Governorship of California of Ronald Reagan

Reagan campaigned actively for Nixon in his run for governor of California in 1962 and supported the presidential candidacy of conservative Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964, serving as cochairman of California Republicans for Goldwater. In the last week of the campaign, he delivered a 30-minute nationally televised address, “A Time for Choosing,” that The Washington Post described as “the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” Reagan’s speech, which resulted in $1 million in campaign contributions for Republican candidates (the most attributable to any political speech in history), catapulted him onto the national political stage and made him an instant hero of the Republican right.

Reagan announced his candidacy for governor of California in 1966. The incumbent, Democrat Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown (who had defeated Nixon’s challenge in 1962), ridiculed Reagan’s lack of experience, declaring that while he (Brown) had been serving the public, Reagan was making Bedtime for Bonzo, a 1951 movie in which Reagan starred with a chimpanzee. But Reagan turned this apparent liability into an asset by portraying himself as an ordinary citizen who was fed up with a state government that had become inefficient and unaccountable. The public also reacted well to Reagan’s personality, in particular to his apparent genuineness, affability, and self-deprecating sense of humor. (When asked by a reporter how he would perform in office, Reagan replied, “I don’t know. I’ve never played a governor.”) Reagan won the election by nearly one million votes. During his two terms as governor (1967–75), Reagan erased a substantial budget deficit inherited from the Brown administration (through the largest tax increase in the history of any state to that time) and instituted reforms in the state’s welfare programs. As some observers have noted, Reagan’s administrative style as governor was essentially the same as the one he would later adopt as president: he left most of the day-to-day business of government to assistants and department heads, preferring to focus on larger issues of policy and vision. Reagan followed a rigid schedule, which his aides would prepare and type up for him daily.

Reagan made a halfhearted bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as a favorite-son candidate, finishing third behind Nixon and former New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. During his remaining years as governor, he made plans for a more serious run for the presidency, expecting that his chance would come in 1976, at the anticipated end of Nixon’s second term. But Nixon’s resignation in 1974 put Vice President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office. Unwilling to wait another eight years, Reagan challenged Ford with a blistering critique of his policies and appointments but lost the nomination by 60 votes.

Election of 1980

Reagan dominated the Republican primary elections in 1980. Although his strongest opponent, George Bush, won an upset victory in the Iowa caucuses, Reagan bounced back after a notable performance in a debate with other Republican candidates in Nashua, New Hampshire. The debate, initially sponsored by a newspaper, was first extended to only Reagan and Bush, but Reagan decided to pay for the debate and invite the rest of the candidates. When all the candidates took the stage that evening, the Bush team appeared surprised, and, as Reagan began to explain the situation, the moderator from the newspaper instructed that Reagan’s microphone be turned off. Reagan responded memorably with an angry line he remembered from a Spencer Tracy movie: “I am paying for this microphone!” Reagan went on to win New Hampshire and most of the other major primaries and entered the convention with a commanding lead; he won the nomination on the first ballot with 1,939 votes to 37 for John Anderson and 13 for Bush, who had withdrawn from the contest before the vote. After some tense and ultimately fruitless negotiations with representatives of Ford, Reagan chose Bush as his running mate, and the two men campaigned against Democratic incumbents Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale on a platform promising steep tax cuts, increased defense spending, a balanced budget, and a constitutional amendment to ban abortion.

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Carter began the campaign in a vulnerable position. Inflation had increased from 6 percent to more than 12 percent since his first year in office, and unemployment and interest rates were also high. An even more important factor than the economy, however, was Carter’s apparent inability to resolve the Iran hostage crisis, which had continued for almost a year at the time of the election. On November 4, 1979, a mob of Iranian students had stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehrān and taken the diplomatic staff there hostage. In April 1980, after months of fruitless negotiations with students and officials of Iran’s revolutionary government (which had sanctioned the takeover), Carter ordered a military rescue operation, which failed dramatically. The hostage crisis contributed to a general public perception of the Carter administration as weak and indecisive, and the failed rescue mission reinforced Reagan’s charge that the Democrats had allowed the country’s military to deteriorate badly. In their only debate of the campaign, Reagan memorably reminded his national television audience of the country’s economic problems by asking, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Carter, for his part, tried to make the most of Reagan’s image among some of the electorate as an extremist and a warmonger, charging that as president Reagan would eliminate cherished social programs and threaten world peace. Reagan’s smiling response to such charges—“There you go again” (a line he had practiced in preparation for the debate)—did not directly address the point, but it did convey a disarming image of sincerity, self-confidence, and friendliness, which most voters found appealing. On election day Reagan defeated Carter and John Anderson (who ran as an independent) with slightly more than half the popular vote, against Carter’s 41 percent and Anderson’s 7 percent. The vote in the electoral college was 489 to Carter’s 49.