The GOP, “trapped between a demographically declining support base and an ideological straitjacket . . . reached for a tried and true weapon: disfranchisement.” Anderson notes that despite the rarity of voter fraud, state after state began requiring voters to have documents such as bank statements, utility bills and W-2 forms, which African Americans, Latinos, the young and other economically disadvantaged people are less likely than others to possess.
.. “At this point,” Anderson writes, “Reagan chose to slash the training, employment and labor services budget by 70 percent — a cut of $3.805 billion.”
Among the programs targeted were those that assisted college-bound African Americans, causing their college enrollment to tumble from 34 to 26 percent. “Thus, just at the moment when the post-industrial economy made an undergraduate degree more important than ever, 15,000 fewer African Americans were in college during the early 1980s than had been the case in the mid 1970s,” Anderson writes... And as crack ravaged black communities, Anderson argues, the Reagan administration targeted the victims, rather than the drug-smuggling villains... The war on drugs, Anderson says, “replaced the explicit use of race as the mechanism to deny black Americans their rights as citizens.”.. And while African Americans are the least likely to use or sell drugs, Anderson writes, “law enforcement has continued to focus its efforts on the black population.” As a result, she writes, blacks, while 13 percent of the national population, make up 45 percent of those incarcerated... Less persuasive is her contention that rage, rather than a cool and calculated effort to retain economic and social primacy, is behind the destructive policies she cites.
The Ad That Helped Reagan Sell Good Times to an Uncertain Nation
The one-minute commercial commonly known as “Morning in America,” created for President Ronald Reagan’s re-election effort in 1984, is one of the most effective campaign spots ever broadcast. The ad’s haze of nostalgia and optimism helped obscure Mr. Reagan’s lingering political problems with the deficit and unemployment.
The scenes in “Morning” would have fit almost seamlessly into the 1950s sitcoms “Father Knows Best” or “Leave It to Beaver.” One difference is that the ad is rendered in soft, pastel colors similar to those used in “The Natural,” the Robert Redford baseball film also released that year.
.. The subtext is that after 20 years of social tumult, assassinations, riots, scandal, an unpopular war and gas lines, Mr. Reagan returned the United States to the tranquillity of the 1950s.
.. “Morning in America” and several other Reagan TV ads were written byHal Riney of Ogilvy & Mather in San Francisco. Known for his skill at appealing to the emotions, he was determined to demonstrate that negative political ads were not the only kind that worked.
.. Only 10 months before his re-election campaign began, Mr. Reagan’s Gallup Poll approval rating had dropped to 35 percent, equal to President Lyndon Johnson’s at its nadir during the Vietnam War.
Is the U.S. Ready for Post-Middle-Class Politics?
A particular vision of the American dream has shaped elections for decades. What happens when people stop believing in it?
.. Last spring, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of respondents who identified as middle class or upper middle class dropped 12 percent since the 2008 financial crisis; nearly half of those polled identified themselves as either working or lower class.
.. Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently revealed just how ill equipped American politics is for a post-middle-class nation
.. The new middle-class utopia did, of course, exclude most nonwhite Americans.
.. in 1959 the black poverty rate was still 56 percent, and blacks on average earned 53 percent what whites did.
.. Democrats’ hold on the white middle class was balanced precariously on the racial status quo — which, by the mid-1960s, was breaking apart. George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964 in protest of Lyndon B. Johnson’s turn toward civil rights, performed well not just in the South but also in white blue-collar enclaves in the few Northern states where he was on the primary ballot.
.. Ronald Reagan’s campaign aired its “Morning in America” ad, a Vaseline-lensed montage of overwhelmingly white suburban prosperity. Walter Mondale — the son of a small-town Minnesota minister whose politics radiated an austere, Scandinavian morality — spent the last days of his campaign unfurling increasingly dire pictures of urban and rural poverty and beseeching people to vote for an “America of fairness.”
.. Speaking bitterly of Reagan’s commercial, he told a crowd at a church in Cleveland: “It’s all picket fences and puppy dogs. No one’s hurting. No one’s alone. No one’s hungry. No one’s unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody’s happy.” But Americans liked the picket fences and puppy dogs.
.. not being black was what constituted being middle class.”
.. This is where you draw the line if you’re interested not in absolute wealth but in the trajectory of wealth — not whether you have a yacht docked in St. Bart’s, but whether you’re doing better than you were five years ago.
Donald Trump Is Transforming the G.O.P. Into a Populist, Nativist Party
For the past forty years, the G.O.P. has been an uneasy alliance of social conservatives, free-market conservatives, and corporate interest groups, with the latter largely dictating economic policy. Trump has been drawing on a base of alienated white working-class and middle-class voters, seeking to remake the G.O.P. into a more populist, nativist, avowedly protectionist, and semi-isolationist party that is skeptical of immigration, free trade, and military interventionism.
If he were to succeed in this quest, he would arguably be the most consequential Republican since Ronald Reagan, in part by challenging some aspects of Reagan’s legacy.
.. Given the fact that Christie was bashing Trump on the stump just a few weeks ago, his endorsement was the most dramatic (and heavily covered) of the two. It indicated that Trump, ultimately, may end up getting the backing of many coastal Republicans and business interests, who aren’t particularly ideological.
.. But in terms of votes in the Republican primaries, and the future direction of the party, it is the Sessions endorsement that probably matters most. A lifelong Republican whom Reagan nominated to a federal judgeship in 1986, his bona fides as a conservative and party loyalist are unquestioned.
.. He identified immigration and trade as the key issues that had brought him to Trump’s side. “Nobody is perfect,” Sessions went on. “We can’t have everything, can we, Mr. Trump? But I can tell you one thing . . . at this time in American history, we need to make America great again.” With that, Sessions took out one of those red Trump baseball caps—which are stitched together by a Los Angeles firm that employs lots of Mexican immigrants—and put it on, to huge cheers.