1988 Presidential Election

3 Key excerpts on "1988 Presidential Election"

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  eBook - ePub

  A Companion to Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter

  • Scott Kaufman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Détente and Confrontation (1994). In any case, Soviet aggressiveness had escalated over the previous twenty years, an evolution that was traced by Bruce D. Porter (1984) and that was widely seen as ominous by the public. By 1980, large majorities said they supported a US defense build-up and a tougher stance vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

  Outside of the Iranian trauma and East–West conflict, other key changes were taking place in the international context, often barely noticed by analysts focused on the Cold War. In The Shock of the Global, edited by Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent (2010), twenty-one chapters attend to the rise of globalization in economic and other realms including human rights, cross-national political Islam, popular culture, and public health.

  The Campaign and Election

  As is often the case, the first lengthy interpretations of the election of 1980 came in the form of journalistic accounts by political reporters. The first of these was The Pursuit of the Presidency 1980 (1980) edited by Richard Harwood and consisting of a collection of essays by Washington Post reporters. Coming out only weeks after Election Day, The Pursuit of the Presidency traced the campaign month-by-month and declared the election “the most astonishing landslide in American history” (Harwood, 1980: cover). Over the next two years, Elizabeth Drew (1981), Jack Germond and Jules Witcover (1981), and Theodore White (1982) joined the conversation. In America in Search of Itself, White provides a journalistic account but also puts 1980 into the context of presidential elections since his first The Making of the President books made him famous in 1960.

  Of course, participants in the election have offered a variety of explanations and interpretations. It is customary for the losing side to complain about the injustice—and the winning side to trumpet the justice—of the electoral verdict, and memoirs of the 1980 election are no exception. The most important participants were the presidential candidates themselves, who, unsurprisingly, have fundamentally different understandings of what happened in 1980. In his memoir Keeping Faith

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  Leading Men

  Presidential Campaigns and the Politics of Manhood

  • Jackson Katz(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Interlink Books

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 3

  1980: Reagan vs. Carter

  The 1980 election was a watershed election in American politics for many reasons, not least of which is that Ronald Reagan’s superlative performance of presidential masculinity continues to loom large in contemporary presidential politics. But 1980 was not the first electoral contest between competing versions of masculinity, nor was it the first election in which media figured prominently. Among political historians there is widespread agreement that the 1960 race between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy was the first presidential campaign in which television played a decisive role, mostly because in a televised debate the camera loved Kennedy and showed Nixon’s sweaty brow and less-than-endearing five o’clock shadow. Constructed and mediated images of presidential masculinity had long been important in presidential races, even before the mass media technologies of the twentieth century. But since the invention of television, and particularly since 1960, the way a candidate for president performs his manhood in the media spectacle of presidential campaigns has not merely been an important part of his “electability”; it has arguably been the most important part. Especially since the 1980 Electoral College landslide victory of Reagan—a former Hollywood actor—effective televisual performance, including the ability to project “manly” strength, has become the sine qua non of success at the presidential level.

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  The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan

  • Robert Mason(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  David and David H. Everson, eds., The Presidential Election and Transition, 1980–1981 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 220. 14 Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Richard Nixon, Nov. 13, 1970, box 8, White House Special Files – Staff Member and Office Files: POF; Everett Carll Ladd, “The Reagan Phenomenon and Public Attitudes Toward Government,” in Lester M. Salamon and Michael S. Lund, eds., The Reagan Presidency and the Governing of America (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1984), 221–249. 15 Gillon, Democrats’ Dilemma, 304. 16 Roger H. Davidson and Walter J. Oleszek, “Changing the Guard in the U.S. Senate,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 9 (1984), 638; Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, “Sending a Message: Voters and Congress in 1982,” in Mann and Ornstein, eds., The American Elections of 1982 (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1983), 136–137. “You Are Witnessing the Great Realignment”: 1977–1989 251 that the party’s new support was durable. Volatility characterized public opin- ion during the 1980 campaign, and perhaps more than one in three voters set- tled on a choice of presidential candidate only in the week before election day. Moreover, apart from the growing opposition to welfare, support for spending on other government programs did not change significantly – despite increasing antistatism. The economic problems of the 1970s did not spell the end of the divided opinion that Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril had analyzed in the 1960s as ideological conservatism but operational liberalism. Instead, those problems sharpened the former sentiment while continuing to demon- strate the latter’s social benefits. 17 Although many in the party saw the 1980 results as full of promise – perhaps the start of a new Republican era – the rightward shift was not unqualified. As Ranney emphasized, how govern- ing Republicans responded to victory was critical to the party’s longer-term prospects.

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