24. Richard M. Nixon campaign rally, 1968. Oliver F. Atkins, photographer. At the end of a tumultuous election and a violent, momentous year, Richard Nixon emerged victorious in his quest for the White House. His win derived partly from savvy marketing and campaign strategy, and substantially from the implosion of the Democratic Party. The dynamics of 1968, however, foreshadowed the transformation of politics in the Reagan era and beyond. National Archives.

  So, ultimately, the story of 1968 doesn’t just explain 1968. It explains what comes afterward. In 1972, the wounds of the last election were still visible throughout the Democratic Party. In the post-civil rights era, the party had become a much bigger tent, and much more open to new voices. African Americans, women, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups had more prominent roles in the Democratic Party than they ever had before. Yet the Democrats had lost the establishment power they had enjoyed from the New Deal through the Johnson years. They faced increasing dissent from the ranks of white working-class voters who had been the bedrock of the national party since the 1930s. George McGovern tried to be the glue that could bind these different factions together, but he couldn’t pull it off.

  Meanwhile, the Republican Party had found a new way to talk to voters, and had made inroads into critical parts of the old Democratic base. The real end point of the 1968 election, then, is not 5 November 1968 but 4 November 1980. Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter was a triumph of all the politics tested by Richard Nixon in 1968. Reagan had extraordinary powers of communication and ability to persuade and inspire voters. He picked up the Democratic voters disaffected by civil rights and cultural change. And he added Democrats in blue-collar manufacturing regions who had devastated by the economic malaise of the 1970s. Together, these voting blocs made the Reagan Revolution happen.

  The outlines of the twenty-first century’s red-state and blue-state map started to emerge in 1968. They solidified in 1980. In the thirty years since the election of Reagan, however, many other things happened to change the political landscape—and the personalities and issues driving the two major political parties. That is what the next two chapters will explore.

  PART IV

  1992

  CHAPTER 7

  Reagan Revolutionaries and New Democrats

  At 5:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, 1 June 1980, the Cable News Network, also known as CNN, came on the air. The first words heard on the new network came from its owner, brash and boastful Atlanta cable operator Ted Turner, who proclaimed CNN “the news channel for America” and promised its 24-hour coverage would follow both national and international news like no other network before it. Turner had raided the three broadcast networks for reporting talent and set up full-time bureaus in six cities as well as stringers around the world, doing all of it on a $25 million budget, only a fraction of what the major television networks spent on their news divisions. The bootstrapping showed in the first newscast that followed Turner’s appearance, memorable for its technical glitches and bland reporting. It was clear, however, that something new was afoot in television news.1

  Six weeks later, Ronald Reagan stoo
d before the Republican National Convention in Detroit as his party’s new nominee for president. Accepting the nomination, he promised a new beginning for a country that had been battered by a decade of foreign crises, economic malaise, and social turbulence. He condemned the Democrats as irresponsible tax-and-spenders who had made America less safe by their compromises with the Soviet Union. “It is time to put America back to work; to make our cities and towns resound with the confident voices of men and women of all races, nationalities and faiths bringing home to their families a decent paycheck they can cash for honest money,” Reagan said. “For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!”2

  Figure 25. The Cable News Network, created in 1980 by Atlanta entrepreneur Ted Turner, transformed the television news business and fundamentally altered the rhythms and media strategies of national politics. Here, network president Reese Schoenfeld and weekend anchor Reynelda Nuse prepare for the first broadcast. CNN Cable News Studio, 31 May 1980. AP Photo.

  Twelve years later, Turner’s scrappy enterprise had turned into a media juggernaut with a worldwide audience of millions. Reagan’s two terms in office had redefined American politics and reshaped national government. The New Deal Order that had held steady since the days of Franklin Roosevelt became replaced by a new politics of free markets and free enterprise, of government cuts and privatization, and of social issues and “family values.” The Democratic Party lost three presidential elections in a row. It had morphed from a party of liberal consensus to an expansive and chaotic combination of identity-focused interest groups, Southern populists, tradition-bound labor union bosses, and an economically beleaguered working class. A new generation of leaders within the Democratic Party, hailing from Southern and Western states, had started to argue that the party must move to the political center to stay viable; Democratic liberals strongly disagreed. Meanwhile, the GOP had become more disciplined in its message, more charismatic in its leadership, and more conservative in its politics. Always the party of business, the Republicans had also become the party of evangelical Christians, who were taking a more visible and instrumental role in political affairs than ever before.

  The cable news revolution and the Reagan Revolution culminated in the presidential election of 1992. The Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton, a Southern governor and standard-bearer of the Democratic centrists, gave speeches about hope and opportunity that sounded less like a typical Democrat and more like 1980-vintage Reagan. The Republican nominee and White House incumbent, George H. W. Bush, was a politician who had been conservative in an earlier political generation but who, in the increasingly rightward-leaning 1990s, seemed like a throwback moderate, and an ineffectual one at that. Both candidates operated on an ideological playing field that ranged from moderate to strongly conservative, far from the liberal tilt of the late 1960s. Both talked of curbing spending and cutting taxes, balancing budgets, reinventing government, and reforming welfare.

  Cable news became the great definer, and the great disrupter, of the contest between the two major parties. Its relentless 24-hour rhythm pulled professional consultants and communications gurus to the forefront of the campaign machinery in ways they had never been before, and it demanded constant care and feeding with sound bites, scandal, and spin. CNN, the undisputed king of the medium, became the platform for an outsider candidate, Ross Perot, to launch and run the most successful third-party effort since Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose campaign. The popular success of the erratic and iconoclastic Perot attested not only to the power of new media to bypass and disrupt campaign narratives, but to the deep dissatisfaction American voters had with both major parties, and with the political system itself.

  It took a great deal of money to play in such an intensely competitive national political game, with its relentless news cycle and need for television buys, media consultants, and sophisticated technologies. The cost of campaigns had been spiraling upward for years, and by 1992 it had become a staggeringly expensive political-industrial complex that demanded perpetual fundraising. Those with money had the advantage, whether they were deep-pocketed interest groups who could buy access to a candidate, or individuals rich enough to funnel millions of dollars of personal wealth into their own campaigns. Ross Perot fell in the latter category. He became the first self-financed outsider to alter the outcome of a major election, but he was hardly the last.

  The Democrats’ rightward tilt, the cable news spin cycle, and relentless demand for campaign cash all defined 1992 as a pivotal election. Playing out against a backdrop of economic and social transformation, and channeling the liberal energies of the 1960s rights revolution as well as new impulses of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, the presidential election of 1992 created a roadmap future elections would follow. At his second inauguration, Bill Clinton spoke of the “bridge to the twenty-first century.” The election that brought him to the White House was the contest that moved presidential politics out of one century and into the next.

  Rightward Bound

  The fracturing of America that had contributed to Richard Nixon’s improbable 1968 victory continued to have profound repercussions on the political landscape three decades later. The 1960s rights revolution had opened national politics to an extraordinary extent, giving racial minorities, women, and young people an influence on partisan politics that never had existed before. While the radical Left had imploded into infighting and violent extremism after the end of the Vietnam War, liberals of the baby boom and post-civil rights generations found a home in the Democratic Party.

  Ironically, the prosperity set in motion by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal helped weaken the ties working-class constituencies had to the Democrats. Families who were blue-collar working class in one generation became white-collar middle class in the next. They were more likely to be college educated and less likely to belong to a union. The bread-and-butter issues that had wedded them to the Democratic Party in the Great Depression now mattered less. South of the Mason-Dixon line, the New Deal had set in motion an economic transformation, but had allowed the old racial order to stay intact. When the civil rights revolution of the 1960s broke down that order, the fealty of many Southerners to the New Deal and its Democratic architects dissolved along with it. Many who remained in the working class started to feel the Democrats had left them behind, becoming a party of intellectual elites and cultural permissiveness. To these voters, as well as to the growing numbers of Americans who embraced evangelical Christianity in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, social issues like abortion, homosexuality, or gun rights started to matter more. Liberal voters, too, made social issues litmus tests of whether they would support a particular candidate on Election Day.

  The divergence in political views occurred in a context of consumer abundance, a burgeoning and diverse popular culture, and an emphasis on individual “lifestyle choices” over shared values and sacrifice. Journalist and cultural observer Tom Wolfe famously labeled the 1970s the “Me Generation,” and while the label tended to overstate the vacuous and aimless nature of the decade, many Americans at the time were acutely conscious of the lost sense of higher purpose and collective action that had catalyzed so much change only a few years before.3

  The lost promise of the 1960s seemed particularly acute when it came to politics. In the 1960s, Americans had the Kennedys and King, all of whose reputations had become more giant and idealized after their martyrdom. The political heros weren’t all liberals: Goldwater and Reagan lived on in the hearts and minds of conservatives as true believers, unswerving in their beliefs in limited government, a strong military, and individual freedoms. The Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon not only discredited the more temperate Republicanism he ultimately came to represent—as president he ended a war, beefed up social programs, and visited Communist China—but left Americans of all political stripes deeply disillusioned by the political system. A wave of reform-minded you
ng legislators, most of them Democrats, came into office in the wake of Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Despite the changes they wrought, many American voters continued to feel that Washington was irrevocably broken.4

  The 1976 presidential contest between colorless Republican incumbent Gerald Ford and largely unknown Democratic governor of Georgia Jimmy Carter left voters uninspired and drove down turnout to less than 55 percent, one of the lowest levels in history. “I’m not apathetic about non-voting,” said one who stayed home. “I’m emphatic about it.”5 Even though Carter was a more moderate Democratic voice, and even though the Republican Party remained deeply unpopular, his victory over Ford was a squeaker. The popular vote was nearly evenly split, with Carter winning 50.1 percent to Ford’s 48 percent. Party loyalty diminished. Only 15 percent of American voters identified themselves as strong Democrats in 1976, and only 14 percent strong Republicans. Over a third considered themselves Independents.6

  The disillusionment with politics also became so deep, and so bitter, because political leaders seemed powerless to halt the drastic economic changes that played out painfully throughout American communities in the 1970s. By the late 1960s, the things that had contributed to the country’s unprecedented run of economic prosperity after World War II were starting to come loose from their moorings. Within months of taking office, Richard Nixon found himself struggling with a growing economic recession. Unemployment climbed to 6 percent, the highest in years. Since the New Deal, moderates of both parties had turned to government-sponsored economic stimulus programs as the obvious answer to economic bumps, following the theories of liberal economist John Maynard Keynes. Looking at the dire numbers, Nixon became persuaded. In early 1971, he went on network news to announce a program of stimulus, wage adjustments, and inflation curbs, remarking “I am now a Keynesian in economics.” Journalist Howard K. Smith commented in response that it was “a little like a Christian crusader saying, ‘All things considered, I think Mohammed was right.’”7