http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1984
Without hindsight I’d probably have voted for Reagan due to Mondale’s stance on foreign policy, but with hindsight the Minnesotan is the obvious choice.
Mondale represented everything that was wrong with the Democratic Party at the time. Beholden to special interests, still haunted by Vietnam, and thinking the solution to every problem was more taxes and spending.
In hindsight the choice is even easier to make than it was at the time, even knowing what we know about Reagan’s mental state. If Mondale wins in 1984, the Democratic Party’s inevitable evolution never occurs. Which I realize is what a lot of modern day progressives want, but that’s just ignoring how stale and weak the party had become by 1984. It was experiencing the worst of both worlds: the new left was making them weak on foreign policy and the New Deal Democrats had no new ideas beyond throwing more money at the existing federal behemoth.
In addition, Reagan’s second term featured some major policy accomplishments that I just don’t think the Democrats would have been able to pull off on their own: immigration and tax reform. They certainly would have wanted to do immigration reform, but I don’t think they would have had the balls to amnesty millions of illegals without bipartisan cover, which wouldn’t have been forthcoming if they controlled everything. The downside to controlling the White House and Congress is that you have to own everything. On tax reform, bipartisan desire to simplify the system was the only thing that made it happen.
In 1984, I voted for Mondale despite knowing full well he was going to get stomped. The Republicans had been licking their chops in anticipation of running against Mondale since November 5, 1980 which is the main reason I supported Gary Hart during the primaries (I was even a Hart delegate to the Washington State Democratic Convention). Nonetheless, the Democrats thought they owed something to Mondale for being Carter’s VP so they gave him the nomination instead. That being said, I did mostly agree with Mondale’s politics and does seem to be a nice guy. Still, with all his Jimmy Carter baggage, he was one of the weakest candidates the Democrats could nominate.
They didn’t give him the nomination out of loyalty. THE HArt/Mondale race was about two different visions for the party: Mondale’s old New Deal vs. Gary Hart’s attempt to move the Democratic Party into modernity. Democrats weren’t quite ready to let go yet and wouldn’t be until 1992.
I partially disagree on that point. Still, Reagan was going to win in 1984 regardless of whether the Democrats nominated Mondale or Hart. In retrospect, it was probably somewhat for the better that the Democrats did nominate Mondale because if they’d nominated Hart, a loss to Reagan would’ve so discredited the “New Democrats” that their eventual takeover of the party and victory in 1992 would’ve been far less possible.
Sorta, but Hart was a different kind of New Democrat than Clinton. Hart was a progressive, but his views were more in tune with what we call the “coalition of the ascendant” these days: young people, minorities, environmentalists, government reformers. Mondale was pretty much a Big Labor/senior citizens who were staunch Democrats in FDR’s time guy. Much like what is said about the GOP, the Democrats’ old voting base was dying out, although instead of endangering the party’s future viability it was simply replacing an old voting base with a new voting base with different priorities.
I voted for Mondale, knowing full well he would lose to the Evil One. I forget who said it, but Mondale’s problem was that he could give a speech to a Democratic banquet, say one line and the teachers would stand and cheer, say another line and the unions would stand up and cheer, say another and the environmentalists would stand and cheer, but he never said anything to make them all stand up and cheer. Sure, he checked all the appropriate boxes near and dear to Democrats, but he did not ignite any passion.
Gary Hart would have lost as well, perhaps not as badly. He may be somewhat in the same ideology as Clinton, but he was nowhere near Clinton’s league as a politician. It’s a good thing that Democrats didn’t nominate a guy that lied about his womanizing.
. . . Mondale was right.
He was definitely wrong on defense. He ran an ad that claimed that Reagan’s confrontational stance with the Soviet Union risked WWIII. As much as I’d like to think it was tax and spend that brought Democrats down in the 80s, and I do believe it was part of it, the biggest factor was simply that they lost their nerve in foreign affairs due to Vietnam. Plus the rise of political correctness among the New Left gave voters the impression that they were uncomfortable with the concept of American exceptionalism.
Again with apologies to Dr. Davis, who I admire (I just never liked Gus Hall), I voted for Mondale/Ferraro in '84 and am doing so here too. In retrospect Ms. Ferraro has become less attractive a candidate (thanks mainly to her crooked husband, but also her racially questionable comments in the 2008 primary). But at the time I was energized by seeing the first woman on a major party ticket, not to speak of my intense wish to rid America of the curse of Reagan. The systemic corruption that burst out of the Reagan administration like pus from an infection during his second term bears this out.
What makes you think it didn’t?
Weakness provokes totalitarians, not strength. That’s something liberals still haven’t figured out, although they used to have it internalized pretty well before Vietnam broke their psyches.
This was the first time that I voted for a Dem for President, on my fourth opportunity. (Anderson in 1980, Ford in 1976, and I couldn’t choose who was worse in 1972, though that would become obvious shortly after the election.)
I’d vote for him again, if I were transported back to 1984.
Vietnam broke a lot more than psyches; it broke a lot of lives. There are nearly 60,000 names carved into a wall on the Mall. And probably around a million Vietnamese dead.
And to what end? So that conservatives could cheer Lt. Calley for slaughtering a bunch of the very people we were supposedly there to rescue?
Being strong is good. Being enamored of one’s strength, not so much. Strength didn’t do any more for us in Iraq or Afghanistan than it did in Vietnam. Strength didn’t do the USSR any favors when it went into Afghanistan, either.
It’s nice to have a President who wants to use American strength in intelligent and effective ways, rather than just lashing out at whatever target is handy. That’s how you get bin Laden sleeping with the fishes. That’s how you take out the leader of al Shabab. And now Obama is putting together an international coalition to deal with ISIS, and taking the time to come up with a plan.
That’s the sort of approach that turns strength from a liability into an asset.
We can argue over whether American troops should have been committed to Vietnam. Maybe we should have let Vietnam go since there was no chance for us to save it anyway. But even if we assume it was a mistake, that mistake was compounded by how LBJ prosecuted the war. He also botched the explaining of the war to the American people and further botched the diplomacy surrounding the war. It’s hard to imagine a single thing he did right from 1965-1968. The lessons of Vietnam, aside from the ones liberals do remember, such as “don’t get into quagmires”, was also that you don’t steadily elevate force, you don’t use force to try to get people to the negotiating table, you don’t tie your military’s hands for dubious diplomatic purposes, and most importantly, you need to define the mission and apply overwhelming force to complete the mission right from the start. Colin Powell articulated this well when advising Bush 41 on the Gulf War. I realize no Democrats were in the room, but the Powell Doctrine remains the best way to fight a war.
If anything, I find that Democrats have an unrealistic view of our strength. They apply airpower liberally to various trouble spots but never think about what comes next if the airpower doesn’t work. They make all of the same mistakes LBJ made: they use airpower to “send a message”, they increase it steadily, and they define the tactics to be used, rather than the mission to be accomplished.
That’s horrible spin. First, a coalition is a means, not an end. Second, while we’re planning ISIS is killing. The President has a great record of taking out terrorists, better than GWB. He has kept to his doctrine of “Don’t do stupid shit.” It worked for him until now. Now he’s facing two major crises and instead of taking decisive action, he’s having meetings over a period of months while things get worse and worse. If Bush’s weakness was arrogance and lack of planning, Obama’s is indecisiveness and overthinking. Reagan, by contrast, had it exactly right, as did his successor. Arguably, Nixon and Ford did as well. Carter, by contrast, and his running mate, made America look so weak that it demoralized our alllies and provoked our enemies.
I logged in just so I could vote against Reagan a second time. We are still suffering from his legacy. Just watch the most recent John Oliver show about student loans. Much of those loan problems were started under Reagan.
May I ask that we keep our focus on the 1984 campaign as much as possible, please?
I voted for Mondale, then and now. 1984 was the first Presidential year in which I could vote. A guy down the college dorm hall from me had worked for Gary Hart in New Hampshire that spring, and had lots of great campaign war stories. I’m from Ohio, and Sen. John Glenn’s short-lived favorite-son campaign also got me interested. Hart would’ve been a better candidate than Mondale in November but, with the economy booming and the public mood so much better than in 1980, Reagan was practically unbeatable that year.
Reagan did help reignite the country’s economy, rebuilt U.S. military capabilities, signed off on tax and immigration reform, and did a lot to restore American self-esteem, but I think at too great a price. He was a sunny, likeable guy and had great charisma, but his record on deficit spending, church-state separation, abortion rights, gun control, the environment, race relations, gutting OSHA and taking Big Business’s side in every dispute, the looming S&L crisis, waging a secret war against Nicaragua, etc. etc. etc. is still awful IMHO.
I think the most lasting harm Reagan did was to make Republicans lose sight of the connection between spending and taxes. Prior to Reagan, Republicans still wanted to cut taxes, but since spending was tied inextricably to taxes, spending had to be lowered or kept constant. Coolidge was probably the most skilled at the politics of spending, by doing tax cuts every year but one. And in the one year he couldn’t, he explained gravely that Congress was unable to control spending enough to make a tax cut possible that year.
Reagan sundered the relation between the two almost totally for Republicans, which naturally caused them to just go for the tax cuts and ignore the pain of spending cuts. Heck, during the Bush years, domestic spending rose at the fastest rate since LBJ.
So Reagan did a lot for the Republican brand, but he actually damaged the party a great deal on the issue of small government, even as he actually brought public opinion to the best place it’s ever been on federal spending. Since Reagan, the public is very skeptical of any new spending program, even as the public likes most of the spending that currently goes on. It’s a powerful political weapon for Republicans, and it would be more powerful if they went back to being the party of fiscal responsibility that they were before Reagan.
That’s why Hitler took on the world’s three strongest military powers all at the same time?
Were Nixon and Ford “fiscally responsible”? They both ran deficits, IIRC.