Gov. Reagan loses enough middle America support from his poor response to Patty Hearst kidnapping?

there's a scene in which the newspaper man played by Robert Culp is saying people have grudging admiration for bank robbing [especially involving Depression-era Texas!], but they tend to draw the line at kidnapping.

St. Paul Minnesota was a notorious haven for mobsters well before WWI, and the emerging 'Motor-Bandits' who knocked off banks. They all had protection from Police Chief Brown, after paying a fee, and vowing to not commit any crimes in city limits, across the river in Minneapolis, that was ok, but not Saint Paul. It was to be neutral ground for crooks.
https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2015/11/crooks-haven-gangster-era-st-paul
https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2015/11/crooks-haven-gangster-era-st-paul
So while St.Paul was crime free, the rest of MN dealt with having 20% of the Nations bank robberies.

That all ended after Ma Barker and her gang kidnapped Ed Bremer, Bank President of a Saint Paul Bank, and son of Adolph Bremer, owner of Schmidt Beer breweries.

FBI got involved, chased the gang after he was released, with most of them killed or captured by the FBI, after they made 'Public Enemy #1'
 
He was leaving office in 1974 anyway, . . .
The election was Nov. '74, and Reagan chose not to run for a third term. He stayed in office a lame duck till early Jan. '75, at which time newly elected Jerry Brown became governor. Yes, the Jerry Brown we're all familiar with!

My point is, more so than appearing a mean-hearted person, if Reagan comes across as clumsy and blundering and doing unpredictable things which don't always make sense, that will really hurt his political star.
 
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And two other St. Paul police chiefs as well.

Holy Shit. :neutral:

Talk about a gulf between theory and practice.

Yeah, can you imagine the klnd of reception that St. Paul chiefs would be getting at statewide police conventions?

"Oh look, there's the guy who pays gangsters to murder people in our city. Hey John, how ya doin'?"

But that sort of thing is not entirely unheard of, even in more "respectable" circles. It is stated in the Spielberg film Munich(and I would assume the book by George Jonas as well) that the CIA in the 1970s was bribing members of Black September to avoid hitting American targets in Europe.
 
The election was Nov. '74, and Reagan chose not to run for a third term. He stayed in office a lame duck till early Jan. '75, at which time newly elected Jerry Brown became governor. Yes, the Jerry Brown we're all familiar with!

My point is, more so than appearing a mean-hearted person, if Reagan comes across as clumsy and blundering and doing unpredictable things which don't always make sense, that will really hurt his political star.
Because Reagan never did anything like that in OTL.
 
. . . It is stated in the Spielberg film Munich(and I would assume the book by George Jonas as well) that the CIA in the 1970s was bribing members of Black September to avoid hitting American targets in Europe.
and maybe it’s less harmful if it’s a low-level judgement call where it’s understood that it can stop at any time, and modest money that does not appreciably increase military capability?

Not that I’m justifying it by any stretch. Rather, we need to understand the world and understand how people justify such things to themselves, so we can bend the curve for the better.
 
and maybe it’s less harmful if it’s a low-level judgement call where it’s understood that it can stop at any time, and modest money that does not appreciably increase military capability?

Not that I’m justifying it by any stretch. Rather, we need to understand the world and understand how people justify such things to themselves, so we can bend the curve for the better.

Rather than the money going to buy arms, I was thinking the problem would be more that if the CIA bribes Black September not to kill Americans, then that means Black September is killing more Europeans who would not have died had the US not been protecting Americans.

Of course, if you assume that Black September is gonna kill X number of people anyway, steering them away from your citizens isn't actually adding to the body count.
 
Or . . . draw a lesson from how a mob boss keeps people in line. In part, by maintaining a fair amount of uncertainty about where people stand. Okay, so you've skimmed some off the top. Is it a small enough amount that he's not really going to mind, or is he going to talk to you about respect and trusting each other, or is he going to 'whack' you?

So, what we would have on members of the Black September who we would be in a position to bribe, is that we could turn them over to German or Italian or French authorities, or we could 'whack' them if it comes down to it. Not turning them in immediately could be the bribe for information and for them settling down for a while. That is, we get the uncertainty working in our favor.
 
I'm going to just weigh in with my usual dark cynicism relative to your admirable buoyant and cheerful outlook that there are other factors in work than the authentic reactions of a spectrum of common people. Of course that is going on, and US democracy is not yet a complete and utter sham, but the layer of professional and highly situated cultural manipulators is a pretty old, established thing--Mark Hanna's approach to the 1896 election is already a case in point, then Woodrow Wilson hired professional ad men into the administration to manage wartime national narrative, and we just sink deeper and deeper.

Reagan's national image was very much a product of such manipulations--though as an artistic personality as you put it, I believe managing his own image was something he had a high degree of responsibility for. It was his forte. Now combining that with his tendency to say things that exhibited some combination of awesome stupidity, stunning levels or ignorance or sociopathic cruelty might seem paradoxical, but there is clearly something in the psyche of Americans, if not everyone in the world, that resonates with a smug bully on a roll, as long as you can identify with him and believe yourself to be one of the winners stomping a boot on the face of the losers, forever. It is the basis of what passes for right wing humor. I've argued before that the agency of common people is limited and constrained--this does not mean absent at all, but it takes both effort and risk for people who are not in the privileged inner circles of wealth and their hand-picked sycophants to act against the interests of the establishment. They can be mean and vengeful and quite over the top ruthless too--not typically judiciously so, unless the circumstances require it, but rather Custer-level massacre type mentalities. "Put them all to the sword for God shall know his own." It all is integrated into the Jacksonian mentality, whereby Americans who believe themselves in the wide but sharply bounded inner circle of "people like us who belong" believe themselves to be kindly and fair, if kind of crude and rough, among our own but that suspicious, ruthless vigilance is required against outsiders, and often "outsiders" are people who have been living among the circle of True Americans for centuries. People like us rejoice in the defeat and debacle of people like them, and a certain frontier toughness is assumed to be necessary. "We do not negotiate with terrorists" comes out of this mentality.

Given this streak of mass mind exists in the USA, professional manipulators know how to play it. Without both elements something like the Reagan Administration would have been unthinkable.

But with it, there is a dialectic going on between the manipulators and the manipulated. You might argue that it is patronizing to describe them like that, but I will mitigate by claiming the latter are playing a responsive part. They want their theatre and a successful manipulator knows how to deliver the kind of drama they want. If on the whole a certain political team is delivering the red meat of Jacksonian theatre, the circuses part, they will forgive high prices for bread and also the occasional misstep or false note. Think of a TV show you like that has had a couple real howlers of bad episodes; what you want (well, what I would want, generally) is for those to be forgotten, or set aside as special turkeys everyone makes fun of in good fun, and for the show to continue on the basis of what they did right, with those mistakes surgically excised from the overall image. This is the nature of the willing suspension of disbelief political dramatists such as Nixon to some great extent, Reagan almost entirely, and GW Bush and Donald Trump rely on. Political opposition that focuses on substance generally miss the point. Mind, as a person who isn't very good at lying and at this kind of political theatre I am talking about, I would hope there is an alternative path, a theatre of sincerity and openness and inclusion and sober working with real facts, that opposition can develop, but they err badly if they think it is just sufficient for the truth to be exposed and for a sane and sober majority to immediately take their authority as the People in hand and straighten out the Keystone Kops/Marx Brothers shenanigans running the show. It is not because people have the life experience of learning that truth and fairness are often light years away from how things work, and that it is dangerous to step out of line, and in that context want to be assured they are among the good guys. The followers of Right Wing political theatre believe that in the essence of the matter, their leaders are straight shooters. It may be that every word from their mouths is a lie and the reality they claim to believe in warped beyond recognition, but the important thing is that they flatter the masses into thinking they are all on the same side, and it will be the winning side because of their awesome goodness, and that their enemies are despicable scum who deserve a Death Wish like vigilante spree inflicted on them.

In this context nearly any crazy, stupid, heartless thing Reagan said or did would come across to his base the marks of a righteous man they are proud to stand with, just as Trump's admirers appear to see some kind hero where the rest of us...well never mind.

The homework of inverting the image of the Hearst family from grieving and terrified parents just like they would be to gibbering fools and wimps would be left to the audience largely, with just a few cues.

Another thing I often remark on in some puzzlement is how many of your PODs in these political WI TLs are actually exactly the thing that really happened, and the divergence lies in expecting people to react differently than they did. I think that layers of professional manipulation have to be considered, and the absence of countervailing cultural forces similarly organized (which the Right alleges actually does exist, and indeed that they are David to the Left's Goliath) is not an accident but the outcome of a carefully maintained cultural hegemony. To organize a counterattack an organization is needed, and the only candidates that historically emerged for that role, such as the Communist Party, were hamhanded and tin eared at this game, and easily discredited. (I contend that Marx and some of his followers were crackerjack economists and social analysts, but rotten at the game of pragmatic politics, and the tradition continues to this day. Of course today few read Marx as the powerfully insightful analyst of capitalist civilization that he was, and content themselves with simplistic formulas that despite their clumsiness are anyway no farther from truth than mainstream economics or social analysis tends to be).

The absence of the shrewd democratic populist, who can see both need and means of rallying the common people against the millions of Lilliputian threads that bind them to helplessness, might be due to some deep underlying nature of things and then I guess we are doomed to be playthings of this relentless riptide of privileged cynicism giving the mob the circus of inclusion and righteousness they crave. Anyway, the absence of a credible cultural center for speaking out the truth of circumstances is key to all of your questions of "why did it happen as OTL instead of this straightforward alternative I am talking about?" Note that there were always people saying the things you'd think would prevail, and you generally produce them as clear evidence you aren't just making stuff up. The question remains, why do they not engage the gears and shift the dialog over?

I'm telling you why. Cultural hegemony, that's why.
 
. . though as an artistic personality as you put it, . .
By artist type of personality, I mean contrasting Reagan with Ford.

President Ford was:
1) an extrovert,
2) a policy generalist, and
3) generally in the mainstream.

Reagan was none of these things! :p Just the fact that Reagan was an introvert is interesting in and of itself. He had a close relationship with his wife. But with most other people he was rather formal. Generally, Ronnie had allies and supporters, but not really friends. Maybe Paul Laxalt was a friend, but how often did Ronnie really see him? I'm not criticizing. It's just different. Ronnie Reagan lived a different life.

And then Reagan was not a policy generalist like you'd expect a chief executive to be. He cared immensely about standing up to the Soviet Union and about reducing the top rate for personal income tax. But give me even a handful of other issues he cared as much about?
 
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. . . but there is clearly something in the psyche of Americans, if not everyone in the world, that resonates with a smug bully on a roll, as long as you can identify with him and believe yourself to be one of the winners . . .
To large extent, because people want to do something. They don't want to be like Hamlet, stuck and not able to do anything. And since we were talking about Black September and the attack on the Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics:

cropped-shutterstock_57082151.jpg



https://rabbiatthemovies.com/tag/ethics/

Munich (2005 movie)

' . . . I remember vividly watching the events of Munich unfold on our family TV when I was a teenager. I recall being shocked that the Games simply continued after a mass murder, and that the Germans, indeed the world, seemed to feel that since many of the terrorists were dead, there was nothing for the police to do. I confess that I was glad later when I learned that the Israeli government decided to take action, . . . '
People want to do something.

I think Martin Luther King, Jr., talked about this in one of his speeches or writings. After an injustice, people want to do something.

(me saying) You've got to keep potential responses in your hip pocket. Yeah, you might have a discussion, maybe even a vote, but keep it short and sweet.
 
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. . . how many of your PODs in these political WI TLs are actually exactly the thing that really happened, and the divergence lies in expecting people to react differently than they did. . .
Yes, I often do wax optimistic. I'll happily plead guilty to this. ;)

Sometimes I focus on leadership. What if there had been earlier, more energetic, or just luckier leadership on toxic waste for example?

Or, we were reasonably close to de-criminalizing marijuana in the 1970s. If we had, would have avoided the lion's share of the mass incarceration in the '80s and '90s, and shit, continuing to this day.

And on the political front, when Reagan challenged President Ford for the '76 Republican nomination, Reagan was struggling till he gained traction in the North Carolina primary. It was a very close thing and could have easily gone differently. And then Ford himself made a comeback late in the primary season, but not enough to knock Reagan out entirely, even though Ford went into the Convention with a lead.
 
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. . Given his OTL gaffes, why does this one . .
Because at a certain point, the guy will reach the breaking point, even though admittedly this will occur at different points for different people.

Please remember, in the 1980 general election, Reagan got 51% of the popular vote compared to 41% for Carter (with John Anderson getting the bulk of the balance).
 
Because at a certain point, the guy will reach the breaking point, even though admittedly this will occur at different points for different people.

Please remember, in the 1980 general election, Reagan got 51% of the popular vote compared to 41% for Carter (with John Anderson getting the bulk of the balance).
He outperformed Hillary Clinton with percentage points to spare.
 
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