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Presidential Campaigns Have Their Own Dialogue

7/4/2012

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Picture
Throughout every recent presidential campaign, a dialogue develops in the media between the major candidates for the job.  The candidate best able to position themselves before the public takes the job.

The dialogue has its context.  Voters have a distinct perception of the most important issue, how well or how poorly the economy is doing.  And they hear reports of how wars are going.

This perception is how Ronald Reagan used the phrase “Morning in America” in his re-election campaign of 1984.  As the public already believed, rightly or wrongly, that the nation had peace and prosperity, Reagan’s dialogue was strengthened.

As a way of telling the public not to argue with success, he said of his opponent, Walter Mondale, that he “never met a tax he didn’t hike” and that he “taxes [Reagan’s] patience.”  Mondale’s response, that he was being “honest” about the need for new taxes, got lost in the dialogue.  Given the choice of a candidate who promised jobs and a candidate who promised the truth, voters as a group were conditioned to optimism and believed they could have both.

A dialogue over taxes took over the following election between Vice President George H. W. Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis.  Bush lacked his predecessor’s congenial manner and used issues in a more cynical way.

Bush’s dialogue included phrases such as “read my lips, no new taxes” and a name for his opponent’s state, “Taxachusetts.”  But on the issue of crime, he repeatedly named a man who had been released as part of the Massachusetts furlough program and who had then raped a woman.  Television commercials made it clear that the prisoner, Willie Horton, was a black man.

It was as if Bush was saying that the voters ought to fear a Dukakis election as crime and taxes would go up.  He also threw in Dukakis’ veto of a bill that would have made a teacher’s refusal to lead the pledge of allegiance a crime.  It was an assault on Dukakis for some of his ideas of public safety, taxes and patriotism.

Dukakis responded by explaining that a predecessor had started the furlough program and that he (Dukakis) had ended it after the Horton incident.  He attacked Bush for promising not to raise taxes (a pledge that came back to haunt Bush albeit too late to help Dukakis).  And he made it clear that he had gotten an advisory opinion about the bill on the pledge of allegiance from his state’s highest court, which told him it was unconstitutional.

The dialogue had Dukakis on the defensive even before he answered.  Bush picked issues that evoke a visceral response but would not have gotten away with selecting these issues had the economy not be understood by the public to be satisfactory.  Bush could not get re-elected because the economy had worsened over the next four years and because he had to defend his own record.

So what is in store for the election of 2012?

The economy has gone from bad in 2008 to…bad in 2012.  President Obama will talk about his health care legislation and how the Supreme Court found it to be constitutional.

Mitt Romney will have to find a new way to attack a law patterned to a good extent after a law he signed when governor of Massachusetts.  He will also have to explain what he would do differently than Obama in turning around the economy.

The burden is on Romney to find a chord that even some Democrats can agree with.  Obama has positioned himself as a somebody.  It will take a somebody to beat one.



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Ronald Reagan Was the Original American Idol

1/15/2011

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Ronald Reagan was God.

At least, that is what many of my high school classmates told me.  He was the reason for the economic recovery that started in early 1984, the fact that we were not at war with anyone and the resurgence of “morality” in our nation.

When I disagreed, arguments ensued.  The arguments would always revolve around Reagan and what my “problem” was.

I would say I did not agree with the arms buildup under Reagan.  Then I would get a response like:

“These weapons protect us!  Reagan is tough on communists.”

Of course, after I left high school, Reagan made an arms-reduction deal with the Soviet Union.

I said I did not like the strike on Libya that Reagan authorized in April 1986.  He did so in retaliation for what he believed were Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy’s terrorist activities.  The classmates first pummeled me with their fists before the teacher arrived in one of my classes.  They told me we needed to be tough on terrorists.

Of course, after I left high school, an investigation revealed that the Reagan Administration illegally shipped weapons to Iran, designated by the State Department as a terrorist state.  This is now known as the Iran-Contra affair because the profits were diverted to the anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua.

My suspicion that the nation was not being told the whole story about the President’s mental faculties fell on deaf ears.  I guess that is why people even then called him the “Teflon President.”

Of course, after I left high school, Reagan acknowledged that he had Alzheimer’s disease.  And now, in his new book, Reagan’s son Ron, Jr. admits that his father may have had this problem during his time in the White House.

Support for Reagan during those years I was in high school was comparable to idolatry.  Instead of evaluating his policies, my classmates blindly followed them.

Over twenty-five years later, little has changed.  Republicans still view Reagan as anti-communist, anti-terrorist and the epitome of patriotism.  The facts don’t seem to matter.

As we approach the one hundredth birthday of President Reagan, we can expect to hear the same rhetoric from his supporters.  As they did at his funeral in 2004, they will say that he “won the Cold War” (implying that the seven presidents before him did not contribute), that he was a “tax fighter” (he raised taxes sixteen times during his two terms) and that he belongs on Mount Rushmore (well, some say he was a big bust!).

Now would be a great time to talk of the real Ronald Reagan.  He was not as bad as Democrats would say, nor as good as the Republicans believe.

Other presidents can and should learn from the mistake he made in keeping our soldiers in Beirut before a terrorist killed over two hundred of them.  There are some places that not even peacekeepers belong.

They could learn from his use of humor to defuse difficult situations.  Troubled by accusations he was too old for another term, he knocked out any chance that Mondale could make a race of it by saying he would not make an issue out of his opponent’s youth and inexperience.

But to suggest that any leader is without fault opens us to a false argument in which some participants defend a point of view without understanding it.  Even high school students should know better than that.


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