It sure would have been nice to see a Ford among all those Buick dealers, not to mention a Reagan. But your sentiment about the historic change represented here is one we all deeply share. It brought to mind the graphic above that somebody created shortly after Election Day. Talk about dramatic. Also, not a bad way to cap the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.
The first election I remember feeling that same sense of hope was, believe it or not, in 1980. As an eighth grader growing up in a small town in rural Connecticut, the fate of the American hostages in Iran turned the attention of me and most of my classmates away from the Red Sox and Yankees and toward politics for the first time. We collected articles and newspaper clippings in loose-leaf binders. We wrote book reports about the hostages. We learned to find Tehran on a map. We watched Walter Cronkite.
And just as (what turned out to be) a pretty overwhelming majority of Americans, we rooted for the cowboy from California to rescue them. And in our minds, he did. At home, I still have the front page of the Norwich Bulletin, our local newspaper, from January 20, 1981, with its 36-point font headline blaring, “A Great Day to Be an American!,” with a picture of President and Mrs. Reagan on one side, and the freed hostages arriving with arms raised at that air base in Germany on the other. I remember a sign on the door of the plane: “Welcome Back to Freedom.” That’s how a lot of people in my hometown felt when Reagan won.
And when my father, the sheet metal mechanic, saw contracts flooding into the local plant shortly afterwards, and people going back to work, it was enough to convince me to cast my first ballot for President at age 18 for Ronald Reagan. Of course, four years later, I was in Iowa working for Democrats, having been disillusioned by what seemed more like contempt for people in those very factories, but that’s the subject of another post. The point is, the election of 1980 made us all believe that our country could get back on track.
And that’s how most people feel today. Now that I’m friends with some of the people who wrote those speeches for President Reagan; and I get my hair cut by a guy who was actually a student in Tehran back in 1980—I hope we have a little time to let that sense of renewal wash over us for at least a little while, before we break out quotes from Keynes and the “big government” bumper stickers and the scandal du jour.
I know that somewhere, somebody is waiting to dust off Bob Dole’s famous Kafka-like placard he used to sink the Clinton health plan. But I just noticed that earlier today, Bob Dole himself introduced incoming HHS Secretary Tom Daschle during his Senate confirmation hearing today, calling for “real, constructive, bipartisan action.” I hope we all embrace that notion—not Dodge it.
