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On blacks, Reagan, a man without prejudice, may yield a little, but only if he can find blacks of merit, and certainly not enough to satisfy black Democrats or black separatists. He will not meet Jesse Jackson's demands; those he will willingly leave to the Democrats.
The new President will have it in his power to mold the takeover generation. Its leaders were the managers of his campaign, and they expect their share of the rewards. Politics is where the jobs are, and command too, and rewards in wealth follow. Reagan can by appointment and preference choose from those who pursue his aims with intelligence and give them importance by public notice. He can set them against the hot eyes who see him (and George Bush) as the eldering generation to be discarded in the struggle for power in 1988. Abraham Lincoln left no young men behind to pursue his purposes; he was too busy with war, and cut short by assassination. Franklin Roosevelt did seek out young men—and left behind the generation that was to dominate his party for years after his death.
Most of all, Reagan will write his mark on American life by how he shapes the issues of values and moralities. He is on record as supporting a school-prayer amendment and a right-to-life amendment and opposing a women's Equal Rights Amendment; on all these Mondale differed. This may have been the rhetoric of the Republican campaign, as was Roosevelt's 1932 rhetoric promising a 25% budget cut: words blown away by the winds. It is the push the President puts behind such matters of manners and morals, both at the highest court level and the lowest congressional level, that will shape the takeover generation in the Republican Party and set its members against the Democrats' takeover generation.
If Reagan recaptures his old vigor to forge a policy that wisely harnesses all the new forces in the nation, his election could prove to be one of historic reorientation, the long-awaited realignment of American politics.
If he does not, the campaign of 1984 will have led to just one more election of passage, and the last word will be left to others in 1988—or beyond.