During the Carter era, Reagan emerged as one of the president’s fiercest critics, targeting his foreign and domestic policies in equal measure. He believed Carter’s foreign policy, like those of Nixon and Ford before him, had endangered the nation with its commitment to the policies of détente. The Soviets, he argued, were rapidly expanding their military arsenal, while the Democratic Congress systematically cut defense spending. After Vietnam, defense spending declined to approximately 4.8 percent of the GNP in 1978. At the height of World War II, defense spending had reached a whopping 41 percent of GNP, before dropping down to roughly 10 percent, where it remained for the decades that followed. The 1970s had brought a sharp drop. More than a matter of money, Reagan believed Carter’s priorities were entirely wrong. The Democrat, he thought, was overly focused on achieving diplomatic breakthroughs with the nation’s enemies while ignoring the threats they still posed and neglecting the military might he thought necessary to oppose them. America not only needed to be strong again, he argued, but also had to make it clear to the world that it would be willing to use that strength in the post-Vietnam era. “It doesn’t make any difference if you have all the arms you need,” Reagan asserted, “if the other fellow is convinced you won’t fight.” 21
The Middle East quickly became the focal point of the growing debate over American foreign policy. For his part, President Carter had focused his time and energy on the long-standing problem of finding peace in the Middle East. After twelve days of intense negotiations between Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in September 1978, Carter proudly unveiled the Camp David Accords, which led to peace between the two longtime enemies and to the Nobel Peace Prize for Begin and Sadat. Carter was widely praised for the breakthrough, with Capitol Hill celebrating in what one congressman called “bipartisan euphoria.” But the feeling was fleeting, as events in Iran quickly eclipsed the Israeli-Egyptian agreements. In January 1979, followers of the exiled radical Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew Iran’s ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and forced him to flee into exile. A month later, extremists in the Iranian revolution stormed the US embassy in Tehran and, after a two-hour gun battle, took 102 Americans who were stationed there hostage, including the ambassador. The new Iranian regime forced their release, but the damage to American prestige had been done. “I’m beginning to wonder,” Reagan said after their release, “if the symbol of the United States pretty soon isn’t going to be an ambassador with a flag under his arm, climbing into the escape helicopter.” 22
And, indeed, that soon became America’s image, as the situation in Iran spiraled out of control. In October, Carter allowed the shah, critically ill with cancer, to come to New York City for much-needed surgery. Two weeks later, a mob of Iranians overran the US embassy again and took sixty-six Americans hostage; unlike the first time, the Iranian regime now refused to intercede. The revolutionaries demanded that America apologize for aiding the shah and turn both the dying man and his vast personal wealth over to them. Carter refused, and at first, the country rallied around the president. But as the Iranian hostage crisis stretched on, the stalemate increasingly suggested a state of American paralysis and powerlessness. The media became consumed by the drama. ABC launched a nightly news program, titled “The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage,” that kept the hostage situation at the forefront of viewers’ minds and crowded out all other news. Purporting to provide daily updates on a crisis in which there was truly little breaking news, the program instead became an outlet for American frustration. “Viewers sometimes see [anchorman Frank] Reynolds almost trembling with rage over the occupation of the embassy,” one TV critic noted, “and using language that might call his objectivity into question.” Meanwhile, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite began closing his nightly news broadcast with a reminder of the ongoing hostage crisis. “And this is the way it is,” he said somberly, announcing the date and then noting that it marked “the __________ day of captivity for the American hostages in Iran.” 23
Reagan pointed to the Iranian hostage crisis as the perfect illustration of Carter’s failures in foreign affairs. Just weeks into the stalemate, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination blamed the “vacillation, the weakness of the foreign policy” of the Democratic administration for the embassy’s seizure. Reagan was “as mad and frustrated” as the American people, he said, insisting that the country needed to take a tougher line against the “rabble” that had seized its embassy. As the crisis continued, with daily reminders of the stalemate in the media, Reagan intensified his rhetoric. In March 1980, for instance, he charged that the Carter administration had “dillied and dallied for five months now, trying various diplomatic maneuvers” with nothing to show for it all but more failure. “And now apparently he’s just sitting, waiting for a miracle and hoping that miracle will happen just shortly before the November election.” 24
Instead of miracles, however, the months before the election only brought more misery for Carter and the Democrats. Over the course of the campaign season, the public learned the details of an elaborate FBI operation known as “ABSCAM.” For two years, undercover agents posing as representatives of a fictional Arab sheik had bribed a range of elected officials at the local, state, and federal level, purportedly to help Middle Eastern elites secure casino deals in Atlantic City and special legislation. (According to investigators, “ABSCAM” simply stood for “Arab Scam.”) In late August 1980, Democratic congressman Michael “Ozzie” Myers, a former longshoreman from Philadelphia, was convicted of taking $50,000 in exchange for promises to help foreign elites with their immigration issues. Weeks later, the House of Representatives voted to expel Myers, the first time Congress had expelled a member since the start of the Civil War. Myers’s conviction would merely be the first, as the ABSCAM scandal soon led to the conviction of five more congressmen, a senator, the mayor of Camden, New Jersey, and three city council members in Philadelphia. All of the politicians convicted in the scandal were Democrats, except for a lone Republican congressman.25
Even more so than Watergate, the lurid details of ABSCAM unfolded on television. In mid-October, soon after Myers’s conviction and removal from Congress, the Supreme Court ruled that tapes of the FBI’s undercover recordings could be released to the public and, in a first for evidence in a criminal case, broadcast on television as well. The networks rushed to get the tapes on the air that same night, with five-minute segments on the nightly news shows and then full half-hour specials later that night on ABC and CBS. The tapes, viewed by millions, showed Congressman Myers meeting with undercover agents, taking envelopes filled with cash and assuring them that he would now be “ 100 per cent” on their side. “You’re going about this the right way,” the representative assured them. “Money talks in this business and bullshit walks.” The crass corruption revealed in the tapes only seemed seedier thanks to the low-quality nature of the recordings. “It had the photographic quality of a porno reel from the ’50s,” columnist Tom Shales noted in the Washington Post, “and one felt a similarly naughty voyeuristic fascination watching it. Fuzzy, grainy and black and white though it was, it was changing the face of television and maybe of our legal system.” 26
As the Democrats’ standing on foreign policy crumbled thanks to ABSCAM and the Iranian hostage crisis, Republicans made a strong attack on domestic issues too. The combination of a weak job market, inflation, and excessive government regulatory interference had produced disastrous economic conditions, Reagan said. Although the weak economy had its roots in a mixture of public and private mistakes made largely in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reagan placed the blame squarely on Carter’s shoulders, and government more broadly. “When we talk of these problems all of us seem to do so in the context of what should government do about them,” he noted in April 1979. “May I suggest that government has already done too much about them and that’s why we have the problems.” 27 While the Democratic president had begun the process of deregul
ation in key sectors like aviation and trucking, Reagan argued that much more needed to be done. Rejecting entirely the New Deal institutions that Democrats had insisted were essential to ensuring the economic security of Americans, Reagan claimed that even greater deregulation and massive tax cuts were the only way to restore robust economic growth.
For Reagan, the political promise of the new tax revolt was crystal clear, as the movement had begun back in his old home state of California. Property taxes there had risen dramatically in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely due to new assessments and rising land costs. In general, the steepest increases hit middle-class homeowners in the booming suburbs. The wealthy could afford the increases with little sacrifice, while the poor usually rented and therefore did not directly pay property taxes themselves. But middle-class homeowners found themselves faced with huge tax increases that imposed a real hardship on their family budgets. For some on the right, criticizing and challenging the tax system was a way to assault a much more significant issue: the welfare state. Within California, notably, the blasts against the skyrocketing property taxes were often more about the progressive social services paid for with that money.28
There had long been a number of antitax groups in California, such as the United Organization of Taxpayers (UOT). Before the middle-class outrage of the mid-1970s, however, these groups found little broad support for their cause. But with suburbanites reacting in unison to the higher taxes, UOT suddenly discovered a committed constituency. The result of their outrage was a revolutionary measure known as Proposition 13. Placed on the ballot by antitax activists Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, it called for a massive decrease in property taxes across the board. It would slash property taxes by 57 percent, roll back tax rates, and ensure that unless a house was sold, the rates would rise by no more than 2 percent a year. Finally, Proposition 13 would amend the state constitution as well, establishing a new requirement that the state legislature had to secure a two-thirds vote before it could ever increase state taxes. Proposition 13 had supporters across the state, but its strongest backers were middle-class suburbanites. Although these were not people normally thought of in populist terms, the leaders of the tax revolt did. “You are the people,” Jarvis told supporters at one suburban rally, “and you will have to take control of the government again, or else it is going to control you.” In June 1978, Proposition 13 passed by a huge two-to-one margin.29
After the passage of Proposition 13, the tax revolt took on a national scope. The victory in California quickly inspired successful crusades against property taxes in thirty-seven states and against state income taxes in twenty-eight states. Observers of American politics realized that a fundamentally important issue had emerged on the national scene. Reagan argued that the passage of Proposition 13 “triggered hope in the breasts of the people that something could be done. It was a little bit like dumping those cases of tea off the boat in Boston Harbor.” Likewise, in the words of the New York Times, the tax revolt signaled nothing less than a “primal scream by the People against Big Government.” Indeed, the protest represented the dawn of a new era in American politics. It helped create a coalition against the liberal welfare state, gave the New Right a unifying issue, shaped a growing antigovernment ethic, and generally generated more dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party. It also further cemented the growing links between ideological conservatives, business leaders, and the Republican Party. As a Democratic pollster said, “This isn’t just a tax revolt. It’s a revolution against government.” 30
The political power of the tax revolt became even clearer in the 1978 elections. After Proposition 13’s triumph, Michael Barone noted in the Wall Street Journal, “the major question on taxes became not whether they should be held down, but how.” During the fall campaign, many Republican candidates ran on a tax-cut plan proposed by Representative Jack Kemp of New York and Senator William Roth of Delaware. In essence, the Kemp-Roth Plan called for the reduction of all federal income taxes by 30 percent across the board. It took the arguments of the tax revolt, escalated them to the national stage, and reduced them to a simple, appealing argument. Voters were still a little wary of the idea, with polling showing the public opposed by a margin of 47 to 34 percent. As a result, Republicans made only small gains in the midterms, winning eleven seats in the House and three in the Senate. Though the new class of Republican freshmen was small, it proved to be powerful; among its ranks were several who would soon become leaders in the GOP, including future Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and future Vice President Dick Cheney. Their election proved to be a harbinger of things to come. Two years later, with the stagflation crisis of the late 1970s reaching a fever pitch, Republicans would make even greater gains.31
After a decade of work laying the foundations for change, the conservative constellations that had come to be known as the New Right and the Religious Right coalesced in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. The GOP convention made it clear that Reagan, long loved by the party’s Goldwater libertarians, had been warmly embraced by the forces of religious conservatism too. “There is no formal Christian caucus at the Republican National Convention,” a reporter marveled. “None is needed. Overlap between the Reagan campaign and evangelical Christians is substantial.” Reagan’s acceptance speech showed a skillful blend of the New Right and Religious Right movements, with lengthy passages on the need to lighten the “tax burden” capped off by a dramatic call for a silent prayer at the end of his address. Despite their different agendas, the two conservative camps were held together by a simple promise that Reagan had made repeatedly on the campaign trail, a claim that as president he would work to “get the government off the backs of the people.” 32
After the widespread distrust and disillusionment of the 1970s, that simple message proved enormously popular with the electorate. Moving beyond the ranks of the Republicans, Reagan made such strong inroads with white working-class voters who had long been a cornerstone of the New Deal coalition that a new term would soon be coined for the phenomenon: “Reagan Democrats.” The sweep of Reagan’s victory was clear early on election night, as the colored maps on network news steadily turned blue, the color assigned to Republicans that year. Shortly after 8pm eastern, NBC News anchor David Brinkley marveled that the map was “beginning to look like a suburban swimming pool”; soon after, the network called the election for Reagan. In some ways, the broad blue maps of the network news exaggerated the size and scope of Reagan’s victory: he had racked up a staggering 489-to-49 margin in the electoral college, but barely cleared 50 percent in the popular vote in an election that had the lowest turnout in one-third of a century. Nevertheless, Reagan had won the White House and, equally important, had shown strong enough coattails to enable Republicans to take control of the Senate as well.33
Taking stock of the election returns that weekend, the Washington Post’s Haynes Johnson noted the new conventional wisdom in town: “it was clear to all the wise men in Washington what historic shift had occurred. A Reagan Revolution . . . had altered the American political landscape with profound implications for the nation and the world.” Johnson cautioned readers against reading too much into the results, noting that the president’s victory held no signs of an “ideological mandate,” but the revolutionaries in Reagan’s camp proved undeterred.34 Nevertheless, the president seemed to have brought a new mood and a new attitude to Washington, one best reflected in an Iranian announcement on the day of his inauguration, that the American hostages were being set free, after 444 days in captivity. Seemingly, with a new president in office, the paralysis and pessimism of the previous decade had disappeared, if only for a moment.
The Reagan Revolution
The confident attitude of the new president and his administration was, at heart, a tried and true political strategy. As governor of California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reagan had learned how a Democratic legislature could force the chief executive to compromise. With Democrats dug in at the House, White H
ouse aides invoked the “Reagan Revolution” to claim a mandate. The president wanted to build a sense of momentum for his policies by presenting the election in the most favorable light.35
Reagan assembled a skilled team of advisors, such as Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver and Director of the Communications Office David Gergen, who worked diligently to influence news coverage of the White House. Their operating premise, as presidential pollster Richard Wirthlin said, was that “There’s no question that how the press reports [on] the President influences how people feel about the President. People make up their minds on the basis of what they see and hear about him, and the press is the conduit through which they get a lot of their information.” Accordingly, Deaver and Gergen started each morning with a “line of the day” meeting during which they settled on a single theme around which all major events, presidential proclamations, and even visual backdrops for the next ten to twelve hours would be coordinated. Gergen was the mastermind behind this innovation. According to campaign strategist Ed Rollins, “Gergen really understood sound bites. He understood how to pick a story, how to get a story that somebody was working on and change it, how to get the reporters to call the people you wanted them to call and make the story come out how you wanted. He understood that you had to be proactive about it, as opposed to just letting your guys do your job and just reading about it in the paper the next day.” 36 Every morning Gergen delivered the line to the cabinet, launching their common point of discussion for the day. “We had to think like a television producer,” White House spokesman Larry Speakes explained, which meant they had a “minute and thirty seconds of pictures to tell the story, and a good solid sound bite.” 37 An experienced actor, President Reagan understood the process well and gladly played his part. Every single hour of the president’s daily schedule was structured around the “line of the day,” with speeches designed to yield the right sound bite and public appearances deliberately staged to deliver the perfect photograph. The events themselves were carefully thought through down to the detail of the lighting and physical position of the president.38
Fault Lines Page 13