The author of the Making of the President series, one of the foremost experts on U.S. politics, examines the surging forces that not only helped re-elect Ronald Reagan but mil play a major role in determining the outcome of the next campaign for America's highest office
Every American election presents history with a puzzle; and this issue of TIME opens with the solution to a part of the puzzle. We now know that Ronald Reagan has been reelected. But the larger part of the puzzle is left to solve: How does this election fit into the longer story of American politics and history? What did it mean?
This was the dreariest political carnival in 20 years. Yet it was more than carnival, for it was fought on two levels. On one level were the classic issues, all sprayed over with statistics and figures: disputed factoids of missile and nuclear capability, of budget entitlements, of thunderhead deficits that could prove anything any candidate wanted to prove. Yet underneath, more enduring and more important, was a clash between American cultures. At bottom the candidates were talking about the community of Americans, torn by enormous surges of new forces, bewildered by how to greet or resist them. The campaign was about how we live together—in short, about our culture as a nation in change.
What 1984 bequeaths to 1988 is far more than the timeworn questions debated since 1960, when Richard Nixon described the central problem as How We Keep the Peace Without Surrender and John Kennedy proclaimed, "We must move again." What this campaign promises is the rearrangement of much of the old familiar political scenery and the way we see each other.
So the election of 1988 begins now.
The 1984 election pitted two men against each other—party chieftains both, but entirely different symbolic characters. They saw America differently.
On one side sat an aging Ronald Reagan, still tall in the saddle, holding forth a future rooted in a mythic past of heroic patriots and open opportunity. He rode into the election with several large achievements: a real grip on inflation, an undeniable economic recovery and a substantial defense buildup. But he bore the burden of a monstrous deficit for whose solution he offered only the Band-Aid of a balanced-budget amendment. He may frequently have been wrong on his facts, but he spoke to the wordless groping of millions of Americans seeking comfort in the future. Reagan wanted to slow the entire tempo of change speeding Americans to disturbing ends—from encroaching Government and welfare dependency to the drug epidemic and crime in the streets. He saw the future in the lost summertime of the nation's past, when neighborhoods were safe, when families held together (though his first marriage had not), when U.S. power bestrode the world. He wrapped both past and future in the American flag.
Against him, as the candidate of the Out party, stood Walter Mondale. The Out party must always cope with the new surges and forces of this restless country, unrestrained by the discipline of a sitting President. But in 1984 so many new surges were pressing up from underneath that the orthodox political issues were to blur in the interminable Democratic primaries. Mondale, a man of conscience but also a master political mechanic, had tried to swallow them all, to bring a coherence to the multitude of