For April 4

William Chafe, The Unfinished Journey excerpts from 482-489

As if by magic, Reagan remained untouched even by his mistakes. He was a "Teflon president,' Congresswoman Pat Schroeder of Colorado said. Nothing stuck to him. Americans had long since accepted Reagan's unfamiliarity with facts, one presidential advisor noted. 'What's wrong with it if the system works and people are happy. Ronald Reagan is part of the mythology of what America likes its leaders to be." If Reagan had been Nixon, one Republican wag commented, he would have been dead because people blamed everything on 'Tricky Dick.' But Reagan was the "gipper." He 'never lost that quality of next-door neighborliness and never became part of the system,' a journalist noted. He was a 'cultural democrat,' still "playing best friend, a citizen cast up among politicians.' Reagan had been made into "the personification of America," The New Yorker's Elizabeth Drew commented. In that context, 'to suggest that any- thing is wrong with him is to run down the country." Indeed, it was precisely that chemistry that made the president invulnerable. As one of Mondale's leading advisors observed, "you couldn't touch Reagan without hurting yourself."

In the face of such odds, Mondale could only go back to the basics of the Democratic faith, hoping to plant a seed, if not reap the harvest. In Reagan's America, he told one audience in Cleveland, 'it's all picket fences and puppy dogs. No one's hurting, no one's alone. No one's hungry. No one's unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody is happy.” But there was another America, Mondale said, where the poor, the disabled, the unemployed, the victims of discrimination, were treated as part of the family and were helped. That America, Mondale insisted, believed in community and compassion. Such people, Mondale allowed himself to think, would not cast a vote for selfishness dressed up as patriotism.

But in the end, there was no gainsaying the president's popularity. In a devastating landslide, he rolled to re-election with 59 percent of the vote and 49 of the 50 states. In almost every single category where Reagan appeared vulnerable, he triumphed instead. Women gave him 57 percent of their vote, the elderly 6i percent, the young-for the first time in decades-voted Republican. Catholics voted for the president; more Jews voted Republican than ever before; and even union households--where Mondale hoped for his strongest support-split almost down the middle. No electoral result better typified what had happened to Mondale-and the party-than the returns from Macomb County, a white working-class suburb of Detroit. In 1960, Macomb had been a bastion of Democratic strength, giving John F. Kennedy a 63 to 37 margin of victory over Richard Nixon. Now, stunned by recession and angry about blacks, this union enclave reversed itself completely, giving Reagan 67 percent to Mondale's 37- It was a night, Newsweek said correctly, 'that Ronald Wilson Reagan became Mr. America."

Whatever the momentary analyses of the pundits, the 1984 election ultimately was as much about traditional values-and America's sense of confidence in itself-as about the prosperous economic state of the union. The two were clearly connected. If America in 1984 had been where it was in 1982, with a 10 percent unemployment rate and little prospect of recovery, Reagan might well have been defeated. But instead the economy was on the move and there was a new sense of pride and confidence about the nation's stance in the world. This latter mood was difficult to quantify, but in many ways it held the key to the election. At the end of the Carter years, 75 percent of Americans said they no longer felt confident that the future would be better than the past. Now, after four years of Reagan, more than half had returned to their traditional optimism. In 1980 only one-fifth of all Americans said that the government was run for the benefit of all. Now, in 1984, that figure had more than doubled, notwithstanding the redistribution of wealth that had taken place away from the poor and toward the rich. Reagan's campaign slogan, "We Brought America Back," seemed to resonate. His ability to link the Olympic triumphs of Los Angeles with a new sense of national assertion in the world appeared to make sense. "Let’s take our cue from our ... athletes," he declared. "Let's go for growth, let's go for the gold." And Americans responded. There was, one commentator said, 'a new patriotism" abroad in the land, growing out of a natural desire to feel better about things after Watergate, Vietnam and the [Iranian] hostage crisis."

Reagan embodied this new patriotism, and brought it to fulfillment in his campaign, from the speech he gave on the beaches of Normandy commemorating the sacrifices of American soldiers on D-Day, to his proud display of America's Olympic triumphs, telling the voters that their athletes were "living proof of what happens when America sets it sights high." Whatever its intrinsic shortcomings, the Reagan credo had succeeded in winning the ardent support of millions of people inspired with a new faith in themselves and in their country. Even if based on an illusion, this new era of good feelings was one that people wanted to celebrate and savor for as long as possible. The question at the beginning of the second term was how long it could continue, given the flawed foundation on which it rested.

[chapter then turns to the Iran-Contra foreign policy scandal, which we will cover in a later class ]

…As if chaos in national security affairs were not enough, [In 1987] the economy began to display some of the long-term consequences of Reagan's tax and fiscal policies. Despite constant warnings that massive increases in military expenditures would generate excessive deficits, Reagan refused to propose new taxes and continued to act as if there were no problem. Although he systematically blasted Congress for its role in creating deficits, he seemed congenitally incapable of acknowledging that he was to blame for 95 percent of the problem, since it was his budgets that created the dilemma. The Reagan tax cuts, combined with a 41 percent real increase in the defense budget, caused the federal deficit to soar from $90 billion in 1982 to $283 billion in 1986--nearly ten times the highest deficit under any previous president. To finance the debt, America had to borrow, raising interest rates to attract capital. What that did, in turn, was to generate a flow of foreign money into America, which then caused the value of the dollar to rise dramatically, out of all proportion to its true worth. As the dollar skyrocketed, imports became cheaper-forcing many American industries either to relocate to third-world countries or go out of business-and the nation's trade imbalance also went haywire, since foreign markets could not afford to buy American goods at the inflated dollar value that now prevailed. The world's largest creditor nation in 1980, America now became the world's largest debtor nation, with a trade imbalance that soared to $170 billion by 1987. It was all a vicious spiral downward, fueled by indebtedness. The interest on the national debt alone took as much money as it cost to run nine departments of government, including Labor, Commerce, Education and Agriculture; and the more the budget and trade deficits grew, the harder it would be for the American economy to reclaim its independence and self-sufficiency. It required the output of 1.5 million American workers simply to pay America's interest on the debt it owed to the rest of the world. In the face of such realities, one economist concluded, "the potential for disaster is very great."

Even more disturbing were some of the deeper structural changes that flowed from these realities. More and more American workers, for example, were forced to seek employment in low-wage service industries. Although more new jobs were created in the 1980s than were lost, half of those that were lost were in relatively high-paying industries; on the other hand half of the new jobs paid wages below the poverty level for a family of four. Hence, the number of low wage earners increased substantially during the 1980s at the expense of high wage jobs that either disappeared or moved overseas. Given existing conditions, some economists predicted, every new job created in America for the foreseeable future would be in the service sector of the economy.

In such circumstances, the trend toward a two-tiered society accelerated. The proportion of blacks and Hispanics who were poor continued to grow, in both instances exceeding one-third of the total black and Hispanic population. High school dropout rates in the inner cities exceeded 50 percent; the number of female-headed households jumped to nearly 6o percent among blacks and 50 percent among Hispanics; and children born to these families ran a better than even chance of being poor. (Almost go percent of black female heads of household under 25 lived below the official poverty line.) The problem of homelessness spiraled in small and large cities alike, with hundreds of thousands of Americans sleeping on sidewalks, in doorways, on subway platforms, over heating grates, and in the nation's parks because they had no other place to go. While Ronald Reagan dismissed the problem as one limited to the emotionally disturbed, the facts were that the majority of the homeless-many of them children-came from families that simply had no place to go in the larger society.

At the root of all of this was the lack of decent jobs. Unskilled work was being mechanized out of existence. Skilled work was either moving out of the country or to the suburbs. Inner city residents lacked the education or the mobility to compete for jobs far removed from their own neighborhoods. And their own neighborhoods offered only minimum wage work or none at all. In such a context, drugs or crime offered some of the only options available. (The problem was compounded, unfortunately, by one of the positive results of the civil rights revolution-the fact that middle-class blacks, the leaders of the community, had for the most part moved from the inner city to more comfortable housing, thereby depriving ghetto neighborhoods of stability and direction.) If decent paying jobs existed in the inner city, the sociologist William J. Wilson observed, then young people would have a reason to stay in school, and would have the wherewithal to support nuclear families. Without such jobs and the institutions they would reinforce, the country seemed destined to experience an ever widening gulf between the haves and the have nots, a gulf that, in the words of one Urban League official, was going to "produce an individual that you're not going to be able to do anything with no matter what you do, someone who has been completely severed from what we consider normal relationships, someone who's outside the pale."

Although most Americans may have remained unaware of these structural problems, the whole world jolted awake to the perilous state of the American economy when the stock market crashed in October 1987. Like a bolt of lightning, the Wall St. debacle glaringly illuminated the fundamental weakness of Reaganomics. In one week, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 13 percent of its value, plummeting almost 8oo points. One day alone, $5oo billion of losses occurred in the market value of U.S. securities. And with remarkable unanimity, economists throughout the world agreed on the cause: the deficits in the budget and in the trade balance had cast profound doubt on America's ability to sustain itself in the world economy. The United States, one Republican economist pointed out, had been borrowing from abroad at twice the rate of its previous high mark in the i 8oos when the nation was industrializing. But the "unprecedented consumption and borrowing binge" could not continue. America had to display 'self-denial, collective discipline" and the same willingness to pay the price for its own excesses. Sounding the same theme, Texas billionaire Ross Perot declared that everyone had to realize the lessons of the crash. 'It's outrageous that our elected officials say the fundamentals of our economy are sound; none of the fundamentals are sound' (italics added). The problem, Newsweek con- cluded, was 'this Rube Goldberg structure" of indebtedness that Reaganomics had foisted on the nation; the economic miracle of the Reagan revolution, it now appeared, was a big bust.

By the late fall of 1987, commentators from virtually every political that the Reagan presidency had imploded, a victim of its own excesses and of the president's inattentive and erratic 'No sadder tale could be spun in this holiday season," David Broder noted, 'than the unraveling of yet another presidency." Adopting the same theme, a Republic leader observed that 'we have as weak a cast of political characters as anyone in the Western world, [and] this government still has fourteen months to go." Pundits searched for parallels in history, most settling on Reagan's similarity to Warren Gamaliel Harding, with his amiable but ineffectual style. But more disturbing was the Financial Times of London's observation that "historical comparisons with previously incapacitated chief executives like Woodrow Wilson may now seem relevant.'

For the time being, at least, it seemed that the "Teflon' had disappeared, with each embarrasing episode exposing what some now saw as a persistent pattern of manipulation and malfeasance. Thus, when Poindexter confessed to Congress that he had lied to them, James Reston declared: “You shouldn't be surprised. This administration has been living a life of pretense, cheating and borrowing for over six years." Even Republic stalwarts such as Richard Cheney of Wyoming, former chief of staff for President Gerald Ford, found the revelations astonishing. 'You have to say it's a pretty fundamental flaw," Cheney observed, "that would allow a lieutenant colonel on the White House staff to operate in defiance of the law.' [this refers to Iran-Contra, which we will deal with later in the course] With little more than a year to go in the Reagan presidency, the White House seemed overwhelmed by its own misfortunes, paralyzed by the president's detachment and indifference, and without the will or the way to turn things around. As The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Drew commented, "It is hard to see how [things] could change sufficiently to give us a presidency that is not-and does not put the country in-danger.'

Reaching New Heights

Ironically, the Reagan administration was rescued from lassitude and despair by the leader of the president's archnemesis, worldwide communism. . . (to be continued…)