Excerpted from Right Turn:
(1986) excerpts from Chapter 5 “The
Democrat’s Response” and Chapter 6 “the 1984 campaign”
Given their behavior during
the late days of the Carter Administration, the first reaction of most leading
Democrats to the Reagan onslaught was entirely predictable. Seeking to
recapture business support, they acquiesced in, and in many cases helped
promulgate, the right turn in public policy.
The Democrats were, for example, noisy supporters of the
military buildup. Earlier, in considering the Carter Administration’s 1980 and
1981 requests for sharp increases in military spending, a Congress controlled
by the Democrats in both houses actually exceeded those requests in its final
appropriations. During Reagan’s first term, the Democratic House continued in
this vein, granting him over 93 percent of the more than $1 trillion dollars in
military obligational authority he requested over 1982-1985.
Democratic compliance in the area of social spending…was less
dramatic. Still, the House gave the Administration most of what it asked for in
1981, and over the first term, ratified just under 50 percent of the
Administrations’ impressive sending-reduction proposals. More generally, the
Democrats did next to nothing to contest the Administration’s basic strategy,
which was to reduce benefits most drastically for those who could least afford
it—low-paid workers and the poor…
Last but by no means least, many Democrats supported the
regressive Reagan tax plan, which everyone knew would create almost unbearable
pressures for further cuts in social spending.
[The Democrats alternative budget/tax proposals] was closely patterned
on the Administration proposal. Costing the same, and equally regressive, it
merely distributed the great corporate tax breaks to a slightly different range
of firms.
Nor were these results merely a function of Republican
alliances with the Southern faction of the Democratic Party. Repeatedly,
Northern Democrats, including prominent “liberal” Northern Democrats, facilitated
or openly endorsed Administration initiatives. During the drafting of the tax
bill, it was Democratic Illinois congressman Dan Rostenkowski [who was a
leading recipient of PAC money] who as chair of the House Ways and Means
Committee, played a key roll in the dizzying auction that eventually gave even
leading business groups pause. During the debate over social program budget
cutting in 1981, titw as House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the quintessential
“Northern liberal,” who declined to permit an “open rule” allowing admendments
to individual spending-cut proposals. By forcing budget ttrimmers to take
public stands on individual cuts., rather than just aggregate, “reductions in
the bloated federal government,” the amendments such a rule would have permitted
would probably have slowed the momentum of the Administration’s attack. And in
the Senate, John Glenn and twelve other Norhtern Democrats also voted “yes” on
the final passage of the Administration’s budge bill in 1981..In short, it was
clear from early on in the Administration that the Democrats were prepared to
buy into major elements of the “Reagan” program.
But while congressional
Democrats and party elites did little to context the new Republican order for
many months, the Democrats’ threatened mass base at length began to stri. As
the full scale of the Reagan assault on soicla programs became apparent,
unions, community organizations, church groups, social-welfare workers and
state and municipal employyes sought to unite in opposition. . .
Clearly the audience for an alternative political message
existed, and had this burgeoning opposition been able to seize control fot he
Democratic party, the consequences might have been interesting indeed. The
problem was that he groups most strongly committed to presenting alternatives
had almost no resources, while those that did were either halfhearted or
actively hostile o any basically new messages.
… [Except for unions] popular organizations that were trying to
mobilize against Reagan were living on shoestring budges and were almost
hopelessly divided among themselves. The Reagan cutbacks exacerbated their
desperate condition. . .A 1982 survey by the Campaign for Human Developmetn,
the domestic anti-poverty agency of the Catholic Churcgh, found that some 80
percent of the organizations it funded had been adversely affected by the
budget cuts. . . The net result…was
that community organizations not only shrank but changed, giving substance to
the Administration’s slogan of “defunding the left.”
… Within the labor movement the situation was somewhat more
complex. Unlike the community and
church groups, the unions still commanded substantial resources. But save in the
few unions suffering from truly catastrophic declines in membership there was
no real will ot use them. The social ties, financial incentives and
organizational advantages that made accommodation with big business uscha an
attractive option for top labor leaders in the 1960s were still operating. For
all its bellicose rhetoric, what the AFL-CIO leadership really wanted was to
find out if anyone in the business community was still intererested in a
separate deal. . .
As usual, the AFL-CIO’s moves in foreign arenas paralleled its
actions at home. From the early days of Reagan’s first term on, even as they
denounced the Administrations’ domestic inititatives, top labor leaders
actively supported the Administration in the promotion of “free trade unionism”
abroad. Federation president Land Kirkland and teachers union president Albert
Shanker, for example, joined the rabidly anti-labor Orrin Hatch, who had led
the fight against labor-law reform in 1978, on the board of the
Administration's new and controversial National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
which sought to pursue U.S. foreign-policy goals through a variety of informal,
and largely uncontrolled, channels. By the end of Reagan's first term, the
AFL-CIO's budget for foreign activities would be running in excess of $40
million annually, almost matching its total domestic budget. Of that foreign
budget, roughly go percent would come from U. S. government sources--chiefly
the Agency for International Development, the U.S. Information Agency, and the
NED. The money was spent on many things: the further corruption of land reform
in El Salvador, where labor worked to shore up the brutal regime of Joss
Napole6n Duarte; the support of the anti-Sandinista CUS union in Nicaragua, and
the sponsorship of speaking tours by prominent Contras, including Alfonso
Robelo and Arturo Cruz, in the United States; the promotion of Ardito
Barletta's fraudulent election in Panama; and various attacks on the Philippine
Labor Federation, the principal source of organized worker opposition to the
regime of Ferdinand Marcos. Arguably, the AFL-CIO became the single most
important actor in the Reagan Administration's more general policy of promoting
controversial foreign-policy goals through private institutions-the official
rationale of the NED, which by the end of Reagan's first term was giving the
AFL-CIO 75 percent of all its grants. Clearly, labor was ready to deal.
And
while labor leaders put out feelers, business Democrats re-grouped. Aware that
the times demanded something more then business as usual, the most venerated of
all the New Deal Democratic business leaders, investment banker Averell
Harriman, had already begun putting together a new Democratic pressure group.
Organized principally by his wife raincia, "Democrats for the 80s"
first appeared in December 1980. On its board were Stuart Eizenstat,
previously a top aide to Carter and currently a director of Hercules, a major
defense contractor; former LBJ counsel (and Atlantic Institute director) Harry
McPherson; and Robert Strauss, the former Carter trade adviser who is perhaps
the best connected of all the leading Democrats to Wall Street and-the
multinationals. Another glittering bloc of multinational Dernocrats-including
former Carter Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, McPherson, MCA's Lew Wasserman,
Lazard Freres partner Felix Rohatyn, former Treasury Secretary and current
Burroughs chief executive Michael Blumenthal, former Carter Under Secretary of
State Warren Christopher, and Washington "super- lawyer" (and
Trilateral Commission member) Lloyd Cutler-bulwarked the new Center for
Democratic Policy (later renamed the Center for National Policy). Max Palevsky,
the major McGovern fund-raiser who had served as a member of Xerox's executive
committee, and was now on the board of Intel, bankrolled a new journal, democracy. Older Democratically oriented think tanks
also stirred. The Brookings Institution, whose carefully balanced and formally
nonpartisan board has long been chaired by one of the best-known and most influential of all the multinational Democrats, Robert
Roosa, added several new board members (including Bank of America chief
executive Samuel Armacost, a liberal Republican). It also revamped research
programs and staff to compete more effectively with right-wing, GOP-oriented
think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Though everyone continued making all the usual disavowals about how the
researchers operated with "complete independence , etc., these personnel shifts and other changes clearly had a
major effect. In due course, Industry Week was gushing enthusiastically
that Brookings "is sounding more like Ronald Reagan every day."
With signs of discontent in the rank and file rising rapidly,
the Democratic business groups and labor leaders opened negotiations over the
shape of a Democratic "alternative" to Reaganism. Their most
important step was the first-the Democratic National Committee elected a new
chairman, Charles Manatt. A prominent lawyer and banker from California, whose
law firm represented, or quickly acquired as clients, many firms with obvious
interests in what happened in the Democratic Party (such as Northrup, a major
defense contractor, and Nissan Motors, the Japanese auto giant), Manatt swiftly
embarked on a sweeping reorganization of the party.
His program was perfectly
straightforward. Like most other business Democrats, Manatt wanted to
strengthen the party's ties with the business community, rather than with
blacks, community organizations, or the poor. To that end, he and his allies
deliberately sought out millionaires and other wealthy business figures to run
as candidates. They also tried to shore up the party's desperately straitened
financial condition. Like many other institutions in trouble in the world
economy, the Democratic Party was heavily in debt, and short- run relief
required taking on more debt while struggling to pay off sums already run up.
Under Manatt, who before he became DNC chair was mentioned as a possible future
head of the American Bankers Association, the party's financial structure soon
bore more than a faint resemblance to that of a debt-encumbered LCD being run
under IMF surveillance. Major banks, including Bank of America and Chase,
helped float the loans, which prominent business leaders of the party
guaranteed."
The party also attempted to strengthen its capacity for direct
mail. Famously anemic when Manatt took over, the Democrats' use of these
techniques did
increase. But while the party raised some additional sums this way, and also
began gradually to catch up to the in its use of computers and polls, some
plain facts of sociology set severe limits on the party’s use of the new
technologies. The sheer facts of American social class, for example, virtually
guaranteed that the party would always trail behind in appeals to the upper
middle class--there were simply affluent Republicans out there than Democrats.
The role organized labor played in the party also helped limit the Democrats' direct
mail. Since direct fund-raising appeals to union members would bypass the
union leadership, many union leaders objected to its use. Business Democrats,
who were then at work trying the AFL-CIO within the party, did not press the
issue.
The most important step Manatt and his
allies took to reform the :party’s finances finances, however, was their organization of the
Democratic Business Council (DBC). Originally promoted by Byron Radaker (chief officer of
Congoleum, the huge New Hampshire holding whose Bath Iron Works subsidiary has
been a major naval since the days pf Admiral Alfred Tbayer Mahan), the DBC
required annual contributions from each member of either $10,000 of the
member's own money or $15,000 from the member's company. In return, the party
invited members to participate in a regular series of task forces and study
groups to develop party policies, as well as "quarterly meetings of a
substantive nature held in Washington" and elsewhere, "where members
can share their respective business, professional and political interests with
the political leadership of America. "
With big business as a whole headed
increasingly to the Republicans, the venture was a bit of a gamble for the
heavily indebted party. But it proved a highly successful one. As they had done
ever since the New Deal, labor-intensive manufacturers stayed away completely.
While lower-ranking executives of Arco, Occidental, Chevron, and a few
independents eventually signed on, most of the oil industry also declined to
join. Vast numbers of executives from capital-intensive military contractors,
however, snapped up the high-priced memberships, including officials of United
Technologies, Signal, Tiger International, General Dynamics (which had several
members), Boeing, and Grumman Aerospace. Leading financiers, including Bank
of America board chairman Leland Prussia, and many investment bankers also joined, as did a huge bloc of real-estate magnates, some high-tech executives, a few mostly lower-ranking figures in various multinationals (such as General Electric), and many corporate lawyers. Executives from several natural-gas companies-a sector that has historically been interested not only in regulatory policy but in detente--also took out membership. "
Arms Control, Intervention, and the Nuclear "Freeze"
Organizing the DBC required considerable time. All during this period, however, the economy was collapsing, and a host of other issues-Central America, European relations, and trade policy among them--were generating new problems for the Reagan Administration. As a consequence, not only the mass public but important segments of big business began turning more clearly against the President.
For the Democrats, the gradual disintegration of Reagan's support in the business community presented both an opportunity and a danger--an opportunity because it brought many new recruits to their project of building a business-oriented alternative to Reaganomics; a danger because many of the firms newly interested in the party shared little beyond a disenchantment with Reagan's policies. Because virtually nothing else bound them together, in the longer term they could as easily destabilize the party as strengthen it. During much of 1981-1982, however, the specific ways in which Reagan's coalition was disintegrating meshed almost perfectly with traditional Democratic themes.
As a glance down the roster of the top federal appointees of the Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter Administrations indicates, most top-level multinational Democrats came from companies that had strong orientations toward Europe. Though in the 1970s the attention of American business as a whole was shifting from Europe to the Pacific Basin, the Middle East, and other parts of the Third World, the old-line Democratic business executives that still dominated the party's elite structure disproportionately retained this orientation.
In early 1982, moreover,
they, along with their handful of multi-national allies that were still hoping
to do business with the Soviet Union, made-up precisely the parts of the
business community with the biggest grievances with the Reagan Administration.
For many reasons--including the Administration's
huge military buildup (which several systems denounced by critics as potential
"first strike" which promised to destabilize the European theater);
Reagan’s "Evil Empire" rhetoric; the disastrous effect high American
interest rates initially had on European growth; the dispute with NATO allies
over the construction of a pipeline to carry natural gas from the U.S.S.R.;
American effort to limit Europe's trade with the Eastern bloc; and the growing
stalemate in arms control--a crisis was brewing in U.S. -European relations.
Strong opposition from Europeans, criticism from friendly business elites in
Latin America, and the certainty that a U.S. invasion of Central America would
lead to massive protests (and damage to the property of American firms) all
around the globe, were also fanning doubts among some leading multinationalists
about the Administration's aggressive Central American policies.
Traditionally Democratic business elites thus had an opportunity to do
good and do well at the same time. Many seized it with relish. Harriman, Thomas
J. Watson, Jr. (whose family has long controlled IBM), and other prominent
Democrats in whose global vision and corporate strategies Europe has long
enjoyed a special place, sharply attacked the Reagan Administration for its
neglect of arms control and allied relations. Several leading multinational
Democrats joined the board of the elite Arms Control Association, including Robert
McNamara (former Secretary of Defense and president of the World Bank, and now
a director of Shell and many other multinationals, and a trustee of the Ford
Foundation) and Admiral Bobby Inman (formerly Deputy Director of the CIA under
Carter, and by then the head of MCC, the computer consortium whose
moving spirit was William Norris, the longtime Democratic head of Control Data,
close friend of Walter Mondale, and a champion of U.S.-U.S.S.R ' trade). The
Association, rather quiet for some time, soon reemerged as a strong and vocal
critic of the Administration's arms-control policies. . .
At almost
the same time, Sol Linowitz (a prominent international lawyer, for many years
chair of Xerox, and still a director of Time Inc and many other concerns) began
heading up an influential series of meetings between elites int eh United
States and Latin America. . This “Inter-American Dialogue” was implicitly quite
critical of Reagan Administartion policies in Central America. [Criticism was]
offered at a time when the Reagan Administration was breaking off negotiations
with the Soviets, accusing the
Nicaraguans of being Soviet agents, and sabotaging the Contadora
process.
By themselves, the
multinational Democrats and their allies in the (predominantly Eastern,
internationalist) press and the foundations were a force to be reckoned with.
Their emphasis on arms control and the avoidance of armed intervention,
moreover, laid the basis for a coalition with yet another powerful set of
business interests the Reagan policies were then alienating-urban real-estate
interests, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest.
Because the Reagan tax bills, passed
earlier, made new investment so attractive, they could only accelerate the
flight of business from central cities to the South and West. In addition, the
Reagan budget presented in the fall of ig8i called for sweeping cuts in federal
spending on a wide range of urban programs that primarily benefited older
cities and declining regions-spending on housing, transportation, state and
local fiscal assistance, trade-adjustment assistance, and ur- ban
infrastructure and development.
Such cuts would not only devastate the
poor, blacks, and blue- collar residents of these areas; together with the tax
bill, they would also knock the props out from under many investments in real
estate and other place-oriented business ventures. Real-estate interest
building in the downtown areas of many large cities, for example, absolutely
required mass transit for their projects' viability. Cars, in many cases,
simply could not bring in enough people to make high-rise, intensive
developments economical. Many projects, particularly for "urban
development," were counting on other forms of subsidy as well. Nor were
they the only major businesses with a special stake in the economic viability
of these urban regions. The media had to worry about the decline of local
audiences for its lucrative flagship stations in the East. As long as major
regulatory hurdles remained in the way of interstate banking, local banks had
to worry about protecting their deposit bases. And any number of other major
business interests for whom a move out would be difficult and
expensive-utilities, many small businesses, even some New York City financiers-could
not afford to stand idly by and watch their communities decay or simply
move to the Southwest. \
The result was, perhaps, inevitable. The elite concern with arms control and the
military budget found a focus in the growing grass-roots campaign for a
"nuclear freeze." The multinational Democrats and the real-estate
interests coalesced behind efforts to reduce the Reagan arms budget by
cutting--or, rather, restructuring-nuclear programs. From a decentralized
campaign begun by a few committed activists, the movement for a freeze abruptly
changed character. All of a sudden Eastern real-estate magnates with no known
interests in any defense issue, such as the famous Donald Trump, began
supporting a vaguely defined "freeze" movement. Foundations,
investment bankers like Donald Petrie of Lazard Freres, and many members of the
Forbes 400 contributed to groups like the Council for a Livable World, which,
along with the Union of Concerned Scientists, became a bridge between the
freeze movement and the more conservative, establishment-oriented arms-control
movement. General Motors heir Stewart Mott funded a variety of peace groups,
while other individual businessmen--such as American Minerals' Stanley
Weiss--founded other groups. In Boston, a group of hotel and real- estate
magnates underwrote the costs of informal discussions that helped start the New
England anti-nuclear movement, probably the most successful in the nation.
With the same media that was then
criticizing Reagan's budget proposal providing extraordinarily favorable press
coverage, the freeze movement took off. While professional groups unthreatened
by the Reagan budget cuts (such as lawyers and accountants) generally held
aloof, professionals in occupations threatened by budget cuts flocked to
support activists who had previously worked on a shoestring. Physicians who
never said a word about capping medicare fees now joined Helen Caldicott
in Physicians for Social
Responsibility. Church groups, which had temporized all through Vietnam, but
which relied on federal grants that the defense buildup placed in question,
joined the movement. So did many teachers' unions and educators that also faced
big budget cuts if the Reagan military buildup continued.
By mid-1982, the anti-nuclear movement had become a powerful
political force. But it had also moved far from the intentions of its original
champions. Few of the business groups and foundations that now helped push it
along wanted to explore the relations between multinational business, the use
of force in American foreign policy, and social class. Accordingly, the
critical content of the early freeze proposals largely evaporated. Allying with
the "freeze" became little more than a way of disaffiliating with a
military buildup of the size Reagan projected.
The height of the denaturing process was reached during the
great anti-nuclear demonstrations of June 1982. Only days before 2.5 rnillion
people were scheduled to march in New York and Washington, events in Lebanon
threatened to provoke a major superpower confrontation. After a private debate,
sponsors of the anti-nuclear movement agreed to make no reference to the crisis
in public.
By then, however, Manatt and many
multinational Democrats were moving to affect the character of the anti-nuclear
debate in a way that would still further strengthen the Democrats' ties with
the business community. Thanks to revolutionary developments in electronics,
the technologies available for conventional war were in rapid flux. A whole new
generation of weapons-precision-guided munitions, pilotless drones and robots,
supersophisticated tanks, bafflefield missiles and all sorts of
aircraft-delivered weapons-held out the promise of a new kind of very expensive
land war. The chance to combine capital-intensive infantry attacks with
fabulously expensive tactical aircraft support was bringing the Army and the
Air Force together around new strategies of "Air-Land battle" (whose
name ex- presses its costly essence) and "Follow on Force attack." To
varying degrees these were promoted in opposition to the Navy's own
"forward strategy" of carrier-based offensive force projection
against the Soviet Union. The sharpness of interservice rivalries grew under
the Reagan Administration (whose huge buildup, as already noted,
disproportionately benefited the Navy), as did the debate over these two
different approaches to the projection of U.S. power. And it soon became clear
that the dispute within the military had political potential for the Democrats.
Democratic military strategists such as Robert Komer (a
Vietnam superhawk in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and an Under
Secretary of Defense under Carter) had long been arguing for the virtues of
"coalition defense." They wished to increase conventional
capabilities through closer alliances and "burden sharing" with major
allies, and grew agitated in contemplating the huge naval buildup. As Komer
argued:
[T]he kind of carrier-heavy navy we are
building, and the peripheral maritime strategy for which it is designed, cannot
meet our basic strategic needs. Even if we simultaneously swept the Soviets
from all the seven seas at the outbreak of a,war, this could not alone prevent
the U.S.S.R. from dominating the entire Eurasian landmass, including such vital
areas as Europe, Japan/Korea, and the Persian Gulf oil fields. Only land and
sea power as ,well
could do that. . . . Moreover, the
current costly emphasis on big carriers for offensive force projection is even eroding
our ability to perform the essential naval mission of sea control.
Thus, he concluded, while
carriers "are splendid for Third World conflict," the United States
already had enough of them. More re- sources should go into land and air
forces, while realizing the efficiencies that came from coalition defense.
Other Democrats, including Samuel Huntington, took the Komer argument a step
further. T'hey argued that the new military technologies could afford the
United States a chance to strike at Soviet forces in Eastern Europe with
devastating force.
In either version, the emphasis on
building up conventional land and air forces, particularly in Europe, would
permit large savings in the huge naval buildup and permit less reliance on
nuclear weapons. Reciprocally, many prominent advocates of nuclear-arms
control, including the famous "American Gang of Four"--Robert
McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Gerard Smith, and George Kennan-emphasized in their
writings the importance of increased reliance on land and air conventional
forces and a greater cooperation with the allieS.24
These developments handed Manatt & Co. a providential
way to square the circle. The Democrats could now endorse the
"freeze," which implied the cancellation or scaling down of some
big-ticket nuclear programs, such as the MX, the B-1 bomber (manufactured by
Rockwell, which, unlike other contractors, had no personnel on the Democratic
Business Council), and perhaps the D-5 missile for the Trident 11 submarine.
Adding these savings to those gained by scaling back the naval buildup, both
the rnultinationalists oriented toward Europe or a potential accord with the
U.S. S. R. and the real- estate and other regional interests would gain.
Because a whole new field of conventional weaponry would open up, however, even
many military contractors would be satisfied. And this in turn kept such
"middle of the road" (and distinctly unfrozen) Democrats as Sam Nunn
of Georgia (home to Lockheed, the producer of the C-5A transport), a prominent
advocate of conventional weaponry, happy too.
As explicit commitments on the freeze faded, many Democrats
even abandoned the rhetoric, and (following the Administration) shifted the
earlier rallying slogans in favor of "build down" proposals on
nuclear weapons. Sponsored by a group of mostly Democratic officials with very
close ties to weapons producers, this notion proposed that the Unites States and USSR destroy a certain number of
nuclear warheads for each addition they made to their nuclear forces. Because
they provided for the destruction of some nuclear weapons, such proposals could
be plausibly passed off as “freeze”-inspired. In fact, they were really
formulas for the further modernization of strategic forces. . . they could
legitimate the purchase of almost anything, in almost any amount. Added to the
arguments for more conventional defense, they seemed at the time to be a
perfect answer to many Democratic needs.
As the Reagan Administration hopes to force down federal
spending by inducing a budget crisis led to larger and larger budget deficits,
the Democrats won more affluent friends. Faced with mounting deficits,
virtually all segments of big business complained, but not with equal urgency.
For weapons producers, for example, the deficits appeared as an entry in their
profits column. Labor-intensive manufacturers, whose bargaining position
against their workforces would almost certainly improve if the administration
succeeded (Perhaps in a second term) in still deeper cuts in social spending,
also had an incentive to stick with the President. But not everyone in the
business community could afford to wait. In particular, investment bankers and
insurance companies could hardly afford to stand quietly on the sidelines while
new government debt exploded, since their prosperity depends on investor
confidence in long-term bonds. Permanently growing deficits erode such
confidence, since investors know what government and taxpayers will be
..tempted . . to pay off the debt by merely printing money. Prominent members
of both these sectors thus became increasingly active in supporting the
Democrats….
…In March 1982, [The
Democratic National Committee] chartered a commission on party rules
reform….Frankly intended to increase the control of party leaders over the rank
and file [the rank and file delegates had been given more power since the
disastrous 1968, where party bosses had thwarted the rank and file on Vietnam.]
… the rules changes rolled back most of the reforms of the early 1970s. They
included a shortening of the primary and caucus season, the abandonment of
mandatory proportional representation in state selection of delegates (in favor
of various “winner take all” or winner take more” alternatives), the
reservation of 14 percent of convention
delegate seats for “superdelegate” party leaders not committed to specific
candidates. Together, the changes were designed to advantage the
early-front-running candidates and ensure that party insiders would be “heard”
at the convention.
Prodded by Cyrus Vance and some other business leaders,
particularly those sympathetic to the “anti-nuclear” movement, the party also
warily eyed the possibility of increasing voter turnout. As noted earlier,
American electoral participation is decisively class-skewed; the nonvoting
population, as a group, is significantly poorer and less educated than the
voting population. And because it is poorer, the non-voting population is also
disproportionately Democratic. Everything else being equal, it would seem then
that increased voting participation would tend to help the Democrats. Since
most nonvoters (more than 70%) are unregistered, and registration is generally
required for voting, a natural focus for any effort at increasing turnout would
be an effort to increase voter registration. ..
. . .[D]espite his overwhelming electoral college victory,
Reagan’s share of the popular vote in 1980 was unimpressive. . Assuming the
Democratic nominee in 1984 did at least as well as Carter had in 1980…incremental
increases in registration could make a big difference [in 1984]. Below the
national level the case seemed even more compelling. In 1980, nine of
thirty-four Senate races were decided by 2 percent of the vote or less.
Republicans won seven of those, emerging with a 53-47 majority instead of a
46-54 minority… again, registration seemed to hold the key to possible
Democratic victory.
…But while many within the party were advocating massive
efforts at voter registration, party leaders were ambivalent. After all, the
very characteristics that made non-voters attractive candidates for
mobilization into Democratic ranks—most importantly the fact that they were
poorer than the rest of the voting population—also spelled potential trouble
for elite Democratic interests. Mobilizing the poor might threaten business
Republicans, but it would also threaten business Democrats. Manatt and other
party leaders had spent much of their time over the past 2 years extinguishing
such threats—by acquiescing in the Administration’s attacks on working people
and the poor and reintegrating business interests into the party—and were not
inclined to reignite them now. Nor was organized labor, the chief non-business
actor in the party, anxious to rock the delicate arrangements it had entered
into with business Democrats, or to disturb, as a full-scale mobilization
surely would, its own intensely hierarchical organization. Thus, while party
leaders began talking about voter registration as early as 1982, they did
little about it at the time
….It was widely assumed that the agenda worked out by the
Democratic business groups and the DNC commanded support form the vast majority
of the party and that, accordingly, [Walter Mondale] would sweep the
{Democratic Party nomination]. . . the Mondale campaign appeared to embody
perfectly the coalition Democratic business leaders were seeking to build. At
its informal center was a group of Democratic businessmen with glittering
multinational credentials …For more than a year [these men] had been working to
“educate” Mondale on their business-orietned views on taxes, social spending
and other issues. Under their guidance (and in some cases patronage, since
Mondale was working for several of them), the candidate bhad begun a loudly
proclaimed effort to fashion a new, more centrist, business-oriented public
image. .. The Mondale campaign also raised funds from real-estate magnates,
including both Fred and Donald Trump; insurance executives, liberal
internationalists with strong tied to Europe and many investment bankers…
In the later half of 1983, however, the aura of Mondales’
invincibility began to tarnish, for the coalition it was based upon was proving
unstable..From the beginning the raison d’etre of Mondale’s effort had been to
find a compromise that both (parts of ) big business and organized labor could
support. That ..was the reason Mondale kept courting the support of the
AFL-CIO, whose precedent-shattering pre-primary endorsement he secured in 1983.
Reeling from imports, high unemployment, and the new assaults by Reagan
appointees at the NLRB and Labor Dept, however, labor was losing its
organizational effectiveness, even among its own confused and frightened
members.
Second, the economic recovery of 1983 changed the calculus of
interests among Democratic business groups, particularly among the new
arrivals.. In particular, with labor so transparently in decline, many
corporate figures were beginning to wonder why they should deal with labor and
the poor at all, and not explicitly seek to rearrange the party’s mass base..
[Authors describe candidates who sought to steal the business
base from Mondale, like John Glenn, Gary Hart on the right, and Jesse Jackson,
who sought to forge a campaign among poor, blacks labor and women; ] …
. . . As Mondale reconsolidated his elite support [when Gary
Hart and John Glenn withdrew for different reasons] their money began to weigh heavily in the outcome.
[As a last nod to organized labor and women’s groups in the
Party] … Mondale named Geraldine Ferraro as his vice-presidential candidate. .
Mondale looked like a bold innovator, and after Ferraro’s first press
conference, the new ticket began rising in the polls..
[But then the campaign] made a series of fatal moves. . .
Mondale named Bert Lance chairman of his campaign committee. The news that
Jimmy Carter’s former OMB chief would direct Mondale’s efforts shocked many in
the party, who remembered how Lance had departed under a cloud in the Carter
Administration… Then Mondale named Mannatt as DNC chairman.
Desperate for money and a
few favorable press notices, he had made a fatal bargain. By the early summer
of 1984, virtually all sectors of the business community were up in arms over
the size of the deficits projected by the Reagan Administration for the next
several years. ..the protests were loudest from those parts of the business
that were already close to Mondale and the Democrats—investment bankers and
insurance company executives.
To the Mondale campaign…the agitation about the deficit
appeared to be a golden opportunity. Here was a chance for Mondale, at one
stroke, to shed the charges of “special interest” domination. By presenting a
tough fiscal program and calling dramatically for a tax rise, he could throw
Reagan on the defensive and demonstrate his ability to make touch decisions. He
could secure support from major parts of the business community and obtain more
favorable press notices.
…At the convention, Mondale [with careful advising from several
key business contributors], announced he would raise taxes if elected.
To the immense relief of Reagan strategists… Mondale also turned
aside please form many leading Democrats for a sweeping endorsement of tax
reform…
The investment bankers and insurance company executives in the
campaign were, of course, gratified. Even if Mondale lost, their preeminent
issue would be massively publicized and the party would be committed in advance
to major efforts at deficit reduction after the election. . .
Poor and middle-class Americas . . were unimpressed. Could even
Jesse Jackson rouse a crowd of the unemployed to march, sing and demonstrate in
favor of higher taxes? Without any jobs program at all? . .
. . Certain to capture a heavy majority of upper-income groups,
all the President had to do was to split off a minority of the working class
vote. Unless the poor voted in unprecentedly large numbers he would win by a
landslide.
The Reagan campaign, accordingly, dusted off the old
tried-and-true formulas for consternating blue-collar voters. Aware, thanks to
its highly sophisticated polling operation, that most affluent American men and
women would not vote against their economic interests merely because the
President endorsed some eccentric views on social issues, the White House
stepped up its appeals to conservative religious groups. The President praised
Jerry Falwell, campaigned at Catholic shrines, appeared on stage with Catholic
bishops, and denounced abortion. He also associated himself with the Olympics, wrapped
his campaign in the flag, and scored it with country music. …..
. IN the final weeks
of the campaign, Mondale accused Reagan of having a secret plan to raise taxes
after the election. Until Reagan’s announcement of an upcoming summit with the
Soviets, he flogged away at the arms-control and nuclear-terror issues. In a
memorable speech at George Washington University, he stepped up his rhetoric
and seemed to come alive:
This election…is about toxic
dumps that give cancer to our children. This election is not about country
music and birthday cakes. Its about old people who can’t pay for medicine..
But Mondale still did not have a jobs program and when the campaign even made noises about redistribution from the rich, his business supporters sharply complained—at one point drawing from Mondale the reply: “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be rich. I want to be rich.” Returning again and again to the deficit issue, the Mondale campaign turned aside proposals from veteran media men and others for a series of hard-hitting attacks on the Republicans. . The Democratic Candidate had almost nothing concrete to offer voters, other than higher taxes.
Meanwhile, as the Democrats temporized on this and other
issues, top aides to the President (as well as a special team of reporters
working for the Washington Post and Newsweek who had been in on the secret)
kept silent about a potentially explosive campaign story—that there really was
a secret Reagan tax plan for after the election. Official plans to further cut
the EPA budget were also not discussed. While Reagan reassured audiences that
the US would simply grow out of the $200 billion annual budge deficits, J.
Peter Grace and other top business supporters prepared a massive anti-deficit
ad campaign to begin on election night. Asked later about the cynicism of this
move, especially given that their company paid only a .2 percent tax rate on
provits over 1981-84, Grace would later explain that “we are not concerned about
the deficit,” rather, “we are concerned about the level of spending.”
On election day, the electorate that knew nothing of this voted.
There were no surprises. Faced with a choice between someone who at least
talked about growth. . and someone whose only firm promise was to raise taxes,
the half of the electorate that made it to the polls opted decisively. .
Blacks, Jews, and the very poorest Americans voted for Mondale Everyone else,
in percentages that rose directly with income, voted overwhelmingly for Ronald
Reagan.
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