As Democrats renewed their sense of purpose, they found support outside Capitol Hill. Organizations representing the elderly, such as the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), conducted a fierce campaign to kill the proposal. They united 100 groups through the Save Our Security coalition, headed by Wilbur Cohen, former secretary of health, education, and welfare, and Robert Ball, former Social Security commissioner. Pushing back against the proposed cuts, the coalition denounced the “despicable plan” aimed at the disadvantaged. Jack Ossofsky of the National Council on Aging said that “the President’s safety net is under water, and old people are being thrown to the sharks.” More pointedly, critics noted that cuts to Social Security would only be needed to offset proposals for increased government spending in other areas, most notably on national defense. Douglas Fraser, the president of the United Auto Workers, declared it was simply “wrong to wring tens of billions of dollars out of retiree benefits so that they may be applied to other parts of the federal budget.” 7
Under intense fire from the public and politicians alike, Reagan reluctantly shelved the plan in September 1981. The president, David Gergen told the press, needed some “breathing space” to sell the idea. Buying time, Reagan appointed a fifteen-member panel to spend the next two years studying the issue. While the president was chastened, Democrats emerged from the fight emboldened and determined to defend liberal legacies. The New Deal programs, they now realized, were more popular than the “Reagan Revolution” triumphalism had originally led pundits to believe. “Social Security is the third rail of American politics,” Democratic staffer Kirk O’Donnell joked, comparing it to the electricity-laden rail of a subway system. “Touch it, you’re dead.” 8 Ultimately, the battle signaled to all sides on Capitol Hill and outside Washington that rumors of liberalism’s death had been greatly exaggerated.
Reagan, for his part, was well aware of the limits he faced. Despite his roots in the conservative movement and his ideological commitment to the Right, he had learned in his years as California’s governor that entrenched Democratic opposition could rule out a lot of options for a Republican. Accordingly, to the frustration of social conservatives, Reagan ignored much of the Religious Right’s agenda during his first term. But the president’s belief that there wasn’t much political support for proposals prohibiting abortion or regulating the airwaves only led right-wing activists to press them with greater passion. As a result, social conservatives found their alliance with the new administration fraying.
This disconnect was clear from the very first days of Reagan’s term, with the politics of abortion deepening the lines of division. On January 23, 1981, the eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, 50,000 antiabortion activists marched from the White House to Congress, chanting, “We want life, yes we do; we want life, how about you?” North Carolina’s Republican senator Jesse Helms, a darling of the Religious Right, promised the crowd he would introduce a constitutional amendment to guarantee the right to life from the moment of conception. Despite his previous claims of kinship with social conservatives, Reagan did not attend the rally in person, rejecting an invitation to address them.9 Then, in the summer of 1981, Reagan angered social conservatives again by appointing Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court. As a state legislator in Arizona, O’Connor had supported the Equal Rights Amendment and sided against the pro-life movement on at least one occasion. Accordingly, the National Right to Life Committee, the Moral Majority, and other groups in the Religious Right announced their firm opposition. Jerry Falwell went so far as to say that Christians should unite to “turn their backs” on Reagan in response to the insulting nomination. Reagan stood fast, though, and O’Connor soon became the first female justice on the Supreme Court.10
Sometimes Reagan distanced himself from social conservatives in less obvious ways. In September 1982, for instance, the Senate considered legislation introduced by Helms to prohibit federal funding of abortions on a permanent basis, for the first time. Reagan supported the legislation, but the White House stayed at arm’s length. Without its full backing, the measure went down to defeat. Behind the scenes, the administration rationalized that Reagan’s focus on economic and political change meant that social issues simply had to be sidelined. “For better than a year,” acknowledged Elizabeth Dole, an administration official charged with political outreach, “the President has marshaled the forces of his conservative supporters behind his efforts to revitalize the economy and restructure government which, in turn, relegated the conservative social agenda to the back burner.” 11
The president also encountered growing criticism from fiscal conservatives who warned that deficits were skyrocketing. The combination of cutting taxes and increasing defense spending, while maintaining the spending status quo on domestic programs, they noted, meant that the federal government’s books were growing deeply imbalanced. The federal deficit, which had reached $80 billion under Carter, now surged to $200 billion. Private grumbling became public in December 1981, when The Atlantic published “The Education of David Stockman.” A true believer in supply-side economics, the budget director had allowed the journalist William Greider to follow him around to demonstrate that Reagan’s administration was full of serious ideas and advisors. But the piece proved the opposite. On the record, Stockman admitted that he waved away worries about growing deficits by using a “magic asterisk” that promised future budget savings from unnamed sources. “None of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers,” he later confessed.12
The growing concerns over the Reagan budget prompted a showdown within the Republican Party. Figures from the New Right urged Reagan to stay the course. The economist Norman Ture insisted that “the deficits aren’t the mischief makers. History shows they have no relation to interest rates, inflation or capital formation.” 13 Congressman Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, mocked Democrats for worrying about deficits at all. “Think about it—liberal Democrats concerned about deficits. It is as confusing to me as if we were back in the 1920s and whisky dealers came out in favor of prohibition.” 14 Such voices, however, were in the minority. Leading Republicans pushed back and called on the president to reverse course. Kansas senator Bob Dole, the fiscally conservative chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and a supply-side skeptic, fought off critics and championed the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. Recognizing the shortcomings of his original tax plans, Reagan signed the measure into law that September. Along with higher excise taxes on items like tobacco and alcohol, the 1982 tax hike reversed some of the 1981 income tax cut as well.
Reagan’s promise to rebuild American strength seemed shattered by the deepening recession of 1982. Unemployment, which had hovered under 6 percent during the last year of Carter’s term, steadily rose during the first two years of Reagan’s administration, largely due to Paul Volcker’s strategy for beating back inflation. Over the course of 1982 alone, the unemployment rate soared from 8.6 percent in January to 10.8 percent in November, the highest rate since the Great Depression. All told, nearly twelve million people were out of work. Unemployment hit certain parts of the nation harder than others: northern manufacturing states, which saw jobs moving to other parts of the country, suffered the worst of it. With 20.9 percent of its workforce unemployed in October 1982, Youngstown, Ohio, had the highest rate in the country, with several towns across Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan not far behind.15 The ranks of the unemployed extended beyond industrial workers, though. As reporters soon discovered, Ronald Reagan Jr., was unemployed, too, after his dance company suffered layoffs. “Everybody’s collecting unemployment,” the president’s son told CBS News with a shrug. “I’m no different.” 16
The worsening recession set the stage for the 1982 midterms. Senator Ted Kennedy called soaring unemployment figures “a national tragedy,” prompting President Reagan to denounce critics “who would try to make a political football” out of the jobless rate.17 But Reagan, of course, had done exactly that during the 1980 electi
on, claiming that the incumbent president deserved all blame for the recession. Voters had agreed with his argument then, and to his dismay, they still agreed two years later. Polls showed that 54 percent of Americans believed that Reagan’s policies had made their own financial situation worse, not better. Accordingly, Speaker O’Neill worked to nationalize the campaign on economic issues. Democrats focused on the “Reagan Recession,” calling for renewed attention to “fairness” in domestic policy and attacking the administration for having made conditions even worse than they had been under Carter. The recession, said O’Neill, was a “deliberate and conscious policy” of the Reagan administration. “The economic fate of the greatest democracy in the history of the world,” he said, “depends on a novel, unproven theory called ‘supply side’ economics.” 18 Reagan’s advisors fretted as they saw his approval ratings plummet down to 40 percent. It was, officials at Gallup noted, the worst midterm rating of any president in thirty years.19
Midterm elections usually go poorly for the president’s party, and this one was no different. Democrats gained twenty-six seats in the House and one in the Senate. Though neither chamber of Congress changed hands, Democrats strengthened their hold over the House to an impressively large margin: 269–166. Liberal members of the Democratic caucus fared well, while the ranks of conservatives who’d been willing to work with Republicans on certain issues had been thinned. More numerous and more liberal, House Democrats could now more easily check major conservative advances. Many reporters interpreted this as a significant blow to Reagan’s agenda. Surveying the results, the journalist Tom Wicker declared: “There is no Reagan Revolution.” 20
After this rough start, the economy finally began to recover in 1983, as unemployment started to decline and the major economic indicators pointed to the nation moving in the right direction. Economists disagreed on the cause of the revival, though most credited the policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. (In contrast, Reagan officials pointedly credited the 1981 tax cuts while ignoring the 1982 reversal.) The revived economy allowed the administration to project a sunnier mood of optimism, one that was soon reflected in public opinion polls that showed renewed confidence in the administration and the economy. A closer look at the polls, however, showed that the electorate was deeply divided along lines of race and class. African Americans had been particularly hard hit in the “Reagan recession,” seeing their unemployment rate spike to nearly 19 percent—almost twice the national average. As a result, they remained more cynical about the recovery than whites. An April 1983 poll showed that 46 percent of whites believed the economy was recovering, but only 17 percent of blacks did. Likewise, the same poll showed that wealthier Americans were more optimistic than working-class ones. Among those earning more than $40,000 a year, 62 percent agreed that the economy was recovering; for those making less than $20,000, only 34 percent did.21
As the economic mood lightened for some Americans, Reagan turned to other domestic issues, looking for proposals that already had bipartisan support. Notably, in 1983, Reagan returned to Social Security. The bipartisan commission he appointed in 1981 now reported that the program faced a severe financial shortfall and proposed raising payroll taxes and containing costs to restore the program’s strength. No longer aiming to destroy the social safety net, Reagan now positioned himself as its savior and sought to shore it up. The president formed a coalition with fiscal conservatives in the GOP and House Democrats to pass the Social Security Amendments of 1983, which raised payroll taxes and made small cuts to benefits, all of which corrected the short-term financial crisis of the program. “This bill demonstrates for all time our nation’s ironclad commitment to Social Security,” President Reagan said, sounding much different than he had as the Republican candidate in 1980.22
While old New Deal programs proved to be difficult to dismantle in Congress, Reagan found ways to undermine them on the executive front. Pointedly, the president staffed key government roles with appointees who were strongly opposed to the stated mission of their agencies. His first head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was Florida businessman Thorne Auchter, whose construction firm had repeatedly been fined by OSHA in the past. Believing that businesses would take care of their workers if not faced with government regulation, Auchter drastically reduced the number of fines issued by OSHA and tamped down on enforcement. “We have slots for only 1,200 inspectors,” he noted. “They were supposed to cover more than three million workplaces. Of course, that was ridiculous.” Accordingly, he reduced the total number of inspections by 21 percent. Labor leaders were furious with what they saw as an executive end-run. “He’s ripping the entrails out of the act creating OSHA, without even going to Congress to do it,” the AFL-CIO’s safety and health expert complained. “OSHA is not enforcing its standards. They’re downgrading the seriousness of many violations and they’re settling out of court with slap-on-the-wrist penalties.” 23
Reagan took the same approach with environmental regulations, seeking to undermine the significant reforms undertaken in the 1970s. The administration did little to enforce existing laws and had no interest in giving support to environmentalists who called on the government to do more to combat issues such as pollution, acid rain, or toxic waste. The Conservation Foundation—known as the “Vatican of the Environmental Movement”—had avoided taking political stances in its thirty-four years of existence, but warned in its “State of the Environment 1982” report that Reagan officials had “broken” the “bipartisan consensus that supported federal protection of the environment for more than a decade.” 24 Chief among these officials was Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who strongly supported the development of public lands by private interests. Like Auchter at OSHA, Watt cut the department’s budget and severely curtailed its regulatory efforts. An outspoken social conservative, he caused a minor sensation in the summer of 1983 when he banned the Beach Boys from a Fourth of July concert on the National Mall on the grounds that they encouraged “drug abuse and alcoholism.” (Watt replaced them with Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton.) A few months later, he caused a more significant crisis for the administration when he made flippant comments about the diversity of a coal advisory committee. “We have every kind of mixture you can have,” he bragged. “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.” A lightning rod for critics, Watt finally resigned in October 1983.25 Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch Burford, the first female head of the Environmental Protection Agency, believed it regulated businesses too aggressively and worked to ease its impact. “The entire organization is suffering from a paralysis from the top down,” noted a Carter holdover at EPA. “The appalling insensitivity of these appointments,” said William Turnage of the Wilderness Society, “the egregious conflicts of interest, the groveling to regulated industry is truly without parallel in the history of our great nation.” 26
In the same vein, Reagan administration appointees at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) worked to make sure that its reach was limited as well. A creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the EEOC had led the fight against racial and gender discrimination in private sector employment for nearly a decade and a half. Clarence Thomas, the 34-year-old African American head of Reagan’s EEOC, argued in July 1982 that the commission had previously been too aggressive in its work. “We are simply in the habit of saying that, if a company has not hired minorities in numbers commensurate with their presence in the population, then discrimination has taken place. But discrimination does not account for all of the differential,” he told a journalist. “Employment is typically based on skills. To become a news reporter, you must be able to write. Simple as that.” It was wrong for the EEOC to stand up for all of those left out of an industry. “To say we are protecting their rights, when in fact they are unqualified, is to create a false hope,” Thomas argued. “It’s like protecting my right to become a concert pianist when I cannot play the piano.” 27 Ultimately, the change in leaders
hip at executive branch agencies like the EEOC, OSHA, and the EPA showed that the institutional stickiness of liberal policies was not as strong as Democrats might have assumed. The New Deal and Great Society might not be eradicated, but their impact could be limited considerably.
Reagan the Hawk
The early years of the Reagan presidency were more amenable to the conservative movement when it came to national security. During the first term, the administration amplified the tensions with the Soviet Union as the Cold War heated up to dangerous levels. Though Reagan ultimately wanted the elimination of nuclear weapons, he believed the means to that end was a massive military buildup and an adversarial stand against the Soviet Union. “Peace through strength,” he said, was the only way to obtain freedom from nuclear war. “If history teaches us anything,” the president said, “it is that a strong defense is a prerequisite to a lasting peace, the only credible deterrent against aggression.” 28
During his first four years, Reagan handled national security issues as a hawk. Although he secretly authorized contact with the Soviet leadership to see if there was any possibility for peace, Reagan publicly made a number of moves that signaled to the American people, and the world, that he was serious about confronting the Soviet Union. In a 1983 speech to religious leaders, Reagan famously denounced the USSR as an “evil empire.” “There is sin and evil in the world,” Reagan said, “and we’re enjoined by Scripture and the Lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might.” 29 Reagan’s defiant tone was shared by his national security team. Many of his key appointments, including those who were responsible for negotiations, were ardent conservatives who had long been outspoken critics of détente. The neoconservative Democrat Richard Perle, who had been a staffer for hawkish Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, became assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. Perle, according to one policy maker, had an “unshakable belief that the Soviets had always managed to bend arms control agreements to their advantage and always would.” Negotiating, he believed, was simply naïve.30
Fault Lines Page 15