Twenty-five years ago back in 1979, the Reagan coalition was emerging as a powerful
and potent force. Signs of its birth were already apparent in the 1978 midterm elections when
Republicans added sixteen seats in the House and three in the Senate. Jimmy Carter–a Democrat
who had been elected president in 1976 thanks to the Watergate scandal–was proving to be an
ineffectual leader. While Carter had not lost his capacity for truth-telling, Americans wanted
something more. In 1978, 70 percent believed “the government cannot be regularly trusted to do
what is right;” 74 percent said “government is run for a few big interests;” and 79 percent
thought “government wastes a lot of tax dollars.”
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Republicans took advantage of this hostility
by advocating the “Kemp-Roth” tax plan–a massive cut in federal taxes they claimed would add
revenues to the federal coffers. Republicans were thinking anew and, in Abraham Lincoln’s
phrase, were “disenthralling themselves” from their long-standing balance-the-budget dogma.
Supply-side economics was becoming an important chapter in the new Republican gospel.
Republican rethinking about government was cheered by a disillusioned electorate. By
1979, a majority began to seriously question whether the present was better than their past and,
more ominously, whether the future would hold the promise of better days ahead.
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A majority
also came to believe that “important national problems such as energy shortages, inflation, and
crime could not be solved through traditional American politics.”
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And this was before the
Iranian hostage crisis sharpened the image of Jimmy Carter as a tepid commander-in-chief with a
country was seriously off on the wrong track.
American dismay with life outside their homes was coupled by a sense that something
was amiss inside them as well. Ronald Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin, found 68 percent
agreed with the statement that “families are weaker now than they were several years ago.” Of
Convention