Chapter 26 The Triumph of Conservativism, 1969-1988

CH 26: The Triumph of Conservativism, 1969-1988 Focus Questions:  What were the major policies of the Nixon administration on social and economic issues?  How did Vietnam and the Watergate scandal affect popular trust in the government?  In what ways did the roots of the rise of conservatism in the 1970s?  How did the Reagan presidency affect American aims at home and abroad? President Nixon  When conservative ideas did begin to spread, liberals explained them as a rejection of the modern world by the alienated or psychologically disturbed  Conservatives found Nixon no more to their liking than his predecessors.  Nixon echoed conservative language, especially in his condemnation of student protestors and his calls for law and order, but in office he expanded the welfare state and moved to improve American relations with the Soviet Union and China Nixon’s Domestic Policies  Mostly interested in foreign policy, Nixon had no desire to battle Congress, still under Democratic control, on domestic issues  Conservatives applauded Nixon’s New Federalism, which offered federal “block grants” to the states to spend as they saw fit, rather than for specific purposes dictated by Washington  Nixon spent lavishly on social services and environmental initiatives  He abolished the Office of Economic Opportunity, which had coordinated Johnson’s War on Poverty Nixon and Welfare  Perhaps Nixon’s most startling initiative was his proposal for a Family Assistance Plan, or “negative income tax,” that would replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by having the federal government guarantee a minimum income for all Americans  Universally known as “welfare,” AFDC provided assistance, often quite limited, to poor families who met local eligibility requirements  Welfare had come to be associated with blacks, who by 1970 accounted for nearly half the recipients  Conservative politicians now attacked recipients of welfare as people who preferred to live at the expense of honest taxpayers rather than by working Nixon and Race  To consolidate support in the white South, he nominated to the Supreme Court Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, conservative southern jurists with records of support for segregation but both were rejected by the Senate  In Nixon’s first three years in office, the proportion of southern black students attending integrated schools rose from 32% to 77%     For a time, the Nixon administration also pursued affirmative action programs to upgrade minority employment The Philadelphia Plan required that construction contractors on federal projects hire specific numbers of minority workers Trade unions of skilled workers like plumbers and electricians, which had virtually no black members, strongly opposed the Philadelphia Plan Nixon soon abandoned the Philadelphia Plan in favor of an ineffective one that stressed voluntary local efforts toward minority hiring instead of federal requirements The Burger Court  Nixon appointed Warren Burger, a federal court-of-appeals judge, to succeed him  Burger was expected to lead the justices in a conservative direction  The Burger Court, at least initially, consolidated and expanded many of the judicial innovations of the 1960s  In 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which arose from North Carolina, the justices unanimously approved a lower court’s plan that required the extensive transportation of students to achieve school integration  The decision led to hundreds of cases in which judges throughout the country ordered the use of busing as a tool to achieve integration  Mexican-American schools stood far below that for white ones. But in San Antonio ISD v. Rodriguez, a 5-4 majority ruled that the Constitution did not require equality of school funding  By the 1990s, public schools in the North were considerably more segregated than those in the South The Court and Affirmative Action  Many whites came to view affirmative action programs as a form of reverse discrimination  Even as such programs quickly spread from blacks to encompass women, Latinos, AsianAmericans, and Native Americans, conservatives demanded that the Supreme Court invalidate them all  In Griggs v. Duke Power Company (1971), SCOTUS ruled that even racially neutral job requirements such as a written examination were illegal if they operated to exclude a disproportionate number of non-white applicants and were not directly related to job performance  In United Steelworkers of America v. Weber (1979), it upheld a program devised by the Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corporation and its union that set quotas for training and hiring non-white workers in skilled jobs  The justices, however, proved increasingly hostile to governmental affirmative action policies  In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Court overturned an admissions program of the University of California at Davis, a public university, which set aside 16 of 100 places in the entering medical school class for minority students  Fixed affirmative action quotas were rejected but race could be used as one factor among many in admissions decision, so affirmative action continued at most colleges and university  Bakke continues to be standard by which affirmative action programs are judged today The Continuing Sexual Revolution  The most profound changes in American life arose from the continuing sexual revolution  The number of Americans who told public opinion polls that premarital sex was wrong plummeted  The number of divorces soared, reaching more than 1 million in 1975, double the number ten years earlier  The figure for divorces in 1975 exceeded the number of first-time marriages  As a result of women’s changing aspirations and the availability of birth control and legal abortions, the American birthrate declined dramatically  In 1972, Congress approved Title IX, which banned gender discrimination in higher education, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which required that married women be given access to credit in their own name  The gay and lesbian movement, born at the end of the 1960s, expanded greatly during the 1970s and became a major concern of the right  During the 1970s, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental diseases Nixon and Détente  In the Third World, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and secretary of state, continued their predecessors’ policy of attempting to undermine government deemed dangerous to American strategic or economic interests  In his relations with the major communist powers, however, Nixon fundamentally altered Cold War policies  Nixon also hoped that if relations with the Soviet Union improved, the Russians would influence North Vietnam to agree to an end to the Vietnam War on terms acceptable to the United States  Nixon’s China visit sparked a dramatic increase in trade between two countries  Out of this “summit” meeting came agreements for increased trade and two landmark arms-control treaties  SALT (named for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks under way since 1969) froze each country’s arsenal of intercontinental missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads  Nixon and Brezhnev proclaimed a new era of “peaceful coexistence,” in which déetente (cooperation) would replace the hostility of the Cold War Vietnam and Watergate Nixon and Vietnam  Under Nixon’s plan of Vietnamization, American troops would gradually be withdrawn while South Vietnamese soldiers, backed by continued American bombing, did more and more of the fighting  Vietnamization neither limited the war nor ended the antiwar movement  In 1970s Nixon ordered American troops into neutral Cambodia          The invasion did not achieve its military goals, but it destabilized the Cambodian government and set in motion a chain of events that eventually brought to power the Khmer Rouge This local communist movement attempted to force virtually all Cambodians into rural communes and committed widespread massacres in that unfortunate country In the wake of the killing of four antiwar protestors at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard and two by police at Jackson State University in Mississippi, the student movement reached its high-water mark Troop morale in Vietnam plummeted For most of the war, college students had received exemptions and as a result, the army was predominantly composed of working-class whites and members of racial minorities African-Americans accounted for 1/8 of American casualties in Vietnam In 1960, the New York Times published details of the My Lai massacre of 1968, in which a company of American troops killed some 350 South Vietnamese civilians. My Lai further undermined public support for the war In 1971, the Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a classified report prepared by the Defense Department that traced American involvement in Vietnam back to WWII and revealed how successive presidents had misled the American people about it In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act which was the most vigorous assertion of congressional control over foreign policy in the nation’s history, it required the president to seek congressional approval for the commitment of American troops overseas The End of the Vietnam War  The Paris peace agreement, the result of five years of talks, made possible the final withdrawal of American troops  The compromise left in place the government of South Vietnam, but it also left North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers in control of parts of the South  When the North Vietnamese launched a final military offensive  The government of South Vietnam collapsed; the United States did not intervene except to evacuate the American embassy, and Vietnam was reunified under communist rule  By the time the Vietnam War Ended, 58,000 Americans had been killed, along with 3 million to 4 million Vietnamese  The only war the United States has ever lost, Vietnam was a military, political, and social disaster  Some people took the lesson that the United States should be extremely reluctant to commit its armed forces overseas—an outlook sometimes called the Vietnam Syndrome Watergate  Nixon won a landslide victory over liberal Democrat George McGovern, receiving 60% of the popular vote  Nixon was obsessed with secrecy and could not accept honest difference of opinion  When the Pentagon Papers were published, Nixon created a special investigative unit known as “plumbers” to gather information about Daniel Ellsberg, the former government official who had leaked them to the press    In June 1972, five former employees of Nixon’s reelection committee took part in a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. A security guard called police, who arrested the intruders When it became known that Nixon had made tape recordings of conversations in his office, Archibald Cox, a special prosecutor the president had reluctantly appointed to investigate the Watergate affair, demanded copies The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Nixon to provide the tapes—a decision that reaffirmed the principle that the president is not above the law Nixon’s Fall  By 1974, it had become clear that whether or not Nixon knew in advance of the Watergate break-in, he had become involved immediately afterward in authorizing payments to the burglars to remain silent or commit perjury, and he had ordered the FBI to halt its investigation of crime  Nixon’s presidency remains a classic example of the abuse of political power  The president insisted that he had done nothing wrong—or at any rate, that previous presidents had also been guilty of lying and illegality  In violation of the law, the FBI had spied on millions of Americans and had tried to corrupt the civil rights movement  Abuses of power went far beyond the misdeeds of a single president  Liberalism rests, in part, on belief in the ability of government, especially by the federal government, to solve social problems and promote both the public good and individual freedom  Nixon’s fall and the revelations of years of governmental misconduct helped to convince many Americans that conservatives were correct when they argued that to protect liberty it was necessary to limit Washington’s power over American’s lives The End of the Golden Age The Decline of Manufacturing  For the only time in the twentieth century, other than the 1930s, the average American ended the 1970s poorer than when the decade began  To strengthen its anticommunist allies, the United States promoted the industrial reconstruction of Japan and Germany and the emergence of new centers of manufacturing in places like South Korea and Taiwan  In 1971, for the first time in the twentieth century, the United States experienced a merchandise trade deficit—that is, it imported more goods than it exported  In 1971, Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, ending the Bretton Woods agreement that fixed the value of the dollar and other currencies in terms of gold  The end of fixed currency rates injected a new element of instability into the world economy Stagflation  In 1973, a brief war broke out between Israel and its neighbors Egypt and Syria  Middle Eastern Arab states retaliated for Western support of Israel by quadrupling the price of oil and suspending the export of oil to the United States for several months      During the oil embargo, long lines of cars appeared at American gas stations, which either ran out of fuel or limited how much a customer could buy Because the rapidly growing demand for fuel by cars and factories outstripped domestic supplies, by 1973 the United States imported one-third of its oil While the rest of the economy stagnated, western energy production grew apace Rising oil prices rippled through the world economy, contributing to the combination of stagnant economic growth and high inflation known as stagflation As oil prices rose, many Americans shifted from large domestically produced cars, known for high gasoline consumption, to smaller, more fuel-efficient imports The Beleaguered Social Compact  The economic crisis contributed to a breakdown of the postwar social compact  By 1980, Detroit and Chicago had lost more than half the manufacturing jobs that had existed three decades earlier  In Paterson, New Jersey, where great silk factories had arisen in the early twentieth century, deindustrialization left a landscape of abandoned manufacturing plants  The accelerating flow of jobs, investment, and population to the nonunion, low-wage states of the Sunbelt increased the political influence of this conservative region  In New York, the construction of the World Trade Center, completed in 1977, symbolized this shift in the economy  Until destroyed by terrorists twenty-four years later, the 110-story “twin towers” stood as a symbol of New York’s grandeur Labor on the Defensive  The labor movement found itself forced onto the defensive  The weakening of unions and the continuation of the economy’s long-term shift from manufacturing to service employment had an adverse impact on ordinary Americans  Between 1953 and 1973, median family income had doubled  But in 1973, real wages began to fall Ford as President  Ford named Nelson Rockefeller of New York as his own vice president  Among his first acts as president, Ford pardoned Nixon, shielding him from prosecution for obstruction of justice  In domestic policy, Ford’s presidency lacked significant accomplishment  His administration called for cutting taxes on businesses and lessening government regulation of the economy  In a continuation of Nixon’s policy of détente, the United States and Soviet Union signed an agreement at Helsinki, Finland, that recognized the permanence of Europe’s postWorld War II boundaries (including division of Germany)  Over time, the Helsinki Accords inspired movements for greater freedom within the communist countries of eastern Europe The Carter Administration  In the presidential election of 1976, Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia, narrowly defeated Ford     Carter was virtually unknown outside his state when he launches his campaign for the Democratic nomination Carter spoke openly of his religious convictions His passions were making government more efficient, protecting the environment and raising the moral tone of politics As president, Carter appointed an unprecedented number of blacks to important positions, including Andrew Young, a former lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr., as ambassador to the United Nations Carter and the Economic Crisis  The Democratic Party found itself ill-equipped to deal with the economic crisis  Carter viewed inflation, not unemployment, as the country’s main economic problem, and to combat it he promoted cuts in spending on domestic programs  In the hope that increased competition would reduce prices, his administration enacted deregulation in the trucking and airline industries  Anticipating what would come to be called the supply-side economics of the Reagan administration, Carter in 1978 inaugurated tax cuts for wealthier Americans in the hope that this would stimulate investment and encourage economic growth  Oil prices kept rising, thanks to the overthrow of the shah of Iran, discussed later, and inflation did not decline  By the time Carter took office, more than 200 nuclear plants were operating or on order  But in 1979 the industry suffered a near-fatal blow when an accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania released a large amount of radioactive steam into the atmosphere  The Three Mile Island mishap reinforced fears about the environmental hazards associated with nuclear energy and put a halt to the industry’s expansion The Emergence of Human Rights Politics  Under Carter, a commitment to promoting human rights became a centerpiece of American foreign policy for the first time  In 1978, Carter cut off aid to the brutal military dictatorship governing Argentina, which in the name of anticommunism had launched a “dirty war” against its own citizens, kidnapping off the streets and secretly murdering an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 persons  It was difficult to define exactly what rights should and should not be considered universally applicable, but various groups could and did unite under the umbrella of global human rights  Carter believed that the post-Vietnam era, American foreign policy should deemphasize Cold War thinking  In 1979, he brought the leaders of Egypt and Israel to the presidential retreat at Camp David and brokered a historic peace agreement, the Camp David Accords, between the two countries  The United States continued its support of allies with records of serious human rights violations such as the governments of Guatemala, the Philippines, South Korea, and Iran The Iran Crisis and Afghanistan       At the end of 2017, Carter travelled to Afghanistan to help celebrate the shah’s rule, causing the internal opposition to become more and more anti-American The Iranian revolution marked an ideological shift in opposition movements in the Middle East from socialism and Arab nationalism to religious fundamentalism At the end of 1979, the Soviet Union sent thousands of troops into Afghanistan to support a friendly government threatened by an Islamic rebellion Afghanistan became the Soviet Vietnam, an unwinnable conflict whose mounting casualties seriously weakened the government at home The president announced the Carter Doctrine, declaring that the United States would use military force, if necessary, to protect its interest in the Persian Gulf A faction of Islamic fundamentalists known as the Taliban eventually came to power in Afghanistan. Tragically, they would prove as hostile to the United States as to Moscow The Rising Tide of Conservatism  The combination of domestic and international dislocations during the 1970s created a widespread sense of anxiety among Americans and offered conservatives new political opportunities  Fears about a decline of American power in the world led to calls for a renewal of the Cold War  Rising urban crime rates reinforced demands for law and order and attacks on courts considered too lenient toward criminals  As the 1970s went on, conservatives abandoned overt opposition to the black struggle for racial justice  The neoconservatives, a group of intellectuals who charged that the 1960s had produced a decline in moral standards and respect for authority  They had come to believe that even well-intentioned government social programs did more harm than good  Neoconservatives repudiated the attempts by Nixon, Ford, and Carter to reorient foreign policy away from the Cold War The Religious Right  Challenged by the secular and material concerns of American society, some denominations tried to bring religion into harmony with these interests; others reasserted more traditional religious values  Even as membership in mainstream denominations like Episcopalianism and Presbyterianism declined, evangelical Protestantism flourished  During the 1960s, many members of the burgeoning evangelical churches of the suburbs, South, and West had become more and more alienated from a culture that seemed to them to trivialize religion and promote immorality  Christian conservatives seemed most agitated by the ongoing sexual revolution, which they saw as undermining the traditional family and promoting immorality. They believed as a result of the 1960s, American freedom was out of control The Battle over the Equal Rights Amendment  The Equal Rights Amendment had been revived by second-wave feminists     In 1972, with broad bipartisan support, Congress approved the ERA and sent it to the states for ratification and it also aroused unexpected protest from those who claimed it would discredit the role of wife and homemaker To supporters, the amendment offered a guarantee of women’s freedom in the public sphere and to its foes, freedom for women still resided in the divinely appointed role of wife and mother Opponents claimed that the ERA would let men “off the hook” by denying their responsibility to provide for their wives and children Thanks to the mobilization of conservative women, the amendment failed to achieve ratification by the required thirty-eight states The Abortion Controversy  The movement to reverse the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision began among Roman Catholics, whose church condemned abortion under any circumstances  Life, the movement insisted, begins at conception, and abortion is nothing less than murder  Between this position and the feminist insistence that a women’s right to control her body includes the right to a safe, legal abortion, compromise was impossible  Today, most women continue to have the legal right of access to abortion  But in many areas the procedure became more and more difficult to obtain as hospitals and doctors stopped providing it The Tax Revolt  Economic distress inspired a critique of government rather than of business  New environmental regulations led to calls for less government intervention in the economy  Economic decline also broadened the constituency receptive to demands for lower taxes  To conservatives, tax reductions served the dual purpose of enhancing business profits and reducing the resources available to government, thus making new social programs financially impossible Conservatism in the West  Many southerners had left their homes for southern California, bringing with them their distinctive form of evangelical Christianity  Evangelicals felt the decline of traditional values and gravitated to the California Republican Party, from which emerged national Republican leaders such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan  Using the language of freedom from government tyranny, leaders in western states insisted that the states themselves be given decision-making power over issues like grazing rights, mining development, and whether public lands should be closed to fishing and hunting The Election of 1980  By 1980, Carter’s approval rating had fallen to 21 percent—lower than Nixon’s at the time of his resignation     Ronald Reagan pledged to end stagflation and restore the country’s dominant role in the world and its confidence in itself and claimed “Let’s make America great again,” he proclaimed “The era of self-doubt is over.” During the campaign, Reagan repeatedly condemned welfare “cheats,” school busing, and affirmative action Although not personally religious and the first divorced man to run for president, Reagan won the support of the Religious Right and conservative upholders of “family values” Carter’s defeat launched the Reagan Revolution, which completed the transportation of freedom from the rallying cry of the left to a possession of the right The Reagan Revolution  His victory in 1980 brought to power a diverse coalition of old and new conservatives: Sunbelt suburbanites and urban working-class ethnics; antigovernment crusaders and advocates of a more aggressive foreign policy; libertarians who believed in freeing the individual from restraint the Christian Right, which sought to restore what they considered traditional moral values to American life Reagan and American Freedom  Unlike most modern presidents, Reagan was content to outline broad policy themes and leave their implementation to others  He was an excellent public speaker, and his optimism and affability appealed to large numbers of Americans  Freedom, indeed, became the watchword of the Reagan Revolution  Reagan promised to free government from control by “special interests,” but these were racial minorities, unionists, and others hoping to use Washington’s power to attack social inequalities, not businessmen seeking political favors, the traditional target of liberals  On issues ranging from taxes to government spending, national security, crime, welfare, and “traditional values,” he put Democrats on the defensive  But he also proved to be pragmatists, recognizing when to compromise so as not to fragment his diverse coalition of supporters Reagan’s Economic Policies  Reagan meant curtailing the power of unions, dismantling regulations, and radically reducing taxes  He declared Taxation violated the principle that “the right to earn your own keep and keep what you earn” was “what it means to be free”  In 1981, Reagan persuaded Congress to reduce the top tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent and to index tax brackets to take inflation into account  Five years later, the Tax Reform Act reduced the rate on the wealthiest Americans to 38 percent  Reagan also appointed conservative heads of regulatory agencies, who cut back on environmental protection and workplace safety rules about which business had complained for years  Reagan’s economic program, known as “supply-side economics” by proponents and “tickle-down economics” by critics, relied on high interest rates to curb inflation and  lower tax rates, especially for businesses and high-income Americans, to stimulate private investment Everyone would benefit from increased business profits, and because of a growing economy, government receipts would rise despite lower tax rates Reagan and Labor  The hiring of workers to replace permanently those who had gone on strike, a rare occurrence before 1980, became widespread  Manufacturing employment, where union membership was concentrated, meanwhile continued its long-term decline  When Reagan left office, both the service and retail sectors employed more Americans than manufacturing, and only 11 percent of workers with non-government jobs were union members  Reaganomics, as critics dubbed the administration’s policies, initially produced the most severe recession since the 1930s  At the same time, the rate of inflation, 13.5 percent at the beginning of 1981, declined to 3.5 percent in 1988, partly because a period of expanded oil production that drove down prices succeeded the shortages of the 1970s  By the end of Reagan’s presidency in 1989, the real gross domestic product had risen by 25 percent and unemployment was down to 5.5 percent The Problem of Inequality  By the mid-1990s, the richest 1 percent of Americans owned 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, twice their share twenty years earlier  Most spent their income not on productive investments and charity as supply-side economists had promised, but on luxury goods, real-estate speculation, and corporation buyouts that often led to plant closings, as operations were consolidated  The income of middle-class families, especially those with a wife who did not work outside the home, stagnated while that of the poorest one-fifth of the population declined  Thanks to the opening of colleges and professional schools to minority students as a result of the civil rights movement and affirmative action programs, the black middle class expanded considerably  Overall, during the 1980s black males fell farther than any other group in the population in terms of wages and jobs The Second Gilded Age  The 1980s, like the 1890s, would be widely remembered as a decade of misplaced values  The deregulation of savings and loan associations—banks that had generally confined themselves to financing home mortgages—allowed these institutions to invest in unsound real-estate ventures and corporate mergers  After Reagan left office, the federal government bailed out the savings and loan institutions at a cost to taxpayers estimated at $250 billion  Reagan took credit for economic expansion while blaming congressional leaders for the ballooning federal deficit and won a triumphant reelection in 1984 Conservatives and Reagan     Reagan sharply reduced funding for Great Society antipoverty programs as food stamps, school lunches, and federal financing of low-income housing It left intact core elements of the welfare state, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which many conservatives wished to curtail significantly or repeal Reagan’s Justice department cut back on civil rights enforcement and worked to curtail affirmative action programs But to the end of Reagan’s presidency, the supreme Court continued to approve plans by private employers and city and state governments to upgrade minority employment Reagan and the Cold War  Reagan resumed vigorous denunciation of the Soviet Union—calling it an “evil empire”—and sponsored the largest military buildup in American history, including new long-range bombers and missiles  Reagan persuaded NATO, over much opposition, to introduce short-range nuclear weapons into Europe to counter Soviet forces  In 1983, half of the American population watched The Day After, a television program that unflinchingly depicted the devastation that would be caused by a nuclear war  Reagan generally relied on military aid rather than American troops to pursue his foreign policy objectives The Iran-Contra Affair  In 1984, Congress banned military aid to the Contras fighting the Sandista government of Nicaragua (which had ousted the American-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979  In 1985, Reagan secretly authorized the sale of arms to Iran—now involved in a war with its neighbor, Iraq—in order to secure the release of a number of American hostages held by Islamic groups  Eleven members of the administration eventually were convicted of perjury or destroying documents, or pleaded guilty before being tried  Reagan denied knowledge of the illegal proceedings, but the Iran-Contra affair undermined confidence that he controlled his own administration Reagan and Gorbachev  Reagan softened his anticommunist rhetoric and established good relations with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev who inaugurated policies known as glasnost (political openness) and perestroika (economic reform)  In 1988, Gorbachev began pulling soviet troops out of Afghanistan  Having entered office as an ardent Cold Warrior, Reagan left with hostilities between the superpowers much diminished Reagan’s Legacy  In some ways, the Reagan Revolution undermined the very values and institutions conservatives held dear  Reagan’s policies inspired a speculative frenzy that enriched architects of corporate takeovers and investors in the stock market while leaving in their wake plant closings, job losses, and devastated communities  Because of the Iran-Contra scandal and the enormous deficits the government had accumulated, Reagan left the presidency with his reputation somewhat tarnished The Election of 1988  The 1988 election seemed to show politics sinking to new lows  Television advertisements and media exposés now dominated political campaigns  Although he did not match Reagan’s landslide victory of 1984, Bush achieved a substantial majority, winning 54 percent of the popular vote