Reagan's political force realigned political landscape
By Susan Page, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — President Reagan was such a powerful political force that he created a new category of voter: Reagan Democrats.
With his buoyant personality and ideological confidence, Reagan realigned the political landscape not only for Republicans but also for Democrats. He won two landslide elections for president, swept a Republican majority into the Senate in 1980 and dismantled the Democratic coalition that had prevailed since it was forged by Franklin D. Roosevelt a half-century earlier.
"He was able to go beyond the Republican association with country clubs and reach out to the main streets of America," says Marshall Wittmann, a former GOP congressional aide and an analyst at the conservative Hudson Institute. Reagan often noted that he himself was a Democrat-turned-Republican.
"Reagan said, 'Look folks, the New Deal era is over'," says Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group that has tried to guide Democrats toward more centrist policies. "What Reagan did was say to Democrats, 'If you want to continue to do things the old way, go ahead, but you're going to lose'."
Before winning the White House, Reagan was dismissed even by some within the Republican Party as too conservative for national politics. When he was first elected, the GOP included a wing of liberal Republicans who supported abortion rights and looked askance at Reagan's supply-side economics. By the time he left the Oval Office, however, the nation's politics had been fundamentally reshaped.
Republicans were able to attract blue-collar workers who had long been Democrats but had grown disenchanted with high taxes, opposition to the Vietnam War and liberal social policies on school busing and other issues.
"His appeal and his ability to communicate took the edge off of Republican policies so that even blue-collar Democrats felt comfortable supporting them," says Ken Khachigian, a former Reagan speechwriter and California political strategist.
In the 1984 re-election contest, Democrat Walter Mondale won the endorsement of labor leaders, but Reagan got the votes of most union members. Reagan also drew to the GOP a new generation of young voters, a demographic group that had been largely the province of Democrats a decade earlier.
Democrats were forced to re-examine traditional tenets that Reagan tagged "tax-and-spend" and to redefine their positions on such "values" issues as crime and welfare. Reagan's success helped lay the groundwork for the Democratic nomination of a more-centrist candidate, Bill Clinton, in 1992 after liberals Mondale and Michael Dukakis failed miserably as presidential contenders in 1984 and 1988. Clinton, a DLC founder, endorsed the death penalty, talked tough on crime and supported welfare reform, positions that were anathema to some Democratic traditionalists.
Both parties became more ideological, and partisan tensions were fanned. In the South, some conservative Democrats switched parties. In the Northeast, some liberal Republicans felt unwelcome in the GOP.
After the 1980 election, Democrats held only the House of Representatives — and focused on controlling it with an iron hand.
"You've got the beginnings there of the high partisanship that continues," says Charles Jones, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin and a former president of the American Political Science Association. That approach helped foster the era of tough-minded Republicanism when the GOP finally won control of the House in 1994 and Newt Gingrich became speaker.
Presidents found a new way of getting things done. "Reagan modernized the presidency in the way presidents dealt with Congress on big issues, which is not an unimportant part of his legacy," From says. "Before Reagan came along, when you had a big issue, presidents went to the congressional leadership and worked it through. Reagan knew he couldn't go to the (Democratic) leadership in the House. What Reagan figured out: If you could build support for your initiatives with people, you could essentially go over the heads of the congressional leadership and win support. Since the 1981 budget-and-tax bill, whenever a president wants to move a major initiative, he now has to go the people. You can't do it through the inside anymore."
Reagan cowed Congress in 1981 by flooding Capitol Hill switchboards with callers demanding that their representatives support his plan, and he began a Saturday morning radio address that Clinton revived during his term in office.
Despite his impact on party politics, however, Reagan cared little for the details of party platforms or the contours of congressional districts that fascinated such presidents as Richard Nixon and Clinton.
Reagan was renowned for espousing an "11th Commandment" for the GOP: "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican." But Khachigian recalls, "He spent little time thinking about party matters, other than occasionally being asked to speak."
Nonetheless, not since FDR had a president left such an imprint on the nation's politics.
"I call them the 'bookend presidents,'" Jones says, although FDR had the more dramatic impact as the nation's leader during the Great Depression and World War II. "With Roosevelt, you had this tremendous expansion in the number of government programs. Reagan represents the time in which you begin to look at all these programs and say, 'Is that the way we want to continue to go?' He thought not, of course."
By cutting taxes and dramatically increasing military defense spending early in his term, Reagan set the stage for escalating budget deficits that put a fiscal squeeze on policymakers and downsized Democratic ambitions for years.
"We entered an era of a kind of control mechanism, which he created, and that had a tremendous impact on the domestic policy scene," Jones says.
One other sign of his impact: Every Republican who has sought the presidency since Reagan has claimed to be his true heir, though none of them so far has been able to match his success in unifying the GOP and appealing to such a broad range of voters.
"Virtually the entire Republican Party is the political progeny of Ronald Reagan," Wittmann says. "We are all Reagan's children."
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