November 6, 1984: President Ronald Reagan is overwhelmingly re-elected, defeating Walter Mondale, who had been Jimmy Carter's Vice President. Reagan nearly becomes the 1st candidate to pull off the 50-State sweep, coming closer than Richard Nixon did in 1972, as Mondale wins his home State of Minnesota by just 2,996 votes.
Reagan thus breaks Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1936 record of 523 Electoral Votes, with 525, although it's not quite a higher percentage: FDR got 523 of 531 for 98.5 percent of the EVs, while Reagan got 525 of 538 for 97.6.
Mondale also won the mostly-black District of Columbia, for 3 EVs, but until about midnight Eastern Time, Minnesota still couldn't be called for him. Or, as comedian Jay Leno put it, "When I went to bed, I only had 3 more Electoral Votes than Mondale, and I wasn't even running!"
Mondale also got at least 48 percent of the vote in Massachusetts and Rhode Island; 47 percent in Maryland; and 45 percent in Pennsylvania, Iowa, New York and Wisconsin. Had he won those, instead of losing 525 Electoral Votes to 13, he would have lost 398 to 140, and it wouldn't have looked so bad. But the popular vote was still bad: Reagan won 58.7 percent, Mondale 40.6.
Unemployment was 7.5 percent, higher than the 7.1 percent that it was 4 years earlier when Reagan knocked Carter out of the White House. And there was the Beirut barracks debacle just a year before this election, killing 241 U.S. Marines -- to put it into recent context, 60 "Benghazis" all at once.
And, less than 4 months earlier, Reagan had joked about starting World War III: "We begin bombing in 5 minutes." As a 14-year-old boy, let me tell you: That was terrifying. And, especially in the 2nd debate, Reagan looked like he was already affected by Alzheimer's disease.
So how did Reagan win? By lying: By saying that it was "Morning Again In America," by saying that America was stronger than ever thanks to his defense building, by saying that the Communists were in retreat (they weren't), and that he wasn't going to raise taxes but Mondale was. (As Mondale pointed out, Reagan had already raised taxes 3 times.)
Or, to put it another way...
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Walter Mondale for Losing 49 States in the 1984 Presidential Election
5. Geraldine Ferraro. It is easy to understand Mondale's desire to choose the 1st female Vice Presidential nominee: He thought he could take the women's vote away from Reagan. That was probably a bad guess, no matter who he would have chosen. Dianne Feinstein, then the Mayor of San Francisco, and later a Senator from California, was rumored to be another finalist for the nomination.
But Ferraro, then a Congresswoman from Queens, was the wrong woman for the job. The traditional running-mate role, that of the "attack dog" who says things the Presidential nominee shouldn't, worked against her, especially with her N'Yawk accent. The fact that her husband, Brooklyn real-estate developer John Zaccaro, was ethically compromised (even if she, herself, was not) didn't help.
4. The Olympics. Granted, the hockey Gold Medal, including the upset of the vastly more talented Soviet team, at the 1980 Winter Olympics didn't help Carter (or Mondale, who was actually at the game with the Soviets and the Gold Medal game with Finland, as several players were from Minnesota). But the boycott of the Summer Olympics, in Moscow, sure hurt Carter – even though it did more to expose the Soviets as "an evil empire" than anything Reagan ever did.
When the Soviets and the East Germans boycotted the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, it left the American team almost free rein to win as many medals as it wanted. It became 16 days of unbridled, safe patriotism, a call of, "You're all welcome to visit our country, but our country is the greatest!"
It was right up Reagan's alley, and it was right in his Southern California backyard. As the host nation's head of state, he even got to officially declare the Games open. He was great at ceremonial stuff like that, and he reveled in it.
3. The Curse of Jimmy Carter. Reagan was able to run against "The Carter-Mondale Administration," even though Carter was better at nearly everything than Reagan – including, as it turned out, creating jobs, avoiding tax increases and getting hostages out of Iran. Nearly everything... except explaining why he was good at those things. Carter was a good statesman, but he was a lousy politician. Reagan was a great politician, and knew how to look like a good statesman, even when he wasn't.
In 1988, George H.W. Bush would also unfavorably compare Michael Dukakis to Carter. It worked. He tried it again in 1992. This time, it didn't work, because now, the Presidency most recently resulting in a bad economy was his own.
2. The Cold War. In spite of the sunny image he projected for both himself and America, Reagan was able to make Americans so frightened of the Soviet Union that they'd rather have a senile, lying Republican as President than an honest Democrat of sound mind.
1. "Morning In America." Quotation marks intentional. It was something that Americans, besieged by a quarter of a century of Cold War, civil rights struggles, race riots, assassinations, war, recession and terrorism desperately wanted to believe. And Reagan and his packagers were able to make them believe it. This was all part of the Actor's show. He never played any part as well as he played "President Reagan."
In short: Ronald Reagan wasn't a great President, but he played one on TV. The truth is, he was a disaster, one after which we are still cleaning up – and, with Donald Trump as his (un)natural successor, there is a new mess. People wanted to believe Trump could "make America great again." The Reagan years are almost certainly what he meant, because it was a time when he and his way of life were riding high, and unquestioned by liberals.
VERDICT: Not Guilty. There was nothing Mondale could have done. The only way he could have won would have been if Reagan's Alzheimer's disease had made him look obviously impaired during their debates. People who heard his closing statement in the 2nd debate wondered, but it wasn't obvious enough to swing the election.
Reagan died in 2004, Ferraro in 2011, Bush in 2018. Mondale is still alive, age 92. (UPDATE: Mondale died on April 19, 2021, at age 93.)
No comments:
Post a Comment