Election ’84: The Shaping of the Presidency 1984

The author of the Making of the President series, one of the foremost experts on U.S. politics, examines the surging forces that not only helped re-elect Ronald Reagan but mil play a major role in determining the outcome of the next campaign for America’s highest office

Every American election presents history with a puzzle; and this issue of TIME opens with the solution to a part of the puzzle. We now know that Ronald Reagan has been reelected. But the larger part of the puzzle is left to solve: How does this election fit into the longer story of American politics and history? What did it mean?

This was the dreariest political carnival in 20 years. Yet it was more than carnival, for it was fought on two levels. On one level were the classic issues, all sprayed over with statistics and figures: disputed factoids of missile and nuclear capability, of budget entitlements, of thunderhead deficits that could prove anything any candidate wanted to prove. Yet underneath, more enduring and more important, was a clash between American cultures. At bottom the candidates were talking about the community of Americans, torn by enormous surges of new forces, bewildered by how to greet or resist them. The campaign was about how we live together—in short, about our culture as a nation in change.

What 1984 bequeaths to 1988 is far more than the timeworn questions debated since 1960, when Richard Nixon described the central problem as How We Keep the Peace Without Surrender and John Kennedy proclaimed, “We must move again.” What this campaign promises is the rearrangement of much of the old familiar political scenery and the way we see each other.

So the election of 1988 begins now.

The 1984 election pitted two men against each other—party chieftains both, but entirely different symbolic characters. They saw America differently.

On one side sat an aging Ronald Reagan, still tall in the saddle, holding forth a future rooted in a mythic past of heroic patriots and open opportunity. He rode into the election with several large achievements: a real grip on inflation, an undeniable economic recovery and a substantial defense buildup. But he bore the burden of a monstrous deficit for whose solution he offered only the Band-Aid of a balanced-budget amendment. He may frequently have been wrong on his facts, but he spoke to the wordless groping of millions of Americans seeking comfort in the future. Reagan wanted to slow the entire tempo of change speeding Americans to disturbing ends—from encroaching Government and welfare dependency to the drug epidemic and crime in the streets. He saw the future in the lost summertime of the nation’s past, when neighborhoods were safe, when families held together (though his first marriage had not), when U.S. power bestrode the world. He wrapped both past and future in the American flag.

Against him, as the candidate of the Out party, stood Walter Mondale. The Out party must always cope with the new surges and forces of this restless country, unrestrained by the discipline of a sitting President. But in 1984 so many new surges were pressing up from underneath that the orthodox political issues were to blur in the interminable Democratic primaries. Mondale, a man of conscience but also a master political mechanic, had tried to swallow them all, to bring a coherence to the multitude of screaming new groups. Where Reagan sought to soothe and cheer Americans, Mondale tried to puncture their complacency with warnings of impending doom and taxes.

Through the two candidates, two Americas were trying to define themselves—a new America, struggling to be born, not necessarily promising, and an old America, its virtues not necessarily outworn. In this clash, Ronald Reagan won.

Even before the 1984 election was decided, we had a glimpse of things to come—for the surges affect both parties, will go on and are certain to change our political culture to absorb the new cultures. Perhaps the best way of telling the story of what happened in 1984, and what is likely to happen by 1988, is to go, step by step, through the forces that rocked this strange year.

The first of the upwellings—the emergence of a new generation in American politics—was surprising only for being a surprise.

Generational upheaval is as characteristic of politics as it is of life. All through American history, the young behead the father generation, and the greater the triumphs of the fathers, the longer their influence lasts. The Revolutionary fathers led this nation for almost 50 years, until Andrew Jackson displaced them in 1828. The Civil War leaders lasted almost as long—until Theodore Roosevelt, a child in the Civil War, replaced them in 1901. In 1960 the Supreme Commander of all Allied forces in Europe was succeeded by a naval lieutenant of the same war. That war generation still holds on, but this year a new generation first flexed its muscle.

It was the size and quality of this new generation that most disturbed politics in 1984—first on the Democratic side and then later, with possibly greater future impact, on the Republican side, as young men maneuvered for the succession in 1988.

The quickest description of the new people, Democratic and Republican alike, was “the baby-boom generation.” When the veterans of the “good war” of 1941-45 came home, nature worked its seduction on them. The first command of nature was to find a mate, then to find a job, then a home, preferably in the suburbs, where they could raise children. The result of the mating urge was a biological explosion. From a national birth rate of 18.8 per thousand before the war, the youngsters pushed the number up to 26.6 per thousand in 1947. There were 2.4 million babies in 1939, 3.8 million in 1947, and the crop hit its peak of 4.3 million in 1957. By 1984 the children of the baby boom were between 20 and 38 years old and accounted for 75.5 million of all American citizens—43% of those of voting age. They were ready to change the world their parents had designed—and they were different.

Theirs was an open world of new sciences and new wonders of technology; experiment lured them to try anything new. That might be a foreign car, a beeping microwave oven, a computer incomprehensible to oldsters, a simple word processor or advanced data base access that gave new tools to leadership. Their social values were different too. They found living together, man and woman, without marriage unobjectionable; the Pill had divorced sex from commitment. They were likely to be tolerant of homosexuals; they were tolerant of women in the workplace. To reach them politics had to offer something new too.

But what? No one could define this for them. On the Democratic side, they first found Gary Hart, who drew almost as many popular votes as the ultimate nominee, Walter Mondale. Hart roweled Mondale from end to end of the country, leaving the Democratic candidate wounded and bleeding. On the Republican side, surfacing later, were half a dozen baby boomers who wrote the Republican platform to their wishes and who regarded Reagan, as one of them said, “more as a totem than a leader. We’re trying to elect a man ten years past his prime.”

Listen to two young men of the baby-boom generation. “The revolution is already happening in our party,” said a key campaign manager for Reagan-Bush. “Our new men are on the way. The Jack Kemps, Trent Letts, Newt Gingrichs, Vin Webers may not make it to the top in 1988. But we’ll be in control. The Bob Doles, the Howard Bakers are out—through. Unless George Bush makes it, we’ll elect the first President who wasn’t in uniform in World War II.” The second baby boomer, liberal Democratic Congressman Charles Schumer of New York City (age 33), had done his best for Hart in the primaries and, ruefully looking back, said, “The tectonic plates of American politics are shifting. Gary Hart touched them, felt them, but he couldn’t shape them. We have other men coming: Gore of Tennessee, Dodd of Connecticut, Gephardt of Missouri, Bradley in New Jersey—and Cuomo, of course.”

The young men and women—between 28 and 38—on both sides were the field commanders of the campaign of 1984. They are the takeover generation. They were frustrated this year by men with older visions of America. But within months they will be fully operational. And they are beginning their own strike for power, with fresh values, fresh purposes, right now, this week.

If the generation gap surfaced first in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire, the next surge, surfacing in New York in April, was of an entirely different nature. It attached itself to the name of Jesse Jackson.

It was always difficult to distinguish between Jesse Jackson and what he stood for. The eloquent young man was a master politician—part preacher, part insurrectionary, part visionary, part hater. Tainted now, however, by racists whom he refused to repudiate, he ran not as a presidential candidate who happened to be black but as the black presidential candidate. And his cause was new—for however he styled it, his cause was that of black separatism within the American political system.

Black separatism has old roots. But modern black leaders, the fathers who forced and won the civil rights revolution, had fought for a different course: full opportunity for and full participation of blacks within American politics. Roy Wilkins of the N.A.A.C.P. had felt equality must be won by law, through the courts. His triumph was 1954’s watershed Brown vs. Board of Education decision. The prophetic Martin Luther King Jr. had gone beyond that: If the laws flouted morality, then morality and civil disobedience must change the laws. His triumph came in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Through the openings that they carved poured scores of black participants and winners at every level of American politics. From three black Congressmen in 1960, the numbers jumped to 21 in 1984; and in the blackening cities, mayoralties went to blacks in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit. Atlanta. Newark. Washington. Philadelphia. But all such blacks ran as representatives of the whole.

Jesse Jackson was different; he changed the politics of 1984.

Political appetite came upon him slowly, then faster. His demands began with a first “litmus test”—that runoff primaries, South and North, be abolished because such contests gave blacks less of a chance of winning than they would have had in a free-for-all involving divided whites. In June he demanded that the rules of the Democratic Party established as recently as 1982 be discarded to give him a share of delegates proportionate to the number of those who had voted for him; the Democrats compromised, setting up at his insistence a “fairness” commission to supervise, patrol and probably again rewrite the rules governing their primaries in 1988.

And then at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, Jackson made his cause clear. The morning after his stunning speech of conciliation and redemption, he spoke to the Black Caucus. “Women got what they want,” he said, “in Geraldine Ferraro; the South got what it wants in Bert Lance. What did you get?—you ain’t got nothing!” He made his demands sharp: that the Democratic Party in the South establish in each of the old Confederate states one distinct district where a black Congressman would be nominated and, with the support of the party, be elected. In other words: not participation by individual merit but group participation with rewards shared by the numbers of race. He ran this course into the campaign: blacks must wait for Jesse’s “signal,” white politicians must negotiate for black votes through his Rainbow Coalition.

Jackson has staked out a new separatism in multiracial America, and it menaces the culture of our politics, for it challenges the bedrock faith of a nation whose secular theology is equality. Is America a nation of individual Americans or a nation of separate communities? If communities were to be given rewards and responsibilities distributed on lines of kinship, ancestry, skin color or religion, the Lebanonization of American politics might lie down the road. And then would come the Orientals, Caribbeans, Africans with other demands. Was ours a nation of separate groups? Or a nation of individual people clinging to the notion that all men are created equal, a nation that chooses the best of its individuals to speak for it?

The surge that Jesse Jackson called forth will not go away. Nor will the fears it roused in the South and in the Northern urban centers. It will be there in 1988, under Jackson’s name or another. It is his legacy to the election of 1988. How much fear of blacks contributed to Reagan’s white majority is still to be measured.

The stirring of black separatism linked another phenomenon in 1984—another underswell from a distant past now requiring full recognition. It could be called the ethnic emergence.

I remember as the most vivid of the episodes of the long trail of 1984 the redefinition of the Democratic Party at its convention in San Francisco. The faces and feel were so completely different that only by effort could I remember the Democratic conventions of the ’50s, dominated by Southerners and big-city politicians. Eighteen percent of the delegates in 1984 were black; 6.5% were Hispanic; Indians in feathered headdress marked the seats of the Western states.

It was Mario Cuomo who gave eloquence to a new party that he defined as a blending of the seed of pioneers and immigrants. Where once candidates boasted of the log cabin, Cuomo described the immigrants’ struggle: “I saw it and lived it… I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language … I learned about our kind of democracy from my father . . . and from my mother . . . And that they were able to build a family and live in dignity and see one of their children go from behind their little grocery store … to occupy the highest seat in the greatest state of the greatest nation in the only world we know, is an ineffably beautiful tribute to the democratic process.” Cuomo would probably run some day for national office, but if his time came, he would run as an American of new traditions in a nation whose heritage was changing.

That heritage had changed long before 1984. The census of 1980, whose mountainous statistics were not fully analyzed until 1983, gave us the first reliable ethnic sifting of the new America. Of the 226 million citizens willing to report their lineage, old-stock Americans now totaled less than half. A good number could still trace their ancestors to colonial times, including many of British stock (now only 62 million Americans) and Dutch (only 6.3 million). Add to them 49 million Americans of German stock and 40 million of Irish stock, and still there were only 157 million Americans who might claim pre-Civil War ancestry. Add to these the later comers: Scandinavians, Slavs, Italians, Jews, Canadian French; add further 22 million blacks only recently admitted to full citizenship; add further 13 million Hispanics and 3.4 million Asian newcomers—and one had the texture of a nation unlike any before and unlike America even half a century ago.

By 1984 “ethnics” were prize pieces in the game of politics. Republicans were now targeting the loyalties of heritage groups that for decades had voted Democratic. No Republican candidate, except possibly Richard Nixon, has had a keener sensitivity to ethnic politics than Ronald Reagan. If the Democrats would open their convention with Mario Cuomo, Reagan would counter with a keynoter of Hispanic origin, Katherine Davalos Ortega, Treasurer of the U.S., who closed her address with “Dios bendiga a America.”

The story of the contest for ethnics can be made romantic. What cannot be made thrilling is the public cowardice shown by both parties’ candidates. Not until the last “debate” in October were they finally forced to confront the problem of new immigration, which is changing our country again. Both waffled. Neither would offer leadership to a nation that saw its borders overrun by illegals, by people of alien cultures and tongues, a nation groping for new laws that at once protect its borders while guarding its tradition of refuge.

Congress, to its credit, did debate a Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill for a full seven days, a soul-searching week torn by anguish, hope and fear. But, in the end, all effort to pass the bill crumbled under the pressure of the Hispanic lobby. Its fate was a classic example of political pathology—every special interest mobilized against the general interest.

By 1988 no candidate will any longer be able to dodge the issue. The inrush of illegal immigrants from the Third World into the U.S. proceeds almost unchecked. No political leader can ignore the dilemma it puts to conscience; but, in the future, if the U.S. “tips” ethnically as our big cities “tip,” it may be impossible to pass any law that makes immigration just and orderly. Neither candidate faced up to the problem in 1984—they bequeath the agony of decision to 1988.

The two largest underswells of 1984 cannot be squeezed into the time frame of the year now ending. They rolled out of past centuries, and 1984 only lashed them to a crest. Both were matters of manners and morals that thrust into politics—the outburst of women and the grotesque debate on church and state.

Women come first—for no one can talk realistically of American politics today without recognizing them as a new, distinct and independent force. Arbitrarily, 1984 gave historians a pinpoint, a day to which the women’s movement finally led and from which its story will go forward: noon July 12, the moment Walter Mondale named Geraldine Ferraro, mother, lawyer and Congresswoman of Deepdene Lane, Forest Hills Gardens, Queens County, N.Y., as his running mate. In large part his choice of Ferraro was forced on Mondale as a tactical maneuver; but, from the instant it happened, it was history beyond politics.

I was in San Francisco in the presence of women when the announcement was made, and caught the feeling of holiday that old war correspondents tell of the liberation of Paris. One had to be there for the feel of it, the crying, the joy, the jubilation. Ann Lewis, political director of the Democratic Party, caught it best.

“It must have been like this the day they signed the Declaration of Independence and the word spread and people said, ‘At last it’s happened, at last it’s happened.’ ” Women? Women as a separate political force?

Always previously in American politics, men had assumed that they understood the affairs of the world best, they knew what was good for wives, mothers, sisters, daughters; and, trying to protect their women, had penalized them with countless legal disabilities and disqualifications. Men had shoveled the ditches, dug the coal, worked the plow—all to make a living for the dependent “family.” They had fought the wars, dying as sons, fathers, husbands, to protect the families left behind. Tradition sustained the conviction that those who had the burden of action held the right of leadership.

But men love their daughters as much as their sons. Postwar prosperity urged families to give their daughters equal education, and with education came skills, status, professional competence. More women go to college today than men; they emerge as lawyers, economists, financiers, doctors, scientists—and politicians. By the ’70s women had begun to organize; in 1980 pscphologists first defined their differential voting behavior as “the gender gap”; by 1982 women were conducting their own independent campaigns in state after state, helping push to victory Cuomo in New York, White in Texas, Blanchard in Michigan. By spring 1984 they were ready to ask that a presidential nominee appoint a woman as his campaign partner. And Mondale yielded.

Women have usually defined the general culture of any nation—from the court of the king to the kitchen of the peasant. But no nation has seen such a new coloration given to a culture as American women have given to the U.S. They now share equally in the forum of television: woman anchor teamed with male anchor. Women’s bar associations, women’s alumnae associations, women analysts’ associations form everywhere. Curiously, all-male organizations are now considered sexist, women’s organizations praiseworthy.

Their political arms—the National Organization for Women and the National Women’s Political Caucus—are shrewd and tough, and they have their own agenda. They demand passage of the Equal Rights Amendment as the seal of all equality, although it can be argued that the ERA might prove to be of dubious merit for it gives to men equal rights with women, such as the right to resist draft in wartime if women are not drafted, or the right to refuse combat duty if women may refuse. Women’s agenda includes, as is long overdue, equal pay for equal work—but also includes equal pay for “comparable worth” in any job, a matter more difficult to define. Their agenda includes as well the “mop-up” of all discriminatory legislation against women and the severe patrol of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which grants women protection against any form of citizen discrimination. Where their agenda leads, no one knows—except that it is akin to the black agenda: always more and always in the name of equality.

There is far more than a simple redefinition of political equality in the shaping of women’s push into U.S leadership. The old American way of work operates now in a world of foreign pressures, where the heavy-labor jobs, the lift-and-heave jobs, are being taken over by the Third World. Those are men’s jobs being undermined. But women seek their share of the desk and managerial jobs. Their increasing share reduces men’s share. If, as in England, the permanent jobs lost are usually so-called men’s jobs and the new openings are increasingly filled by women, there is a harsh edge to the future that women seek to shape. An irrational sex struggle over jobs, with which politics must cope, lies just beyond the horizon. In 1984 women unwittingly placed that matter on the agenda of 1988 and the years to follow.

The clash of cultures in the campaign ended in the spurious debate on church and state.

Never did either candidate challenge the separation of church and state. An “establishment of religion” as known to the Constitution makers was an establishment akin to the Church of England, which could tax the general public for its support. The Constitution outlawed that kind of federal establishment. No one since, not even in 1984, suggested that any church be allowed to clothe itself with the authority of the state. What underlay the debate, however, was the role of religion in politics—or, rather, the contrary views of morality that differing clerics urged on a confused country, and what underlay that was simple fear of any state-enforced morality imposed by any religion.

The unsettling ’80s, when rockets regularly sizzled off to space, when mind-expanding drugs became epidemic, when biotechnologies toyed with the very roots of life, when medicine prolonged life until age often became a curse, have spawned questions that torment conscience. Seeking answers, many Americans found them in a rebirth of pieties, a renaissance of religious search that offered man more than bread alone. And in offering answers to riddles that computers could not solve, or fashion satisfy, clerics raised their voices to offer moralities to politics, passionately arousing those who held opposing values.

Abortion lay at the heart of the final debate on manners and morals. On the one side were ranged hierarchical Roman Catholics and Fundamentalist Protestants; on the other, all those who believed that no church and no dogma might impose their will on the privacy of personal lives. Yet the decline of family life brings unwanted babies and throws the burden of their care on the public purse. Among blacks, 55% of all babies are born to unwed mothers, chiefly to the most impoverished and most ignorant of young women. To deny them relief from unwanted births or to deny relief to any woman whose pregnancy is unwanted seems absolutely immoral to many; others feel it equally immoral to give them relief.

On half a dozen other issues in the religious revival, clerics roused audiences. The Bible, whether in the King James or any other version, is as fine a classic of good narrative as any school can teach; to deny its glories to children is as ridiculous as to deny them Shakespeare. But to clerics of differing faiths, the classroom recital of a single required standard prayer (even one taken from the Bible) is an imposition on the freedom of children to grow up in the faith of their parents. The wonders of modern medicine increase the span of life beyond joy or usefulness; euthanasia, or mercy death for those who suffer, is to some the essence of love and compassion, to others outright murder. To many, homosexuality is forbidden by the command of Moses: “Thou shall not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.” To others that injunction is as savage as “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

What has been going on in the past decade, and came to a blistering point this year, is a revolution of social tolerances—and the demand that Government decide where laws must step in to restrain tolerance, whether it be drunken driving, pollution of streams and air, gun control or abortion. Neither candidate could avoid confrontation with forces urging new values into Government. And never before has the U.S. witnessed in public debate two claimants for the presidency forced to define their religious faith and their stand on matters as intimate as family life and abortion.

For the past twelve years, America has seen a succession of presidential candidates trained in divinity schools, children of divines, self-proclaimed born-again Christians, or men who claimed God as their copilot. Preachers and divines have always tried to infuse politics with moralities. The “Boston preachers” (as some Southerners still bitterly call them) urged abolition of slavery on the nation as a moral issue; so soldiers marched off singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic (“As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”). Clerics dominated politics when they persuaded the nation that alcoholic drink was not only sinful but a public danger, and imposed Prohibition. But never would the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 have passed Congress unless clergymen of all faiths had joined to press it through.

People vote in a crosscurrent of emotions and interests. In 1984 the crosscurrents of a new culture and a new resistance shaped the election as much as or more than the debate on missile confrontation, budget deficits or the trade war. Nor do these crosscurrents show any sign of abating, or the passion of the clerics any sign of softening.

There remains then a last ugly legacy of the 1984 election to the election of 1988: that all the new underswells and surges will have to find their way to a decision through a system of presidential politics now grown so obsolete as to be dangerous.

Simply put, somewhere in the past 20 years the U.S. political system became entangled in rules and customs that make it more vulnerable to special-interest groups than ever before, and television makes this even worse.

The primary system, where choice of candidates begins, is now as absurd as the presidential system before the passage of the 20th Amendment, which reorganized presidential and congressional tenures. The old rules of national elections held that a President elected in November could not take office until March; a Congress elected with him could not take office, unless in an emergency, for 13 months after the election. That system could not work in the 20th century of airplanes and telecommunications, so it was changed.

The primary system today bounces crazily from state to state, hobbled by bizarre party regulations, dominated by the dramatic needs of television. Few except scholars and specialists understand the labyrinthine rules that govern the sequence of nomination. New York has changed its nominating rules four times in the past four elections. In California, once a winner-take-all state, no candidate now runs statewide—and no one yet knows by how many votes Hart whipped Mondale in the Democratic primary. In Texas a voter must vote once on Saturday morning and once more in the evening to have his vote count for local delegates, who will then be mysteriously manipulated up the ladder of layered caucuses for a final choice. One could go on to more outlandish and contradictory rules, laws, regulations. This unworkable system leaves both the parties and the candidates prey to local and hard-bitten pressure groups, from the National Rifle Association to the Sierra Club, from the antiabortion zealots to the equally tough leaders of the women’s movement.

In New England, in spring, candidates must talk about the price of heating oil. In New York candidates must cultivate Jews, blacks, Italians, to the exclusion of other groups. In Texas and California they must court Hispanic voters. In the farm and industrial states they must woo farmers whose needs conflict with those of steelworkers in Pennsylvania or Ohio.

What emerges is political bedlam and national boredom. But there are other more troubling results: not least the total exhaustion of the candidates, who must perform as political athletes, operating by glands, not by reason; and just as important—the inability of any schoolteacher to tell students approaching voting age how the nation chooses its leaders.

Many professional politicians will say, off the record, that our system of politics is too important to be left to self-chosen politicians and that Congress must step in and act, by law, to make the process reasonable. Perhaps the best current proposal is that the long run of primaries be sliced into four separate Tuesdays, one month apart, set not by regions but by time zones. Time zones run from north to south, so parochial regional interests would be blurred. The Eastern time zone clusters New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas; the Midwest time zone clusters industrial Illinois as well as farm states like Kansas and Southern states like Alabama. And so across the nation. Time-zoned primaries would force all national candidates to address themselves once a month to a full cross section of the nation, less fettered by special interests, ethnic or racial groups.

By 1988 it is certain that both parties will be holding primaries simultaneously in a free-for-all that will confuse everyone. New public laws, not new party regulations, are needed.

The conventions are the next step in choice. But conventions have also changed; they no longer choose, they only ratify the primaries. They are spectacles into which television tries to inject drama; even television’s own leaders feel too much power has been placed in their hands. Said one of the most creative of television’s veterans, Producer Don Hewitt of CBS: “Let’s give the conventions back to the politicians. Give the parties control of the two hours of prime time we allot. Let them fill it as they want. If we think there’s any news, we can tack it on afterward as commentary. But the conventions should be their show, not ours.”

The national contest that follows the conventions is fouled by two intertwined circumstances swollen to intolerable: money power and television power. The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy. Money buys television time, buys Election Day “expenses,” buys access to decision makers. Most major candidates now control personal political action committees that let them mobilize allies long before an election. Important Congressmen accumulate similar slush funds. Independent PACs bring the most brutal pressure on individual Congressmen.

More important even than money power is the power of television. Television is the main battleground for public opinion in our time, and professional campaign designers try to outwit television news masters in a game of mask-ing-and-unmasking, or “I’ve got a secret” against “This is their secret.” Television reaches its climax in the so-called great debates. For forgotten reasons these debates, sponsored by the League of Women Voters, wander like a traveling road show from city to city. They are vital as a display of contending personalities, but they have degenerated into quiz shows where candidates, stuffed with facts like geese with fat gobbets, try to outdo each other with encyclopedic tidbits—and gain extra points for well-prepared quips.

Much can be done to restrain both money power and television power. Wise laws, to take one example, can forbid the contribution of money to any candidate in one state from sources in any other state. Wise laws can conscript time from the networks to be shared evenhandedly between the major candidates. New laws can and must help. Yet, in the end, politics is the entry way to power, cruel or benign, and in our system, politics delivers power into the hands of the most potent constitutional leader in the world. It is into Ronald Reagan’s hands, instincts, purposes that this week’s election has delivered us.

A good part of what we need to know of the larger puzzle will take many weeks to analyze. It is buried not just in the size but in the structure and the texture of Tuesday’s vote totals.

The structure of the vote in the South, for example: Did it say that the Republican Party, born to free the blacks, has been accepted there as the guardian of the whites? If so, then a major step in the realignment of U.S. politics has taken place. In the suburbs, did homeowners decisively join in Reagan’s victory, or did they split, by ethnic origins, to give a significant share to Mondale? Did working-class Catholics sway to their church’s leadership—or to their union leaders?

Much will depend on how Ronald Reagan interprets the vote. Landslides give Presidents enormous authority, but they can lead either to disasters, as did the landslides of Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, or to profound redefinitions of American life, as Franklin Roosevelt engineered. Of course, squeakers too can change American life, as Lincoln and Kennedy proved. What is critical in both landslides and squeakers is the ability of a President to read the tides, the yearnings that went into his victory, to distinguish between his own campaign rhetoric and the reality he must force his people to face.

Issues of substance lie on the table of presidential action. Ronald Reagan had a neat, three-sided diagram of the future in his first election: to reduce inflation, re-establish U.S. defense and balance the budget. But the triangle would not join, and through the gap in its apex, there ballooned a budget deficit of terrifying dimensions. His first stated order of business is to face that problem with sweeping tax revision. One of Reagan’s greatest achievements in his first term was to bring into being a bipartisan commission that finally put Social Security on firm footing. One may expect him next to choose an even more imposing group to work on the budget deficit until both parties can, unhappily but necessarily, compromise.

With reelection, Reagan has been handed enormous authority to make the Soviets face U.S. strength and truly negotiate, with some hope of realism on both sides. What is less sure is whether his victory will give him sufficient new vigor to reorganize his discordant White House staff, his Cabinet and his Pentagon.

More important than anything else is how an aging but renewed Ronald Reagan reads his own country. Every great President has been a great politician—Jefferson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy—even George Washington, who lived before the age of party politics. They could tell by political instinct how far and how fast they could lead their own people. This will be the test of a second Reagan Administration: its reading of the forces that underlay its election.

Reagan will probably be forced to recognize the pressure of women, but not as a dogmatic group, rather as individuals displaying talents hitherto unused. Both women in the outgoing Senate were Republicans, so were nine Representatives, so were two Cabinet members (three if you count Jeane Kirkpatrick, at best a nominal Democrat). But only Kirkpatrick was included in policy. Can Reagan stretch to find more?

On blacks, Reagan, a man without prejudice, may yield a little, but only if he can find blacks of merit, and certainly not enough to satisfy black Democrats or black separatists. He will not meet Jesse Jackson’s demands; those he will willingly leave to the Democrats.

The new President will have it in his power to mold the takeover generation. Its leaders were the managers of his campaign, and they expect their share of the rewards. Politics is where the jobs are, and command too, and rewards in wealth follow. Reagan can by appointment and preference choose from those who pursue his aims with intelligence and give them importance by public notice. He can set them against the hot eyes who see him (and George Bush) as the eldering generation to be discarded in the struggle for power in 1988. Abraham Lincoln left no young men behind to pursue his purposes; he was too busy with war, and cut short by assassination. Franklin Roosevelt did seek out young men—and left behind the generation that was to dominate his party for years after his death.

Most of all, Reagan will write his mark on American life by how he shapes the issues of values and moralities. He is on record as supporting a school-prayer amendment and a right-to-life amendment and opposing a women’s Equal Rights Amendment; on all these Mondale differed. This may have been the rhetoric of the Republican campaign, as was Roosevelt’s 1932 rhetoric promising a 25% budget cut: words blown away by the winds. It is the push the President puts behind such matters of manners and morals, both at the highest court level and the lowest congressional level, that will shape the takeover generation in the Republican Party and set its members against the Democrats’ takeover generation.

If Reagan recaptures his old vigor to forge a policy that wisely harnesses all the new forces in the nation, his election could prove to be one of historic reorientation, the long-awaited realignment of American politics.

If he does not, the campaign of 1984 will have led to just one more election of passage, and the last word will be left to others in 1988—or beyond.