Bedtime For Bozo: A Reagan Assassination TL
The presidency of Ronald Reagan is one of the shortest and most bizarre chapters of American history. A former actor elected Governor of California in the Republican's 1966 comeback and longstanding joke among liberals, Reagan built up a following as a conservative firebrand and, after almost upsetting incumbent President Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries, swept to victory in the 1980 Presidential election against Democrat Jimmy Carter. On March 30th 1981, just 69 days into his Presidency, Reagan was assassinated by an obsessive Jodie Foster fan named John Hinckley Jr. The whole scenario reads more like a cartoon than a real Presidency.
Perhaps fittingly, his successor, George H.W. Bush, was a far more subdued politician. He did not push so eagerly for Reagan's supply-side economic approach (which he regarded as 'voodoo economics'), though his government's investments in getting the economy going again were still fairly successful. He was not as hawkish as his predecessor, keeping international relations reasonably diplomatic (and infuriating one of Reagan's stauch allies, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, in the process) and being the bigger man over Brezhnev, Andropov and Chenyenko's fuming rather than trying to strike fear into the hearts of the Soviets in the most comically over the top way, as Reagan might have.
While, by 1984, most voters were reasonably satisfied with the current administration, the Republican right was not. Many of them mourned the absence of Reagan's aggressively patriotic approach; even today, some speculate Reagan could have won all 50 states in his re-election campaign; and resented Bush for his lack of vigor in personally pushing their agenda. To appease them, he picked as his Vice Presidential nominee Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, one of Reagan's closest friends (both geographically and politically), and was pushed to declare at the 1984 Republican convention that he would tell the Democratic Congress, 'Read my lips- no new taxes!'
In the Democratic camp, there was a sense they needed to be able to capitalise on public indifference to Bush; it was felt the Democrats needed to win back moderates by capitalizing on a new approach. A bloody battle for the nomination came down to the liberal former Vice President Walter Mondale, and the moderate Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. Eventually, however, Mondale's famous protestation of Hart's policy agenda ('Where's the beef?') and his backing by the party establishment delivered Mondale the nomination. Mondale's running mate was Kentucky Governor Martha Layne Collins, chosen as a compromise between Mondale liking the prospect of a female running mate to establish a precedent, and party activists feeling they needed to recapture voters from poorer and industrial states to stand a chance of winning. In retaliation to Bush's pledge from the Republican convention a few weeks prior, Mondale declared, 'Mr Bush will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did.'
Unfortunately for Mondale, his lip-reading skills needed work.
Bush/Laxalt (Republican): 389 EVs, 54.8%
Mondale/ Collins (Democratic): 149 EVs, 44.4%
While Bush's victory was larger than Reagan's margin over Carter in 1980 in the popular vote, and the Republicans made further inroads into the House and Senate, the results were still something of a surprise. Pundits had predicted that Mondale would outperform Carter on the Pacific coast and in the Northeast while Bush swept the South, but the Democratic vote picked up slightly almost everywhere. It was felt that, despite his cumbersome campaigning, Mondale's played-for-honesty approach combined with Collins's presence did surprisingly well in the South. On the flipside, Bush's moderation of the Republican right had delivered him the Pacific coast and most of the Eastern seaboard.
Unfortunately for the Republicans, things were about to get rocky.
(Not sure how plausible this is, but hopefully it'll be kinda interesting.)
