The Brooklyn Boxer vs. Hollywood Ron
The Democrats emerged out of their convention unified and optimistic, even if there were grumblings from some corners of the party that it had been a little too "New York-y" for Middle America. It was widely agreed in all corners of American politics that the Democrats most certainly had the wind in their sails: the GOP had held the White House for twelve tumultuous years that included the end of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the controversial Ohio recount, and now the Panama Crisis, and despite occasional pockets of improving employment numbers and GDP growth they had presided over a decade of oil shocks, stubbornly high inflation, factory closures and now, at the end, the worst economic contraction since the Great Depression. To the average Democrat, the Republicans had governed poorly first under the shady Nixon and the hapless Ford - now they seemed ready to foist upon the United States an extremist cowboy in Reagan. Many partisans, in particular the campaign operatives who had in their youth come up under Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern and powered the Watergate Baby landslides of 1974, the case made itself.
Carey's camp strongly disagreed, and it was perhaps the greatest mark of the difference between the Old Left, New Dealer wing of the party and the ascendant New Left, college-educated apparatchik wing. Carey could vividly recall Reagan defeated an incumbent two-term Governor in 1966 on a campaign of backlash to the cultural excesses of the 1960s and how he had nearly toppled a sitting President of his own party four short years earlier, long before the public and the Republican base had aggressively turned against Ford. Winning a fourth term in the White House, especially when it was an open seat, was no easy task, but Reagan was not to be underestimated. His skepticism of some advisors suggesting he run on "Reagan's radicalism" was borne out with the Reagan camp's hard pivot to a softer, more optimistic tone out of the convention, playing on the Californian's silver screen charisma, and their nomination of a respected female foreign-policy wonk in Anne Armstrong as Reagan's VP choice, hoping that Armstrong's domestic ambiguity would avoid difficult questions on the issues of the day. Carey anticipated a deluge of aggressive campaigning and negative ads about "New York values" and "tax and spend liberals" against him to appeal to culturally conservative working-class voters, and if Reagan was going to attack his strengths - that is, the rebound of New York - then he was going to do the same.
Much of Reagan's political appeal had always been built on his movie star looks and movie star charisma. Though he was hardly a Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart, much of America had still grown up watching Reagan's movies and he was a cultural icon for a broad swath of America for his career in Hollywood as much as he was a major leader of the New Right for his conservatism. The Brooklyn brain trust was skeptical that attacking the latter would do much good; Reagan was running as an anti-establishment outsider pitching his appeal entirely on having first conquered the old, tired Nixon-Ford establishment and gunning for the creaky New Deal establishment next. No, the way to hit Reagan was to attack his appeal as a
movie star.
Historians of the 1980 campaign are not sure exactly who in the Carey camp coined the terms "the Brooklyn Boxer" and "Hollywood Ron," but whoever it was scored a major PR coup. The first term told the story about Carey that the campaign wanted to tell - a gruff, Irish-American who had been an amateur boxer in his youth; a war hero; a tough sunofabitch who "beat" the issues facing America's greatest city and saved it from bankruptcy and ruin. This was not a hippie-fueled McGovern or a lecturing moral scold like Carter - this was your father's kind of Democrat, a hard-edged union man who fights for what's right and isn't afraid to sock somebody in the mouth to do it. The "Brooklyn Boxer" campaign persona also served to try to paper over media aghastness at what were seen as below-the-belt attacks on Reagan's age and competency for office - if Reagan hadn't expected to be hit, repeatedly, he shouldn't have stepped in the ring. Pollster Pat Caddell suggested in later years that the aggressiveness of the Carey campaign probably wouldn't have worked against anybody else to the same effect and probably turned off more than a few gettable liberal and moderate voters, but "Hollywood Ron" was the left hook to the "Brooklyn Boxer" right.
"Hollywood Ron" was not Ronald Reagan, a John Wayne stand-in who would fix all of America's problems; he was a slick, empty actor, all shine and no substance. A Democrat attacking a Republican for being too associated with Hollywood was, and still is, a strange phenomenon, considering the film industry's liberal reputation then and now, but Carey leaned into it. The Carey campaign was relying heavily on making the electorate see Reagan as an unserious old man out of his element on the big stage, a B-movie actor who failed upwards and could not be trusted as anything other than sleazy liar who was too good on TV. On policy, meanwhile, the Democratic campaigns kept it simple - rather than attack Reagan's policies as too extreme, which Carey thought would fall flat with a very angry electorate open to drastic change, they instead simply reminded voters, over and over and over again, of all the things they disliked about the Republicans over the last twelve years, and presented them with a simple alternative, best encapsulated in Carey's famous campaign ad that played various scenes of the debacles of the 1970s and closed with the text: "Had Enough? Vote Carey."
