CLOSE YOUR EYES on some days, and you can almost believe it: You’re back somewhere in the mid-1980s, 1984 to be precise. At least from the Democrats’ side of the aisle. There it all is: The Republican president denounced as a dunce and a dangerous cowboy; the left on a tear against corporations and tax cuts; and the vast, murky war against a dangerous enemy, which Republicans think of as a crusade against evil and Democrats think is a sham. Magically, the three intervening elections–1992, 1996, and 2000–appear to have vanished, as have their protagonists: Bill Clinton is gone, as is the George W. Bush of 2000, gone in the moment he learned, on live cameras, that tower number two had been hit. We are back now in Reagan country, with deep divisions, big issues, deep feelings, big wars. And quite a few things are familiar. This is the way they equate.
l. THE PRESIDENT. Now, as in those days, there is a Republican president, a man of the West, detested in Europe and deeply despised by the base of the Democrats, who are driven to distraction by his mere presence. He is looked down on by them as a dupe or dullard, and portrayed, as Richard Wirthlin, Reagan’s favorite pollster, once put it, as “dumb, dangerous, and a distorter of facts.” Reagan was described also, by professional crony Clark Clifford, as an “amiable dunce.” Bush should be so fortunate as to have the word amiable invoked in this way by his foes. Instead, he is widely regarded by liberals as swaggering, arrogant, clueless, vindictive, and mean. Opinion differs as to whether he is an evil political mastermind, surrounded by similar knaves and connivers, or merely an empty suit dressed up and guided by others (in which case the “evil genius” description is used to describe his counselor Karl Rove).
Despite all of this, or perhaps owing to it, Bush is nonetheless liked by the rest of the country, which gives him high marks for his leaderly qualities. Leadership and national security are his best issues. His weakest one seems to be the environment. Although his beloved ranch is run on the greenest of principles, the greens turn him down three to one. Repeatedly, they claim he has poisoned the air, poisoned the water, and is feeding small children a diet of arsenic. For these reasons, and others, they long to destroy him, and are united with the rest of the left in this great cause. “Ronald Reagan has provided all the unity we need,” Gary Hart said at the 1984 Democratic convention. “Not one of us is going to sit this campaign out. You have made the stakes too high.” But not high enough to impress most Americans, who remained less than outraged by the president.
Deep tranches of rage did not produce general anger with Reagan. Thus far, they have failed to do so with Bush.
2. POPULIST OUTRAGE. And you thought “two Americas” was a new theme dreamed up by John Edwards? Not quite. “We’re becoming two Americas–one for the thin veneer of the wealthiest, who are doing better and better, and the other for the rest of America, who are doing less and less well.” This was Walter Mondale, in early January 1984. He wasn’t the only one who held these opinions. “The greatest collection of special interests in all American history had now assembled inside the cold citadel of privilege known as the Republican party,” Ted Kennedy thundered at the party’s convention. And there was the keynote address of Mario Cuomo, disputing the Reagan description of this country as a “shining city on a hill.” “There’s another city, another part of the city, the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one, where students can’t afford the education they need and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate. . . . In this part of the city, there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble . . . there is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see.”
Cuomo delivered this speech to the convention when he had been governor of New York for something under two years. By the time he was voted out of office a decade later, his policies had reduced much of New York to a state of depression, with high tax rates driving out businesses, and the poor folk he spoke of more wretched than ever. But in 1982, as in 2002, the country had been rocked by recession, leading the Democrats to hope they could run on the economy, a hope that dwindled in the following year as the markets recovered, leaving the Democrats to focus on ever-shrinking pockets of failure, telling people they were not as well-off as they felt. Al Gore tried a similar tack in the 2000 election (before there had even been a recession), trying to run as the de facto incumbent telling people that “powerful forces” were working against them, while they never had it so good. This is one problem with a populist spin in a relatively open society, in which most people manage to live pretty well. Another problem is that of the three populists of 2004, two (Howard Dean and John Kerry) come from money and privilege, and the third, John Edwards, made himself a millionaire many times over. Kerry’s second wife has a personal fortune of more than $500 million. “Powerful forces” do not seem to work much against them.
3. FOREIGN AFFAIRS. Foreign policy is a third point of contact in which a déjà vu sense emerges. The Republican president says we are facing an evil and sinister conspiracy that poses a threat to the world and the nation. The Democrats say that the scope of the threat is uncertain, the assertion of “evil” unwise and insulting. The president claims his assertive behavior has gone a long way to make the world safer. The Democrats claim he has made it more dangerous. In 1982, there were mass demonstrations in Europe against Reagan’s deployment of Pershing missiles on the continent. In 2002 and 2003 there were mass demonstrations in Europe against Bush’s war in Iraq. In both instances, Democrats tended to sympathize with the protests and blamed the president for driving our “allies” away.
Democrats also have revived the idea that the president is an arrogant, ignorant ideologue, out of his league in the world of diplomacy. “When the globe is a tinderbox, we need a president who knows what he’s doing. We need a president who sees the world as it is, in all of its subtleties, its complexities, its dangers and its potential; who has been tested by experience, who has read and remembered history . . . who sees force as a last and not as a first resort.” No, this is not John Kerry (or Wesley Clark) in this campaign season. It is Walter Mondale, back in 1984. “He goes on to make the case for a more sophisticated way of dealing with the Soviet Union,” said Elizabeth Drew, then with the New Yorker. “He calls for a ‘strong defense,’ but says ‘I refuse to support Mr. Reagan’s incoherent program, or sign Mr. (Caspar) Weinberger’s blank check.'” John Kerry and John Edwards likewise refused to hand a “blank check” to George W. Bush. In 1984, the most critical ad of the year was the “Bear in the Woods,” run by the Reagan team, about the threat of the Soviet Union: “There is a bear in the woods. For some people the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious. And dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who is right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear.” In 1984, Americans chose to retain their armed sentry. In late 2003, after Bush had invaded Iraq, in part because it refused to divulge what had become of its chemical weapons, Libya announced it now planned to disarm peaceably. Three years after Reagan left office, with nary a shot being fired, the Soviet Union dissolved.
HAVING HAD NO SUCCESS 20 years ago against Reagan, the Democrats haven’t learned much. They called him a dunce, and he has steadily risen in the eyes of historians; they called him a warmonger, and he ended the Cold War; they called him a plutocrat who would cause a depression, and he set off a 20-year boom. But in response they have dug the hole deeper: They have not only retreated past President Clinton; they have gone back before Gary Hart. At least in 1984, there was one voice and one wing of the party making a strong case that it ought to try new approaches, and shake off its tired ideas. But these tired ideas–that markets are bad, and that strength causes problems–are being embraced now more fervently than ever; the freshest new face among the contenders this year is spouting the weariest rants. And with less reason than ever: No one knew then that the Cold War would end as it did, or that tax cuts would really ignite economic growth. Or that the class struggle, as the populists phrase it, would evolve quite the way that it has.
In his 1991 book “Our Country,” Michael Barone explains the failure of the populist campaigns against Reagan and George Bush the elder by the fact that the anticorporate claims of the days of the Roosevelts had much less salience in the labor market of the late 20th century, with its large numbers of mobile and flexible workers, growth in small businesses, and wage earners who also own stock. And this was before the stock market exploded in the mid-1990s, drawing more and more Middle Americans into its arms. In 2002, fifty-two percent of Americans held stock equity holdings; and 29 percent of these owned $1,000 or more. Talk about pitting “workers” against “corporations” does not account for the workers who co-own corporations, and therefore make money when corporate profits rise. It is perfectly true that George W. Bush tries to help corporations, but not so that his rich friends can buy more playthings. He wants businesses to churn out more jobs and more money, and thereby to make millions more people rich. Left-wing publications and politicians love to portray the president as a plutocrats’ stooge from the days of McKinley, helping the bosses plant their boots on the necks of the people. Actually, he is something quite different: a corporate-populist, trying to help more and more workers invest in corporations, and benefit thus from their wealth.
Can Bush, then, recreate the Reagan triumph of 1984? More than in any campaign that one can remember, his fate may not be in his own hands. No president who starts his days reading a terrorist threat assessment can project a true aura of Reaganesque sunniness. There can be no campaigns run on the theme of American mornings while there are orange alerts, bombers in Baghdad, and the prospect of bombs, germs, or gas in American cities. Bush dare not dwell on his biggest success–the fact that there have been no new attacks on American soil–for fear that a big one may hit us tomorrow. Nor can he look for a stable political climate. An unforeseen turn in the war on terror could alter the race overnight.
Nonetheless, his foes now appear eager to help him, returning over and over to oldies but baddies that failed to gain a mass audience the first 18 times they were played. A veteran from a war of the late 1960s, backed by a singer (Carole King) from the late 1970s, nominee-in-waiting John Kerry can’t get the 1980s out of his mind. He has recently taken to ending his speeches by saying that, along with opposing “Nixon’s war” in Vietnam, he also fought against Reagan’s “illegal” wars in Central America, and Iran-contra, and Oliver North.
Oliver North! There’s a rallying cry to get the troops moving! And so they beat on, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might put it, “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
