Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  20. Richard Nixon: “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida,” 8 August 1968, online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25968 (accessed 10 July 2013).

  21. William Rorabaugh, The Real Making of the President: Kennedy, Nixon, and the 1960 Election (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009).

  22. James M. Perry, The New Politics: The Expanding Technology of Political Manipulation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968).

  23. Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, Memorandum to National Mobilization Staff regarding discussion of the Democratic Convention Challenge, Hayden Exhibit No. 2, House Un-American Activities Committee, Subversive Involvement in Disruption of 1968 Democratic Party National Convention, Part 2, 90th Cong., 2nd Sess., December 1968 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1968). The Convention also has been the subject of exhaustive study; see in particular David Farber, Chicago ’68 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Classic analyses by participant-observers include not only White’s The Making of the President 1968 but also Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (New York: World, 1968), chap. 2, and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), chap. 14.

  24. Quoted in Farber, Chicago ’68, 17.

  25. White, The Making of the President 1968, 305; Gitlin, The Sixties, 319.

  26. Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: Convention Week in Chicago, August 25–29, 1968: A Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (New York: Dutton, 1968).

  27. Chester et al., An American Melodrama, 523.

  28. “An Unexciting Choice?” Wall Street Journal, 27 June 1968, 16.

  29. Henry Cathcart, “Inside Washington: McCarthy Fails to Impress Blacks,” Chicago Daily Defender, 9 May 1968, 19.

  30. Paul O’Neil, “The Part Almost Came Down Around Their Ears,” Life, 6 September 1968, 22.

  31. Philips later expanded this thesis to book length in The Emerging Republican Majority (New York: Arlington, 1969).

  32. Richard Nixon, “A New Alignment for American Unity,” 16 May 1968, SR #680516, Nixon Presidential Library.

  33. McGinniss, The Selling of the President, 103. Also see Jonathan Yardley, “Sharp Pencils Shape Elections,” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2006.

  34. “The First Civil Right,” Nixon-Agnew Victory Committee, 1968, courtesy of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, reprinted on Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952–2012, www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1968/the-first-civil-right (accessed July 13, 2013).

  35. George C. Wallace, Stand Up for America (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 121–22.

  36. Wallace, Speech at Madison Square Garden, 24 October 1968.

  Chapter 7. Reagan Revolutionaries and New Democrats

  1. John F. Berry, “Skepticism Greets Hype Surrounding Cable News Debut,” Washington Post, 1 June 1980, F1; Ted Turner, Welcoming Remarks, CNN, 1 June 1980.

  2. “Acceptance Speech,” Detroit, 17 July 1980, reprinted in Campaign Speeches of American Presidential Candidates, 1948–1984, ed. George Bush (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1985), 269.

  3. Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Free Press, 2001).

  4. Jonathan Bell and Timothy Stanley, eds., Making Sense of American Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 76–107.

  5. Time, 15 November 1976, 30, quoted in Patterson, Restless Giant, 76.

  6. John P. McIver, Table Eb309–316: “Party Identification, 1952–2000,” in Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition on Line, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmsted, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/toc/hsusHome.do (accessed 17 July 2013). Among other moderate credentials, Carter was also a born-again Christian, and one innovation of his 1976 run was his choice to emphasize this element of his biography on the campaign trail. See Dan F. Hahn, “One’s Reborn Every Minute: Carter’s Religious Appeal in 1976,” Communication Quarterly 28, 3 (Summer 1980): 56–62. Also see “The Lost Opportunity: Jimmy Carter and the Not-So-Vital Center,” in E. J. Dionne, Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 116–44.

  7. Leonard E. Silk, “Nixon’s Program—‘I Am Now a Keynesian’,” New York Times, 10 January 1971, E1.

  8. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2012). On the business-labor relations of the postwar period, see Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).

  9. “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” Washington Star, 15 February 1976, 51.

  10. John P. McIver, “Political Party Affiliations in Congress and the Presidency, 1789–2002,” Historical Statistics of the United States, Table Eb296–308.

  11. As James T. Patterson observes, “Whether Reagan’s economy policies were good for the country was—and is—hard to judge. Most historians, however, credit his efforts to reverse the inflationary spiral that had deeply frightened Americans since the late 1970s. Reagan gave strong and undeviating support to Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, who continued to pursue the tough monetary policies that he had initiated under Carter” (Restless Giant, 162).

  12. “Prouder, Stronger, Better,” Reagan-Bush ’84, original airdate 17 September 1984, Ronald and Nancy Reagan/Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, from Museum of the Moving Image, The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952–2012, www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1984/prouder-stronger-better (accessed 16 July 2013).

  13. George J. Church, Sam Allis, and Hays Gorey, “Moving Toward the Middle: Sick of Caucuses, Sunbelt Democrats Form—What Else?—a Caucus,” Time, 18 March 1985, 25.

  14. Edward G. Benson and Paul Perry, “Analysis of Democratic-Republican Strength by Population Groups,” Public Opinion Quarterly 4, 3 (1 September 1940): 464–73; Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (New York: Norton, 2009); Cowie and Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History” International Labor and Working-Class History 74 (2010): 1–32.

  15. Douglas Smith, “Into the Political Thicket: Reapportionment and the Rise of Suburban Power,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 263–85. This was a national phenomenon as well; see Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).

  16. Patterson, Restless Giant, 59. On the New South, see David R. Goldfield, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); Nancy MacLean, “Neo-Confederacy Versus the New Deal: The Regional Utopia of the Modern American Right” in Lassiter and Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, 308–30. On the Sunbelt, see Carl Abbott, The New Urban America: Metropolitan Growth and Politics in the Sunbelt Since 1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

  17. Phil Gailey, “Sam Nunn’s Rising Star,” New York Times, 4 January 1987, M1.

  18. Paul E. Tsongas, “Atarizing Reagan,” New York Times, 1 March 1983, E1; “New Faces in the Senate: Atari Democrat,” Time, 17 November 1986.


  19. Margot Hornblower, “House Democrats Tackle the Issues Again—Generally,” Washington Post, 23 September 1982, A1.

  20. Phil Gailey, “Dissidents Defy Top Democrats; Council Formed,” New York Times, 1 March 1985.

  21. Charles Peters, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” Washington Monthly, May 1983, reprinted in A New Road for America: The Neoliberal Movement, ed. Charles Peters and Phillip Keisling (Lanham, Md., Madison Books, 1985), 189–208; William V. Shannon, “A Rocky Road for Neoliberals,” Boston Globe, 18 May 1983.

  22. Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

  23. Jon F. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” Political Science Quarterly 110, no. 2 (Summer 1995), 207–32. Jackson quoted in Robin Toner, “Democrats in New York—Party Leadership: 1992 Ticket Puts Council Of Moderates to Stiff Test,” New York Times, 15 July 1992; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “For Democrats, Me-Too Reaganism Will Spell Disaster” (Op-Ed), New York Times, 6 July 1986; Al From, “Worthy Heirs of the Democratic Legacy,” (Letter), New York Times, 20 July 1986; Patterson, Restless Giant, 190.

  24. Quoted in Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” 219.

  25. David Maraniss, First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995).

  26. Richard Ben Cramer, Being Poppy: A Portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013); Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (New York: Random House, 2008); Timothy J. Naftali, George H. W. Bush (New York: Times Books, 2007).

  27. Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Patterson, Restless Giant, 193–217.

  28. George Bush, “Address to the Nation Announcing Allied Military Action in the Persian Gulf,” 16 January 1991. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=19222 (accessed 27 June 2014).

  29. Quoted in Patterson, Restless Giant, 238. Also see Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf, eds., The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Times Books, 1991); Frank N. Schubert and Theresa L. Kraus, The Whirlwind War: The United States Army in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1994).

  30. Morton Kondracke, “Slick Willy,” New Republic 205, 17 (21 October, 1991): 18–21; William J. Clinton: “Remarks Announcing Candidacy for the Democratic Presidential Nomination,” 3 October 1991, Peters and Woolley, American Presidency Project.

  Chapter 8. The CNN President

  Quoted in Joe Klein, “Bill Clinton: Who Is This Guy?” New York Times, 20 January 1992.

  1. Keith Herndon, “CNN Turns a Corner: The Rising Fortunes of the Fourth Network,” Washington Journalism Review 7, 12 (December 1985): 28–30; Desmond Smith, “Is the Sun Setting on Network Nightly News?” Washington Journalism Review 8, 1 (January 1986): 30–33.

  2. Lynn E. Gutstadt, “Taking the Pulse of the CNN Audience: A Case Study of the Gulf War,” Political Communication 10, 4 (October 1993): 389–409.

  3. CNN audience research from A.C. Nielsen micronode data, cited in Gutstatdt, “Taking the Pulse,” fig. 1.

  4. T. Carroll Morganthau, “The Wild Card,” Newsweek, 27 April 1992, 20.

  5. Mary Matalin in Mary Matalin, James Carville, and Peter Knobler, All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President (New York: Random House, 1994), 148.

  6. Robert Fitch, “Welfare Billionaire.” Nation 254, 23 (15 June 1992): 815–16; Morganthau, “The Wild Card.” Also see Gerald Posner, Citizen Perot: His Life and Times (New York: Random House, 1996).

  7. For example: H. Ross Perot, My Life and the Principles for Success (Arlington, Tex.: Summit, 1996).

  8. Peter Elkind, “Perot and Con,” Washington Monthly 22, 10 (November 1990): 51.

  9. “Ross Perot,” Larry King Live, CNN, 20 February 1992, quoted in Peter Elkind, “The Ross Perot You Don’t Know,” Washington Monthly 24, 5 (May 1992): 14; Jeffrey Schmalz, “The 1992 Campaign: Voters; Perot Petition Embraces as Manifesto of Change,” New York Times, 31 May 1992, 20.

  10. Gallup Organization, “Ross Perot Poll,” sponsored by CNN/USA Today, 3/31/1992-4/01/1992, http://brain.gallup.com/documents/questionnaire.aspx?STUDY=cnn222048 (accessed 18 July 2013). Also see Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Mad as Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992 (New York: Warner, 1993); Peter Goldman, Thomas M. DeFrank, Mark Miller, Andrew Murr, and Tom Matthews, Quest for the Presidency 1992 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994).

  11. Catherine Crier, “Ross Perot—White Knight?” CNN, 1 June 1992; “Guests Discuss Ross Perot’s Effect on Presidential Race,” CNN, 4 June 1992.

  12. John H. Summers, “What Happened to Sex Scandals? Politics and Peccadilloes, Jefferson to Kennedy,” Journal of American History 87, 3 (1 December 2000): 825–54.

  13. Schulman, The Seventies, 144–58.

  14. Kevin M. Kruse, “The Real Loser: Truth,” New York Times, 5 November 2012, Opinion; Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 122, 3 (August 1, 2007): 1187–1234.

  15. Mandy Grunwald, quoted in Matalin et al., All’s Fair, 169.

  16. “Mario Cuomo, Hamlet on the Hudson,” The Economist, 28 September 1991, A34; Gallup Organization, “October Wave 3,” 17–20 October 1991, http://brain.gallup.com/documents/questionnaire.aspx?STUDY=GNS222020 (accessed 18 July 2013).

  17. “Mario Cuomo: Keeping the Faith,” Interview with Craig Horowitz, New York, 6 April 1998.

  18. George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 51–52; Evans and Novak, “Cuomo Departure Elevated Clinton,” Omaha World-Herald, 4 January 1992. Shelby switched to the Republican Party in 1994.

  19. Longtime Clinton aide Betsey Wright coined the term “bimbo eruption,” which she repeated (to her fellow staffers’ horror) to Michael Isikoff, “Clinton Team Works to Deflect Allegations on Nominee’s Private Life,” Washington Post, 26 July 1992, A18.

  20. Kevin Merida, “It’s Come to This: A Nickname That’s Proven Hard to Slip,” Washington Post, 20 December 1998, F1.

  21. Gwen Ifill, “The 1992 Campaign: New Hampshire; Clinton Thanked Colonel in ’69 for ‘Saving Me from the Draft,’” New York Times, 13 February 1992, A1; Stephanopoulos, All Too Human, 69–80.

  22. Stephanopoulos, All Too Human, 82.

  23. Robin Toner, “The 1992 Campaign: Primaries; Clinton Is Victor In New York with 41 percent of Democratic Vote; Tsongas Edges Brown For 2d” New York Times, 8 April 1992; Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 156.

  24. Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 206.

  25. Ibid., 283.

  26. Ibid.; Dan Balz and David Broder, “Party Cements Case for Change,” Washington Post, 16 July 1992, A1.

  27. Matalin et al., All’s Fair, 173, 172.

  28. Richard Cohen, “In a Muddle,” Washington Post, 17 January 1992, A21; Timothy Stanley, The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2012), 142.

  29. Matalin et al., All’s Fair, 53–57; Stanley, The Crusader, 139–152.

  30. Buchanan, “1992 Republican National Convention Speech,” Houston, 17 August 1992, http://buchanan.org/blog/1992-republican-national-convention-speech-148 (accessed 19 July 2013).

  31. Catherine Crier and Bernard Shaw, “Republicans Are Nervous About Bush Campaign,” CNN, 23 July 1992.

  32. Gary Wills, “George Bush, Prisoner of the Crazies,” New York Times, 16 August 1992, 17.

  33. Dan Balz and Ann Devroy, “How Perot’s Presence Is Altering Campaign,” Washington Post, 27 May 1992, A1.

  34. Larry King, “Bill Moyers and William Safire on Convention Eve,” CNN, 10 July 1992.

  35. “Guests Discuss Ross Perot’s Effect on Presidential Race,” CNN, 4 June 1992.

  36. Matalin et al., All�
�s Fair; Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 413–82.

  37. Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 467; Michael Isikoff, “Rollins, Top Aides Leave Troubled Perot Campaign,” Washington Post, 16 July 1992.

  38. Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 446–48, 453.

  39. Ken Moritsugu and Ron Thompson, “Perot Supporters Express Shock, Anger,” St. Petersburg Times, 17 July 1992, C1; “Perot Goes Poof,” Editorial, St. Petersburg Times, 17 July 1992, 12A.

  40. Quoted in Joel Achenbach, “Little Rock, Where Spin Meets Homespun,” Washington Post, 2 October 1992, C1. Details of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign are also informed by personal recollections of the author, who worked at the Little Rock headquarters from July to October 1992, in the Michigan field office in October 1992, and on the transition team from November 1992 to January 1993.

  41. Achenbach, “In Little Rock.”

  42. Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 549.

  43. Ibid., 552.

  44. George H. W. Bush, Debate with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot (11 October 1992), American President: A Reference Resource, Miller Center for Public Affairs, University of Virginia, http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/5532 (accessed 22 July 2013).

  45. Kathleen H. Jamieson and David S. Birdsell, Presidential Debates: The Challenge of Creating an Informed Electorate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 84–193; William L. Benoit and William T. Wells, Candidates in Conflict: Persuasive Attack and Defense in the 1992 Presidential Debates (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996).

  46. Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 580.

  47. Bush to Marlin Fitzwater, quoted in Goldman et al., Quest for the Presidency 1992, 596.

  48. Leslie Gelb, “George, Bill, and Millie,” New York Times, 1 November 1992; B. Drummond Ayres, “Bush Eases Hammering of the Press—New York Times,” New York Times, 28 October 1992.

  49. George Bush: “Remarks in Houston on the Results of the Presidential Election,” 3 November 1992, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=21734 (accessed 22 July 2013).