US election
Reagan's morning breaks
Christopher Hitchens
Washington
Ronald Reagan has contrived to be President of the United States for four years and still to run as if he were the challenger rather than the incumbent. From his White House lair, he has cam- paigned against Washington. Perched on a mountain of debt, he has canvassed against the big spenders. With a giant Madison Avenue budget, he has denounced the East Coast media. As the man who 'lost' Lebanon, he has attacked the craven bureaucrats who surrendered Iran to the Islamic foe. It was the best underdog campaign that the country has ever seen. Against all the odds, and all the array of special interests, it succeeded. It resulted in a surge of populist revulsion against the profligate, tax-oriented Democratic adminstration that has oppressed a spirited and enterprising people for too long. The President now has a mandate to undo all the statist tomfoolery of the last four years.
I don't think that I quite gave up on Walter Mondale until the last day of October, when he quoted a column of mine in The Nation in order to make a point about tax evasion by the ultra-rich. The last Democratic candidate to make a mistake of this magnitude was George McGovern in his campaign for the nomina- tion last year, and look how far it got him. Mondale was speaking in Maryland, one of only six states to vote for Jimmy Carter in 1980 and one of the three Ms — Maryland, Massachusetts and Minnesota — which constitute the Democratic heart- land. On election night 1984, Maryland and Massachusetts went for Reagan and even Minnesota seemed to stay with Fritz out of home state sentimentality. Only in my home town, the tiny diamond-shaped District of Columbia, was there a genuine popular majority (85 per cent) for the Mondale/Ferraro ticket.
At the presidential level, then, Reagan wore more of the aspect of a triumph than a victory. He swept a majority, in some cases a record majority, of states, of electoral college seats, and of popular votes. More important, he broke the long- standing taboo on re-election. True, he forgot to congratulate his defeated oppo- nent in his acceptance speech, preferring to relate the congratulations that he had received from Mondale. True, he confined himself to platitude at the very moment when he need not have worried about what his press handlers would say. But these are quibbles. It is, as his television advertise- ments have ceaselessly intoned, morning in Ronald Reagan's America.
As the morning breaks, one can still ask how much of America does belong to the President. Eisenhower and Nixon both brought off 'landslides', but neither of them gained control of Congress, and nor has Reagan. The Democrats, in fact, more or less held their own in state gov- ernorships. They slightly improved their standing in the Senate (with one important qualification which I will come to) and they took only the most moderate tumble in the elections to the House of Representatives. In at least three states — I write before all returns have been counted — their senator- ial candidates outclassed 'born-again' 'Just as well it isn't five more years, he couldn't have made it.' Reaganite conservatives. In the House, Republican strength has increased only somewhat, and the newcomers are chiefly from southern districts. But this finding may conceal a longer-term crisis for the Democrats, which is the reluctance of many of their own Representatives to take risks. Reagan only needs a shift of 17 votes among the 435 House members to win support for the contras in Nicaragua. He only needs a shift of two votes to carrY the House for the MX missile. And, while the new regime may not be the end of an era, it certainly spells the end for the ERA. I spent part of the election night in and around Tip O'Neill's office, listening W people whistling in the wind, and there, seemed little doubt that the 'boll weevil Democrat was back. Reagan's coat tails may not have proved very adhesive in the case of his own supporters, but he will undoubtedly be able to scare and neutral- ise opposition members of the Congress who dread the idea of tackling such a popular president.
Even the Democrats' most signal suc- cess, the unseating of Senator Charles Percy of Illinois, is hedged with nerve- racking pitfalls for them. Percy was the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, and one of the last of the old-time moderate Republicans. His de- parture leaves Senator Jesse Helms, the patron of Botha and d'Aubuisson, as the senior member of that committee. The chairmanship is his if he desires it, and he probably did not spend a record $14 million to get re-elected in North Carolina in order to stay on as the head of the agriculture committee. These conflicting bits of evidence will be gnawed and chewed for months to come. Already, reactionary Democrats such as Bert Lance are arguing that the party lost because it was too liberal. Mrs Ferraro/ Zaccaro was a bit put out to see her ow° former district in New York fall to a Reaganite: the conventional view being, that her voters had not known how radical she was until she ran for Vice-President. But John Kerry easily won the Senate rae.e in Massachusetts, making no secret of his record as the man who led Vietnam Veter- ans Against the War in the unfashionable Sixties. What the Democratic malcontents want is just what they cannot have. They want t° be in power at all costs, and they want to escape the association which exists in the public mind between the Democratic PartY and 'government'. This association will not dissolve in the mild solution of evidence and experience. After all, just as Reaga° ran against his own Treasury and his oWn budget, the Democrats fought hard for the privilege of administering the Republican deficit. Ancient habits and reflexes die hard, and the realignment of parties, lunch bruited as the post-election topic, will take longer than most people think. AnYwaY' it's been a fun election, and I am wistful. at the prospect of having to go back to writing about politics.
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