As Ronald Reagan was thanking me I was both depressed and
embarrassed.
It was November, 1986. After a solid two years of effort, the
Congressional elections in the sixth year of the Reagan presidency
had gone badly.
The 1980 Reagan landslide over Jimmy Carter had produced twelve
new Republican Senate seats, giving the GOP a Senate majority for
the first time since 1954. It made the Senate a critical ally for
Reagan as he set about rebuilding the nation’s military, getting
forward-looking young conservatives onto the federal bench and
passing the landmark tax cuts needed to revitalize an almost
crippled economy. The House was more problematical. A bastion of
liberal Democrats with a mindset still stuck somewhere between1935
and 1965 on economics. Its more outspoken members loved reliving
their glory days opposing the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon.
The political goal for the Reagan White House had been to hold
that Senate majority and make some incremental gains in the House,
the latter last accomplished by FDR in 1934. As Reagan biographer
Lou Cannon later wrote, President Reagan had agreed to an
“extraordinary midterm campaign effort,” for his sixth year.
Certainly the President knew, as did all of us who worked for him,
that year number six of a two-term presidency was historically a
killer for Presidents when it came to congressional elections. The
mighty Franklin Roosevelt had gotten clobbered in 1938, the beloved
Dwight Eisenhower saw his party buried in 1958. Still, Reagan chose
to fight. Rereading Cannon’s account of that time period brings
those memories flooding back.
The President traveled 24,000 miles for 54 appearances in 22
states. He raised some $33 million for Republican candidates. Over
and over again, from one airport hangar to the next town square, he
restated conservative principles. In the middle of it all we had to
call a halt while he suddenly re-routed Air Force One to Reykjavik,
Iceland, for a surprise summit with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail
Gorbachev. Returning in a hail of negative press for walking away
from a deal to give up the Strategic Defense Initiative (it was
only years later that his refusal to abandon the principle of
military strength won him credit for toppling the Soviet Union), he
picked up the fight. Extra campaign stops were laid on, many of us
suddenly catching planes to California or North Carolina or Nevada
to speak or lend a hand to the over-stretched advance operation
abruptly charged with the details of yet another presidential stop
at some destination we ourselves had recommended. Only once did the
ever-protective Mrs. Reagan protest that I can remember, putting
her foot down at the notion her husband was being sent to a Western
state with a same-day return to Washington. Firmly noting the
president’s age (75) and the fact that he was already putting in a
schedule that would exhaust a man half his years, she saw to it
that there would be an overnight breather at his Santa Barbara
ranch, much closer indeed.
And what did all of this win for the Reagan presidency? A loss
of 9 of those 12 seats gained in 1980 and the end of the GOP Senate
Majority. House races, which I was shepherding, produced a loss of
five seats. While not bad for a six-year election, it was not the
victory everyone wanted.
SO OUR TRIP TO THE OVAL OFFICE that November day found my
colleagues and myself both depressed and embarrassed. The President
had trusted us completely, followed every last piece of advice —
and we thought we had our clock cleaned. In the New York
Times liberal columnist Anthony Lewis had triumphantly written
a column entitled “The End Begins: Radical Right Movement Has
Crested.” (Notice how Lewis substituted “radical right” for
“conservative.” Can you say “BOO!!”?)
But there was something curious going on that day in the Oval
Office. If the staff was depressed at the results, Ronald Reagan
was not. The best way to describe his attitude was serene. I
wondered the obvious; why?
The answer could be found in another nickname than the one he
was most famous for having — “The Gipper.” In the 1980 campaign,
amidst the flurry of charges that Reagan was too old to be
president, he had been given another lesser known moniker by his
friend Jack Kemp: The O&W. The Oldest and Wisest.
As the Reagan presidency played out the nickname not only proved
accurate, it helped those of us who were in the White House realize
that this was a President with a deep reservoir of experience not
just in politics but in life itself. Yes, he was the oldest
President and certainly the oldest amongst his young staff. He was
also, as Kemp had realized, one very wise man.
The 1986 election was, in Reagan’s eyes, nothing more than a
solitary lost election. Would it cause his presidency problems for
the last two years of his term? Sure. But had the conservative
movement that he had led into the White House “crested”? One can
almost see that famous twinkle in his eyes at the mere thought of
Anthony Lewis’s assessment.
In his lifetime Ronald Reagan had participated in a lot of lost
elections, including the 1964 Goldwater landslide loss to LBJ and,
perhaps most notably, his own defeat for the Republican
presidential nomination to Gerald Ford in 1976. It was, in fact,
his loss to Ford that summoned from Reagan an eloquent description
of his thoughts on the subject. Quoting a Dryden ballad he had
memorized as a child, he told his emotional supporters: “Lay me
down and bleed a while. Though I am wounded, I am not slain. I
shall rise and fight again.”
And, of course, that’s just what he did. By 1986 the idea of an
election loss was something he now understood in his bones to be
only a brief detour on the long road to a conservative victory in
America. Reagan understood that it was not the end of the world if
you lost, but it was decidedly not OK not to fight. So in spite of
all the jeering from the press, he fought. A serious look at the
results of that 1986 fight caused Lou Cannon to later note that,
“Reagan may actually have had a greater impact in the 1986
elections..” Why? Because deep in the internals of the
post-election polls it became clear that after Reagan had gone back
on the campaign trail post-Reykjavik, again and again restating his
conservative principles, his candidates went up — not down. The
Nevada candidate who was down in the polls by 13 points lost his
Senate race by 6. The California Senate candidate lost by a
razor-thin 2 points, closer than any of his poll numbers.
“Nationally,” Cannon reminds of the 1986 election, “Republican
candidates for the Senate fared better in percentage terms (49
percent) in 1986 than when the same seats were up in 1980 (47
percent).”
The Oldest and Wisest knew that the Reagan era was in fact only
a chapter — albeit a fairly dramatic chapter — in what was an
endless story about, as he also said, “millions and millions of
Americans who want what (conservatives) want…that want it
(America) to be that city on a shining hill.” Not from Ronald
Reagan would there ever be an apology for his beliefs, nor any
second guessing of what he always knew was nothing more than a
momentary setback. He had relentlessly campaigned on his
principles, and regretted not a moment of it. As I watched that day
in the Oval Office, when we were done, he simply smiled, sat back
down behind his desk and moved on to changing America — and not so
coincidentally, the world.
LET’S LEAVE 1986 AND TAKE A LOOK at the following randomly selected
events from recent headlines.
* Leftist students shut down a presentation by representatives
of the Minutemen border patrol group at Columbia University.
* New CBS anchor Katie Couric’s ratings plummet after barely a
month on the air.
* North Korea tests a nuclear weapon after promising the Clinton
administration that they would never do so. Clinton Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright acknowledges that the North Koreans
cheated on their promise.
Each of these issues touches on core principles of the
conservative revolution which Reagan led and why he had so much
long-term confidence in the response of the American people to
those conservative principles.
The Columbia students, of course, illustrated quite visually a
philosophy of liberal intolerance for dissent and free speech that
repeatedly drives thoughtful Americans into the arms of the
conservative movement.
CBS and Ms. Couric’s failure illustrates a point that was easily
predictable before Katie even sat down in the anchor chair. Putting
Rush Limbaugh on CBS air in a “free speech” segment certainly
pumped Couric’s ratings for a moment. But conservatives — Reagan
were he here and surely Limbaugh himself — realized exactly what
the problem was that lie ahead. CBS tried to demonstrate that they
were free of liberal bias by giving ol’ Rush a few seconds of
airtime. What they had no intention of doing was eliminating the
liberal bias of the show’s writers, producers and reporters, much
less of Ms. Couric herself. Result? The new boss is the same as the
old boss. The philosophical presentation of the new CBS News hasn’t
changed a whit from the days when Dan or Walter or Bill Moyers
looked somberly into the lens to insist they were telling the news
“the way it was.” Still, there had to be a terrifying “ping” when
CBS execs realized that Rush Limbaugh brought higher ratings to CBS
News than Dan Rather ever could. Could — would — that ever
happen? Would they have the guts to make “America’s anchorman” the
CBS anchorman? The people in charge of CBS News would sooner crunch
down on a cyanide tablet before naming Rush Limbaugh or any other
conservative the anchor and managing editor of their show. Even if
it meant winning the ratings for the next century. Fair and
balanced is not now or ever in the cards at CBS, and Ms. Couric’s
ratings have tumbled accordingly. Besides, why would Rush Limbaugh
want a demotion?
Last but not least is North Korea. It’s all been said, including
by me in this space. Appeasement has become the staple of the
modern day Democratic Party. It has been so since 1968. It didn’t
work then, it didn’t work in 1994. It didn’t work for Chamberlain,
it didn’t work for Carter or Clinton and it won’t work now. A
majority of Americans understand that. Again as Reagan knew, they
also understand that conservatives understand.
No matter where you look, from think tanks to talk radio shows,
from television to publishing, from religion to law to the
Internet, the conservative future is not just simply here, it is
the future itself. (The conservative present usually rides pretty
high on the New York Times bestseller list, too!)
No deviant Congressman, no bad polls or a lost election will
stop this.
Ronald Reagan understood that. Eventually so did I, never again
depressed and embarrassed over the 1986 election.
Conservatives can take a lesson from The Oldest and Wisest.
Smile, stick to first principles — and go back to work. Another
victory is always — always — just around the corner.
