of the middle-class guy.
—Joe Biden, 19771
It was November 1980, and one of Joe Biden’s staffers was poring over a list of congressional ratings. The liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action regularly scored every member of Congress on how progressive they were based on select votes. Biden wanted to find out where he ranked.2
Biden’s search had been prompted by Ronald Reagan and the Republicans’ staggering landslide victory earlier that month. Reagan, the first challenger to lop off an elected incumbent president since Franklin Roosevelt’s victory over Herbert Hoover 48 years earlier, had won by ten percentage points and carried forty-four states, earning 489 Electoral College votes to Carter’s forty-nine. He had done so expressly by shattering Carter’s winning 1976 coalition and poaching parts of it for himself: union members, Jews, Catholics, even self-described liberals all defected to Reagan in large numbers. He won the South and the Midwest. The fact that voter turnout had dropped once more to about half the adult population had helped, too.3
This wasn’t meant to happen. Reagan was a conservative ideologue, a man considered far to the right of not just the voting public, but reality itself. He had a habit of accusing his opponents of communist sympathies and railing against “big government,” and his flagship idea was a tax cut for the rich. He insisted Vietnam had been a “noble cause” and suggested at the time that the United States should “pave the whole country.” Now, in public statements, he itched for military confrontation with the Soviet Union. Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard Bill Wilkinson endorsed him, gushing that his platform “reads as if it were written by a Klansman.” He planned to “make America great again.”4
Reagan was a creation of a long-gestating right-wing movement kick-started during the New Deal by a group of the country’s most powerful industrialists, including Jasper Crane and Pierre du Pont, two executives of the very same DuPont company that ruled Delaware as a fiefdom. Reagan received what he called his “post-graduate education in political science” while serving as General Electric’s “traveling ambassador” under its vice president, Lemuel Boulware, a union buster extraordinaire and part of the same corporate conservative network that had started organizing against Roosevelt. It was under Boulware’s tutelage that Reagan made the transition from New Deal Democrat to, well, Ronald Reagan, voraciously consuming the ideas of conservative thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, who in his most famous book had argued just about any government involvement in the economy was the first step on the road to totalitarian dictatorship.5
That conservative movement had, by 1980, succeeded in putting not just Reagan in the White House but a host of candidates in the US Congress who vowed to back his radical agenda. The National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC), founded by “New Right” activist Terry Dolan with help from direct-mail fundraising wizard Richard Viguerie, was at the center of these efforts. With close ties to Reagan that made a mockery of election laws, the NCPAC had a symbiotic relationship with the Republican candidate, who asked his supporters to back the committee, which in turn raised money to support the candidate and attack his vulnerable liberal opponents in Congress. Thanks to the work of such organizations, the Democrats lost thirty-three seats in the House and twelve in the Senate come November. A number of those had been specifically targeted by NCPAC in a “hit list” of long-serving liberal senators, including Indiana’s Birch Bayh, Idaho’s Frank Church, and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern.6
While movement conservatives plotted, Biden was unhappily drafted by Carter to stump for the floundering president. Biden’s lack of enthusiasm for the task was palpable. At one stop, he launched into a series of backhanded compliments, practically apologizing for the president. “Let’s face it,” he said. “Jimmy Carter is not the finest thing since wheat cakes; he’s not the second coming…. He’s not going to go down in the history books … but he is doing a good job.”
Nevertheless, Biden had done his duty, including a speech at that year’s Democratic National Convention in which he assailed the “bankruptcy,” “hollow dreams,” and “hypocrisies” of the Reagan-led GOP’s 1980 platform. Biden had summoned the populist spirit of his first Senate run, condemning Reagan’s “banker friends” and “advisers in the oil industries,” and calling on Democrats to muster the courage to “maintain the historic commitments to the New Deal, the Fair Deal and the Great Society.” It was all for naught, with Carter no match for an embittered populace fed up with a decade of recession and inflation and an energized conservative movement working to get their man into office.7
But for Biden, Reagan’s victory had its upsides. Thanks to the defeat of several of his colleagues, Biden moved up a spot on all his committees, including Judiciary, where he would end up the ranking Democrat. And the president-elect’s antigovernment philosophy actually gelled with his priorities.8
“In a strange way,” Biden said, “the election of Ronald Reagan is more consistent with the budgetary thrust that a guy like me … has been going for for the past few years.” Biden’s long-delayed sunset legislation could now move forward, he said. And he, too, wanted a tax cut. “Biden might come out looking like a conservative when he sits in his seat on the budget committee,” noted the Wilmington Morning News.9
Reagan’s presidency didn’t lead to the instant anti-government “revolution” his grassroots backers had envisioned. But by the end of his eight years, Democrats and liberals whose previously steadfast commitment to New Deal politics had already been wavering during the 1970s would abandon it entirely. In some ways, Reagan’s success in transforming his opposition was his most long-lasting legacy, a transformation Joe Biden would help lead.
No Longer Liberal
Biden’s already growing public discomfort with the New Deal legacy made him perfectly poised to drift rightward with the Reagan years. Even as he thundered against Reagan’s platform during the campaign, he had told crowds that in the world of the 1980s, “we can’t solve all social problems by an endless succession of government programs.”
And while he tried to undo Reagan’s scrapping of price controls on oil and gas and voted “to fill the holes in Reagan’s safety net” left by his severe 1981 budget, Biden made clear he was “not concerned about social programs as much as the direction” the country was going. Asked where Democrats should draw the line with Reagan’s cuts, Biden singled out agencies like NASA, Conrail, the Export-Import Bank, and energy research and development. “They’re finding new answers to old problems,” he said. “Instead of social programs, give the Northeast a rail system that works.”
Despite claiming that “the Reagan program will be economically disastrous for most of us in this country,” Biden voted for the new president’s first budget, one of thirty Democrats to do so. The budget was “a triumph for conservatives rivaling the liberal triumphs of” Roosevelt and Johnson, the New York Times wrote: scores of federal programs for health, education, and social services drastically cut back, weakened, or outright eliminated. The cuts threw countless lives into chaos, with 270,000 public service workers losing jobs, more than 400,000 families thrown off the welfare rolls, and more than 1 million workers ineligible for extended unemployment benefits, just to name a few. The Reagan onslaught marked “the reversal,” wrote the Washington Post, “of two great waves of government intervention, the New Deal and the Great Society,” a verdict shared by lawmakers on both sides of the issue.10
As the decade wore on, Biden’s criticism of Reagan’s policies shifted away from their cruelty to complaints that they were fiscally irresponsible and deficit-bloating. “The elimination of federal deficit spending should be the single most important element in a program to achieve an economically sound future for this country,” he said six months into Reagan’s tenure.11
He
