This is a day of mourning for Americans who believe that our politics are broken, who yearn to reach across the aisle, stop the partisan bickering, and eradicate the influence of money, Big Business, the military, corporate media, parochial interests, anti-tax activists, the NRA, the AMA, the CIA, religious right, Southern congressmen (and women), fossil fuels, flyover America, pro-lifers, and free-speech absolutists.
Former Rep. John Anderson (R-Ill.), the liberal Republican who sought the 1980 GOP nomination for president and, failing that, ran as an independent candidate in the general election, has died at the immoderate age of 95.
Since, on Election Day that year, Anderson ended his campaign garnering 6 strategic percentage points of the popular vote, it is unlikely that former President Jimmy Carter, who was defeated for re-election, is especially upset by the news. But Anderson’s candidacy did have its enduring influence. The successful legal campaign to get his Unity Party ticket on state ballots had the long-term effect of enabling H. Ross Perot’s insurgent candidacy a dozen years later. And the name of his choice for a bipartisan running mate (former Democratic Gov. Patrick Lucey of Wisconsin) furnished an evergreen trivia question.
Still, nearly 40 years after the fact, it is worth recalling conditions in the country that prompted voters in Ann Arbor and Cambridge, in Palo Alto and Chevy Chase, to set aside their checkbooks during PBS pledge week, and take notice of an obscure Midwest Republican member of Congress.
Jimmy Carter was coming into the final lap of his single term as president, and the dual curse of chronic inflation and stagnation—”stagflation”—haunted the economy. In the summer of 1979, Americans found themselves in the midst of a second energy crisis, abetted by the now-forgotten Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and requiring them to sit in line for rationed gasoline and worry about the availability of winter heating fuel. The spring of the year had featured the dramatic nuclear-power accident at Three Mile Island and, in the fall, American diplomats were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
Then, as now, there was a sense that events were beyond the control of statesmen, and that the two political parties offered an unpalatable choice. Carter seemed hypnotized by the gathering storms around him, and was sufficiently weakened politically that Sen. Edward Kennedy, a dozen years after Chappaquiddick, felt emboldened to challenge him in the Democratic primaries. The Republican favorite—harried from the right by Jack Kemp and from the left by George H.W. Bush—was the right-wing onetime movie actor, and ex-California governor, Ronald Reagan.
It’s not difficult to see Anderson’s appeal to 1970s independents. By 1980, he was a liberal by any reasonable measure—in favor of licensing guns, opposed to increases in military spending, pro-abortion—but a self-described fiscal conservative. He had also tapped into what we now regard as the populist, but essentially nonpartisan, disdain for business-as-usual in Washington. The fact that Anderson, at 48, was prematurely gray and favored black suits, solemn expressions, and horn-rimmed glasses, gave him the look of a Puritan divine or Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s uncle.
When it was clear that he, along with Bush, Kemp, and the other aspirants, had lost the GOP primary race to Reagan, he bolted from the party and declared his independent candidacy. In truth, of course, he was halfway out the door. Three years earlier he had complained about the Republican party of 1977 in words that could easily appear in tomorrow’s edition of the New York Times: “Extremist fringe elements,” he declared, “seek to expel the rest of us. . . . If the purists stage their ideological coup d’etat, our party will be consigned to the historical junk heap.”
In the end, Anderson was a victim of his own ambition. At the first debate, in September 1980, Carter, who considered Anderson’s candidacy a frivolous gesture, refused to share a stage with him— and the optics of an empty chair where Carter should have been did the incumbent inestimable damage. This left the spotlight not on Anderson, whose pious rectitude and condescension gained a national audience, but on Reagan, whose cheerful demeanor and mastery of issues impressed wavering voters. Anderson swiftly receded, and Carter never caught up.
In presidential politics, the appeal of an Anderson type has never diminished—one might argue that Donald Trump’s success last year was a transfigured version—but in 1980, John Anderson was not the right Anderson type.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.
