Shoulda run Barbara Jordan as Carter’s running mate.
Thanks for the California info, DSYoungEsq - very interesting.
My take-away, though, is that Reagan was more of a moderate than he is normally painted - or was that simply because he had to be to get things done as Gov?
A mixture of both. Reagan was no Libertarian. He would be to the left of most of today’s GOP. He would become legitimately angry when people accused him of wanting to dismantle the New Deal. He agreed with the New Deal in principle; it was the Great Society he wished to dismantle. He was for amnesty of illegal immigrants. He believed idealistically in a world without nuclear weapons and dreamed of disarmament. After leaving office, he wrote strongly in favor of the Brady Bill and in favor of NAFTA. Where he was more right wing was on social issues. He was either ignorant of, or callous about, the AIDs crisis. He would lie and distort facts about the environment and welfare queens and such. He was basically a Southern Democrat in spirit with Republican trappings.
One must remember he didn’t switch to the GOP until the early 1960s, when he was almost 50 years old. He was a lifelong, ardent, New Deal Democrat up until that point. You can hear his campaign speeches for Truman from 1948.
He was considered in 1948 to be to the left of Helen Douglas, who Nixon that year was assailing as being “pink” or Communist-lite.
Reagan, on FDR, in 1984:
“All of us who lived through those years,” he instructed them, “remember the drabness the depression brought. But we remember, too, how people pulled together, that sense of community and shared values, that belief in American enterprise and democracy that saw us through. It was that engrained American optimism, that sense of hope Franklin Roosevelt so brilliantly summoned and mobilized…What a wave of affection and pride swept through that crowd as he passed by in an open car … a familiar smile on his lips, jaunty and confident, drawing from us reservoirs of confidence and enthusiasm some of us had forgotten we had during those hard years. Maybe that was FDR’s greatest gift to us. He really did convince us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself.
Every generation of Americans has faced problems and every generation has overcome them. Like Franklin Roosevelt we know that for free men hope will always be a stronger force than fear, that we only fail when we allow ourselves to be boxed in by the limitations and errors of the past.
This is not a political gathering. It’s a celebration of a great man who led our nation through historic times. It’s a celebration shared here today by many who knew and loved him well. Friends, colleagues, and relatives—and for my part, a young sportscaster who first felt the awe and majesty of this office when that familiar caped figure drove down the avenue in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1936, the figure who proved to us all that “Happy Days” could and would come again."
A diary entry of Reagan’s from 1984: “The press is dying to paint me as now trying to undo the New Deal. I remind them I voted for FDR. four times. I’m trying to undo the ‘Great Society.’ It was LBJ’s war on poverty that led to our present mess.”
“I believe the answer lies in the firm difference between the New Deal and the Great Society,” he declared. “The New Deal gave cash to the poor, but the Great Society failed to target assistance to the truly needy and made government the instrument of vast transfer payments, erecting huge bureaucracies to manage hundreds of social programs. The Great Society failed in two crucial aspects: It fostered dependence on government subsidies, and it made the transfer of money from Washington bureaucrats to those in need seem like a mission impossible.” He continued, “I was a New Deal Democrat. And I still believe, today, that there is only one compassionate, sensible, and effective policy for Federal assistance: We must focus domestic spending on the poor and bypass the bureaucracies by giving assistance directly to those who need it.”
Another except of a speech about FDR from 1988:
“The months before FDR took office are far behind us now. We forget what they were like—the pink slips handed out at factories across the land with no jobs anywhere if you lost yours, the soup kitchens in every major city, the look of desperation in people’s eyes. And we forget that, in the unprecedented economic crisis, many had begun to question our most basic institutions, including our democracy itself. And then along came FDR, who put his faith, as he said, “in the forgotten man,” the ordinary American.”
He also defended FDR’s legacy:
Was FDR trying to destroy the free enterprise system? Not at all, responded Reagan. He was simply “out to save it at a time of severe stress that had already caused democracy to crumble and fascism and totalitarianism to rear their ugly heads in so many other countries. In America, freedom was saved, and it gave us the strength to rescue a strife-torn Western world in the 1940s and 1950s.” Perhaps FDR did not realize what he had unleashed:
“With his alphabet soup of federal agencies, FDR in many ways set in motion the forces that later sought to create big government and bring a form of veiled socialism to America. But I think that many people forget Roosevelt ran for president on a platform dedicated to reducing waste and fat in government. He called for cutting federal spending by twenty-five percent, eliminating useless boards and commissions and returning to states and communities powers that had been wrongfully seized by the federal government. If he had not been distracted by war, I think he would have resisted the relentless expansion of the federal government that followed him. . . . Government giveaway programs, FDR said, “destroy the human spirit,” and he was right. As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created.”
Any Republican saying anything Reagan said above would be laughed out of the room today.
Ronald Reagan launched political career using the Berkeley campus as a target
That’s what Californians saw and heard, not his diaries.
He deserves ZERO credit for this. They were released before the Inauguration parade started. What he did was convince the mullahs not to release the hostages before the 1980 election, promising they would get a better deal from him than they would Carter. As it was, they were right as Reagan gave them weaponry that Carter wouldn’t have.
Don’t forget, though, that Reagan courted the Christian Right HARD. They weren’t an important voting block before 1980. And quite a lot of them voted for Carter, an actual Christian in 1976, but by 1980, Reagan, the divorced guy who never went to church somehow had people convinced that he, and the Republican party, were the ones with Christian interests, and the opposition was essentially godless.
The Christian Right has remained an important voting block ever since.
She wasn’t particularly bad - just a standard-issue Democrat. Her being a woman didn’t hurt her all that much, but it didn’t help either - anyone who was going to vote for her just because she was a woman was going to vote Democratic anyway.
Well, no. Reagan did not meet with the Iranians, made them no promises, and did not attempt to affect the release date at all.
All correct. Additionally, PATCO went on strike and dared Reagan to fire them all. Which he did. And contrast the incompetent bumbling of the attempted Iran hostage rescue debacle with the invasion of Grenada.
The Democrats had essentially no chance at the White House in 1984. Reagan asked “are you better off now than you were four years ago?”, the Democrats responded “who are you going to believe - me, or your own lying eyes?” with the observed results.
Regards,
Shodan
Politics aside, Reagan was simply masterful at telling people that he had all of this shit under control. After you watched a Reagan speech about the Soviets, nuclear war, taxes, inflation, etc., you could sleep like a baby knowing that everything possible that would be bad or harmful to you was being handled by competent and capable professionals.
I’ve told others this, but in the 1980s, I was just a kid. I had three layers of “buffer” between me and bad things. I had two wonderful parents in their 30s to look after me. If they needed advice, they looked to their parents, then in their 60s. Reagan was even older and had everything under control. Life made sense. I could filter my decisions through three layers of people who were older and wiser than me.
Today, of all of those people, only my mother is still living and she has remarried and moved away. I haven’t had that kind of faith in a President since. Bush was a Reagan-lite. Clinton was a lying adulterer, but I still had faith that he had shit under control. Bush II destroyed my confidence with his faulty prediction of Iraqi WMDs, and I have little respect for Obama or Trump.
So, I went from three layers of buffer to zero. But anyhoo, I wasn’t the only one who had that much admiration for Reagan.
This is partially true in that Reagan did not meet with the Iranians. Everything else is murky. A number of investigations, both formal and reportorial, have looked into what might have happened. No smoking guns, but much smoke.
Gary Sick’s book, October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan, was probably the main source for later accusations. It was treated seriouslywhen it appeared, although later reports have worked to discredit it. Even before the book, various people insisted that the agreements by his staff were part of a long set of secret agreements. Barbara Honneger’s book, also called October Surprise, makes the cases even more forcefully and uses direct interviewed with Bani Sadr as her evidence. House and Senate investigations dismissed the charges.
The problem with the charges is that if Reagan’s camp did do anything, they succeeded in getting the Iranians to do exactly what they wanted to do in any case.
Do I personally think Reagan knew ahead of time that the hostages would be released at the time most favorable to him? Yes, I do. I also thought for years that Nixon treasonously interfered in Vietnam to ensure his election in 1968 and that’s been proved true recently. There is no St. Ronnie. He’s another brick in the wall.
To build on what others have said, particularly about the situation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, compared to 1984:
I was 15 when Reagan was first elected in 1980. That year was the tail end of a span of 7 or so years in which the U.S. struggled through a lot of different (though often related) issues, many of which, from what I recall, made people feel like the country was on the decline.
We had Watergate, the first oil crisis, two recessions (plus a lot of inflation, as well), and the Iran hostage crisis. New York City nearly went bankrupt, and Chicago couldn’t get the snow off of its streets. We had two presidents who were seen as good people, but ineffectual leaders, and the overall feeling, I think, was that there wasn’t any leadership in the country.
More personally: my father and my uncle built a hardware store in Green Bay, WI in 1979. Between the time that they broke ground on the store that spring, and when we opened it in the fall, the interest rate on their bank loan for the store doubled. At about the same time that we opened the store, a recession hit, and a lot of the people who lived in the area around the store (who worked in manufacturing jobs in the city’s papermills) were laid off. Business in our store ground to a crawl, and my family lost our savings, trying to keep the store afloat, before finally closing it in early 1983.
Granted, our family’s economic hardship extended into the Reagan presidency, but the seeds of it were sown by what happened before Reagan took office. My parents are lifelong Democrats, but even they were unhappy with what was happening with Carter as president.
By the time of the 1984 election, the mood of the country, overall, seemed higher. There was more optimism, and more of a feeling that the economy was on the right track.
My mother claims she’s an independent who always just votes for the best candidate regardless of party. She is, though, a staunch Democrat: she voted for Humphrey, for McGovern, for Carter (twice), for Dukakis, for Clinton (twice), for Gore, for Kerry, for Obama (twice), and for the other Clinton this past year. I don’t know who the Dems will put up in 2020, but I’d bet good money she’ll vote that way then.
But if, upon hearing this, you call her out as a Democrat – well, she’ll draw herself up to her full height and announce that she voted for Reagan in '84.
It wasn’t even a question, she’s been known to explain.
How much did the UK’s retaking of the Falklands (1982) and the US invasion of Grenada (1983) help?
It doesn’t really matter if he deserves credit, though - we’re talking about the perception of people in 1984, not objective reality, or how it looks in hindsight. I remember that even my parents, solid Democrats, didn’t think he had colluded with the Iranians (they mostly thought he was an idiot). The ‘Reagan convinced the mullahs to hold them until the election’ meme wasn’t widely believed AFAIK, it was a fringe thing that only people who weren’t going to vote for Reagan anyway held on to, even mainstream Democrats thought it was loopy. I think it’s safe to say that he GOT credit for releasing them.
Do you have any source for his people making a deal with the Iranians? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true, but I haven’t seen anyone make a solid case for it.
Unless I missed it, no one has corrected Reddy yet. Mondale won 2 “states”. His home state of Minnesota and DC.
I was a young teen then but here are some things to consider:
Re-election campaigns are more a vote for/against the incumbent and not their opponent. In four years, Reagan made Americans proud again. After the failures of Nixon, Ford and Carter why would you vote against that? Plus he was charismatic. You believed he would protect you from the godless Commies.
Mondale was associated with Carter’s failures as President. He was the archetype of a milquetoast. His selection of Ferraro solidified his image as Nor’eastern liberal (although he was midwestern) and was seen as pandering to women (it was). My mom had that t-shirt “A Woman’s Place is in the House … and in the Senate” and she was offended by the selection of Ferarro.
People still voted for the person and not the party.
D.C. is not a state. 
I recall purchasing a Time Certificate of Deposit in about 1981 which, if I recall correctly, paid something obscene like 15% interest. It was for 30 months. I was very sad when it ran out; there were no 15% interest options in 1984. 
1992 was possibly the last unpolarized election in U.S. presidential history. In 1984 and 1988 it was even less polarized, and Reagan was able to capture the votes of millions of “Reagan Democrats.”
By 1996 the political battle lines were so deeply drawn that even a guy as unelectable as Dole managed to keep it “close” (relative to 1984) to the incumbent Clinton despite the great economy. Had Clinton vs. Dole taken place in 1984, it might have been a 50-state sweep.
And of course, as of last year, Trump could count on getting 90% of the Republican vote and Hillary could count on getting 90% of the Democratic vote. Had the election taken place three decades earlier, Trump might be getting less than half of the Republican vote.
Which is why I put it in quotes - it has EVs as if it were a state. But the fact remains Mondale won two of the 51 sovereign elections for electors.
Nothing proven. Caution: the source below is the NYT. If you’re not a subscriber, keep in mind that you use up one of your monthly free views if you click: