I feel like he could be a third way and establish an alternate path from both traditional moderate Republicanism and Reaganite conservatism with his bleeding heart conservatism within the GOP (social liberalism on some issue, libertarian market economics, support for civil rights, focus on inner city issues via advocacy for enterprise zones).
Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
I’d imagine he’d be in the mix for the 1984 Republican nominee although I think Howard Baker will be the 84 nominee.
I’m also curious what policies Carey will implement during his first year in office. I’d imagine basically all of the big ambitious legislation will get done in the first few months when has the most good will and biggest mandate to rule. Also intrigued on whether he makes any major changes with taxes
Probably reduces them. When he was governor of New York, Carey cut corporate taxes from 14% down to 10%, capped income tax at 9% and reduced capital gains tax. Maybe the Carey administration does something with tax credits, because he offered them in New York for new investment.
Yeah I could see Carey having a very similar program to JFK on that front in addition to an attitude of “deficits; what are they?”
So like Reagan but the money is going towards public works and welfare rather than the military
Basically, yeah. Essentially keep rates high to break inflation with counter-cyclical spending to drive down unemployment
Nazi Space Spy
Banned
So what does Reagan do next? Running for President in 1984 is obviously out of the question, but does he just retire to his ranch? Does he do radio? Could he end up returning to the Silver Screen?
Probably some combo of those first two plus advocacy for various causes as a party elder statesman, maybe some corporate boards. Since he had a relatively unconventional path to politics and isn’t an attorney a foray into lobbying is unlikely
Why do I imagine Ford and Reagan are going to compete for the GOP leadership and the direction it will go.
Assessing the Damage
Assessing the Damage
"I'm often reminded," Richard Nixon quipped in an interview a few weeks after the 1980 Presidential election, "of the earnest questions of whether or not the Republicans would ever win the Presidency again after Goldwater '64, and then lo and behold, four years later, there I am." The same question that seemed to boil up after every major loss by an American party was now circulating again - where did the GOP go from here, and how soon could it win another election?
It seemed an odd question for a party that had just won three straight Presidential terms, one of them by a 49-state reelection landslide, but during those twelve years they had not once controlled either House of Congress for a single two-year period, the first time that had happened in the history of the party, and the 1976 election had been narrow, scrappy and beyond controversial. The 1978 midterms and 1980 downballot elections had reduced the GOP to one-fifth of the Governors in the country and less than a third of the Senators and Congressmen, and Hugh Carey had decisively defeated Ronald Reagan essentially everywhere sans the suburbanizing Atlantic South and Reagan's native, libertarian-flavored West.
Carey watched the election returns come in from the Plaza Hotel in New York City and gave a triumphant speech to a crowd on Times Square when it was done; the curious juxtaposition of the President-elect in front of sex shops and porn theaters [1] was fodder for late night comics for the next few months. Reagan, for his part, spoke in Los Angeles and kept his remarks short, polite and circumspect. "There will be an hour to analyze and ask what we missed," Reagan said. "That hour is not now. Right now, the task at hand is to congratulate President-elect Carey, to thank him for a campaign well run, and to let him know the prayers of the whole of America are with him as he looks ahead to a monumental task."
The recriminations within the GOP were quick to spread by the end of the week. Reagan's camp demanded to know why Ford and Dole hadn't been more diligent about getting out and campaigning for the ticket; Ford testily replied to such insinuations that he had toured Michigan, Ohio and Indiana with Reagan after the convention as a unity ticket and noted that he had a "day job" to tend to. More moderate Republicans, and some conservatives too, placed the blame on Reagan himself for bizarre mistakes such as his "state's rights" rally in Mississippi earning him well over a week of extremely negative coverage, or his choice to not campaign aggressively in the Northeast or Illinois, ceding a huge chunk of electoral votes to Carey. Some worried that his message had been too conservative both in the primary and the general and he had come off as a rigid reactionary, scaring voters; others claimed he had not run on a sufficiently anti-establishment message, turning off Americans looking for a "clear choice" by tacking to the middle after securing the nomination and tying himself to the "Ford failure."
In all, though, many strategists suspected that the results had fairly little to do with the candidate at all. The headwinds for the GOP - the end of Vietnam, Watergate, the Nixon Shock, stagflation, oil crises in 1973 and 1979, and the debacle in Panama - would have been too great for any candidate to endure, and indeed Reagan may have made the race closer than a less charismatic candidate without as loyal of a following would have. After the loss, Reagan moved on to a quiet retirement at his California ranch fundraising for various charities and conservative advocacy projects - and his endorsement would be fairly valued in primaries featuring more than one candidate from the party's conservative wing for most of the 1980s - and his weekly radio program continued until 1986. In the late 1980s, memory loss and other various health struggles encouraged him to withdraw from his more rigorous public engagements, and he retired from public view entirely in 1991 after a diagnosis of Alzheimers. He would attend the Republican National Conventions in 1984 and 1988, speaking at both, but for "the Gipper," politics was a thing of the past. He died in June 2004, and was buried on his property. When his beloved wife Nancy passed away twelve years later, she was buried next to him.
The GOP as a whole did not have the option to merely retire quietly to its ranch, of course, and the question of where to go next was not only live but would define it for the next twelve years until it managed to win the Presidency again. [2] Over twelve years, it had had two Presidents and three Presidential candidates, all of a very different breed. They had had the law-and-order, anti-Communist prodigal son returning from the political wilderness who had promised to end the excesses of the 1960s with his trusted and tested leadership; the affable suburban Midwesterner who promised budget orthodoxy, national unity and a more traditional Old Right conservatism; and the insurgent New Right champion who promised a more revolutionary, epochal brand of reform. The first two had failed in office, the third had failed to persuade the American voter of his vision of what America could be. These three GOPs - the Nixonian one, the Fordian one, and the Reaganite one - had more overlap than they had differences, but there were still three distinct factions that detested each other almost as much as they disliked Democrats. What course of action would work in a Washington where they faced Congressional super-minorities, an ascendant brawler as President who was the toughest opponent the party had faced since LBJ, and where they were coming off a dismal record spread out over three terms in office was unclear, but the answer would have to emerge soon - 1982, and more critically 1984, would be here before they knew it...
[1] New York in the 70s/early 80s, baby!
[2] Spoiler!
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The Forgotten Elections
The Forgotten Elections
With the transformative elections in the United States in the autumn of 1980, it is easy to forget that two key US allies also went to the polls in October and November of that year, with important results for the ensuing decade in both. In Australia, the incumbent Liberal government of Malcolm Fraser went to the polls and nearly lost its majority to the Labor Party, winning a 1-seat majority in the 125-member House of Representatives - only to see its Senate majority vanish. Fraser would remain on as Prime Minister, but Labor kept its previously unpopular leader Bill Hayden after the surprisingly strong finish and Australian politics promised to have another poll before long, possibly even before the standard three-year term was up.
It was in West Germany, however, that the real shock came. The sharp-elbowed, aggressive Franz-Josef Strauss of the CSU had become the first-ever leader of his Bavarian regional party to head the conservative CDU/CSU coalition in that country, and ahead of the election with Helmut Schmidt's SDP most suspected that Schmidt would be narrowly returned to office despite a mediocre West German economy, which would likely be what it took to get Strauss's longtime internal rival, CDU leader Helmut Kohl, to be the candidate for the Chancellorship at the next election.
However, two events changed the calculation dramatically. The first was the detonation of a bomb at Oktoberfest in Munich which killed over a hundred people and was, as most such events were at that point in history, blamed on the Red Army Faction terrorist group. The second wrench was in East Germany, when hardline communist leader Erich Honecker outlined what became known as the "Gera Demands," after the town in which he gave a speech to a party conference. The demands were aimed at West Germany and outlined East German stipulations for continued warming of relations across the Iron Curtain that had been ongoing since the late 1960s had seen the advent of Ostpolitik under Social Democratic leader Willi Brandt. The demands baffled West German voters at best, and along with the outrage sparked by the Oktoberfest bombing proved a key boost at the last minute for Strauss as West Germans headed for the polls. His CDU/CSU gained enough seats for an absolute majority, pushing the SDP-FDP coalition of Helmut Schmidt from power. Germany had seen one of its most shocking election campaigns ever - and now “Germany’s Nixon” was leaving Bavaria for his new role in Bonn…
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As someone who has spent a lot of time trying to work out the particulars of the Republican party, which shade of which conservative subgroup each are, I am definitely interested in seeing who are the standard bearers for each of the three parties listed within.
Foreign results are certainly interesting, possible that Hayden gets to the main office in this timeline? Interesting to see where it goes. I'll hold my hand up and say that I know nothing of German politics so this result is unique, at the very least?
Yes - Hayden will eventually be Australia’s PM for the 80s rather than Bob Hawke. The exact implications that has for Australian politics im not entirely sure of.
For Germany, I’m not sure how realistic a Strauss win even is. There’s long been suspicion that the CDU set him up to fail in an election they saw as unwinnable to clear the way for Kohl, who absolutely loathed Strauss. With a much weaker late 70s economy, and earlier, Germany is just that much more strained by 1980; IOTL, they actually navigated the stagflation era pretty ok, and that’s why Schmidt was still pretty popular.
Strauss as Chancellor would be… interesting at least. And maybe wouldn’t last super long. Colorful, corrupt, and very conservative.
Small quibble. The term "Early onset Alzheimer's" is used for cases of Alzheimer's disease in people under 65.
Mmmm fair enough, didn’t know that was the cutoff. Fixed!
The people of TTL America don’t know it, but they’re lucky that the devil hasn’t gotten a chance to visit his revenge on humanity by putting his earthly form in the Oval Office
So having done some more research; the consensus on this board from a lot of Germans who’ve been posed this q before is that Strauss would have needed an absolute majority in 1980 because everybody who wasn’t in the CDU/CSU (and even many within it) hated him. However, had the 1980 Oktoberfest bombing been worse, which it could have, he could well have been elected. This kind of freak POD swinging an election is right in line with 1970s/80s history and is the kind of weirdness I enjoy in my alternate history and is in line with this TL for that matter so that’s getting retconned into the narrative
we are in the good timeline where the antichrist failed to sway americans with his honeyed words and the end times were avoided