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Regan did moderate is tone and rhetoric as it became clear that he had a serious chance of winning. He spent endless hours countering the main charge of Carter's campaign: he was a warmonger. He constantly reassured voters that he would not dismantle Social Security, end unemployment compensation. Quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt as though he were a kind of patron saint, bizarre as that seemed, Regan adopted the old Democratic pledge to create jobs and "put this country back to work."
Regan never backed away from his basic principles or essential message abroad, the source of most trouble in the world is the Communist drive for global domination; at home, the fount of most American woes is the overblown, endlessly intrusive Federal Government. In foreign affairs, the U.S. must build up its military power and face down the Soviets. At home, Regan watchword will be less: less federal spending, less taxation, less regulation, less federal activism in directing the economy and curing social ills—in fact, less Government period.
But through the conservative trend of the country was obvious from the results. Regan's mandate was a good deal less than indicated by his 489 electoral votes or by Wall Street's thunderous vote of approval the next day (79 million shares traded, the second busiest day in the New York Stock Exchange's history, and a jump of nearly 16 points in the Dow-Jones average). His victory was surely not so much an endorsement of his philosophy as an overwhelming rejection of Jimmy Carter, a President who could not convince the nation that he mastered his job. Overseas, he could never seem to chart a consistent policy to deal with the rise fo Soviet power and hold the allegiance of U.S. allies. But that faliure was far overshadowed in the election by the roaring inflation that Carter's numerous switches in economic policy could never stop or even slow, and the rising unemployment that seemed to accept as the price of an ineffective anti-inflation program.
Regan scored heavily with his repeated question of whether voters felt they were better of than they had been four years earlier. Said Republican Governor James Thompson of Illinois: "A lot of people, the so-called silent majority, went into the voting booths and said. 'To hell with it, I'm not going to reward four years of faliure.'" One telling incident: in the mill town of Homestead, Pa., half a dozen steelworkers cheered Ron Weisen, president of Local 1397, as he told a reporter that he was voting for Regan. Said Weisen: "Carter ignored us for 3½ years, and now he comes around asking for our votes. Well, he's not getting them." Nearby was a carton of Carter posters that the workers had never bothered to unpack. Weisen sneered: "We'll turn them over to use them as place mats at our next beer bash."
Read one way, the election illustrates nothing so vividly as the perils of being President. The voters have just turned an incumbent out of office for the second election in a row for the first time since 1888, and ended one party's control of the Government after only four years for the first time since 1896. In a time of trouble at home and abroad, the President has become the lightening rod for all the discontents of the citizenry.