Watched Annie Hall last night.
There is a scene where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are splitting up their belongings.
Woody has a bunch of presidential pins saying impeach Johnson, impeach Eisenhower. Then one that says “impeach Ronald Reagan”
The movie was released in 1977, and Reagan was president starting in 1981.
Am I missing anything? Was Reagan a viable candidate choice 4 years before he took office? Just a joke that just happened to come true?
He challenged Ford in the primary in '76.
According to the Wikipedia page, he didn’t do too badly.
Reagan ran for the Republican nomination in 1976 and lost in a contested ballot, 47% to 52% for Ford.
After Reagan lost the nomination, there was a clear feeling of “I’ll be back”.
Woody Allen was looking ahead.
Reagan made a serious run for the Presidency in 1976 against Ford. As Governor Of California he stirred up immense dislike among liberals. There were an unending series of jokes about a President Reagan in those years. So a joke Impeach Reagan button would get a great reaction from half the audience, or more.
Isn’t it possible Woody is making a dig at RR’s years as President of the Screen Actor’s Guild? (Slightly ahead of my time.)
Reagan was governor of California from 1966 to 1975 and, as pointed out upthread, made a serious run for the presidency in 1976.
And there were plenty of “Impeach Earl Warren” buttons around, and he was only a Chief Justice.
Certainly not. That would be a very obscure joke and wouldn’t be the least bit funny to 99% of the audience. Certainly the obvious one is what was intended. And that wouldn’t even make sense, since you wouldn’t impeach the President of SAG.
But he could have been impeached, unlike Reagan in 1976-77.
The process for removing judges, including the Chief Justice, from office is also called impeachment.
I haven’t looked at the state constitution, but I presume Reagan could have been impeached as governor of California. True he wasn’t governor at the time of the movie, but then Eisenhower and Johnson weren’t President at the time of the movie either. The buttons dated from earlier times.
Reagan had been governor. You can impeach governors. “Ronald Reagan” has always worked as a comic punchline.
You presume correctly: Early California Impeachment Proceedings on JSTOR
An interesting gubernatorial impeachment case from Arizona in 1987-88: Evan Mecham - Wikipedia
"I haven’t felt this awful since we saw that Ronald Reagan film. "
The bumper sticker I remember read, “Mecham. Impeach him”. Cute, but a mispronunciation of his name (the “ch” is pronounced like a “k”).
There were buttons made during Reagan’s time as governor which said “Impeach Reagan”:
“Don’t start up with that White Zone shit of yours again.”