By the time of Ronald Reagan’s showdown with Jimmy Carter a week before the 1980 election, the former California governor already was an accomplished debater.
Reagan biographer Craig Shirley recalled that Reagan had debated liberal icon Robert F. Kennedy in a nationally televised debate on the Vietnam War in 1967. Experts figured the New York senator would wipe the floor with Reagan. They were wrong.
“All the elites, they all went on network television and said Carter had won and Reagan had lost … It was a complete disconnect between the corrupt elites and the people.”
“He just beat the crap out of Bobby Kennedy, and he did it with a smile,” said Shirley, author of three books on Reagan.
It was a hallmark of Reagan’s political career. He could drop a devastating put-down without a trace of malice. Shirley recalled Reagan policy aide Marty Anderson’s apt description — the Gipper was “warmly ruthless.”
Shirley said Reagan’s 1980 encounter with Carter highlights several lessons for 2016 Republican nominee Donald Trump as he prepares for a rematch with Democrat Hillary Clinton. One is the value of experience, and another is the importance of nonverbal responses.
Perhaps most importantly, Shirley said, is the game of expectations. As with the 1967 row with Kennedy, observers believed incumbent Carter would have the upper hand on Reagan. The challenger benefited from that dynamic, Shirley said. He added the Trump campaign did nothing to counter the impression leading up to Monday’s debate that Clinton would be over-rehearsed.
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“His people need to manage expectations,” he said. “They need to boost Hillary’s expectations and lower expectations of their man.”
Shirley said Trump needs to fight the inclination to frown or sigh and added that the candidate spent too much time Monday defending issues like his tax returns and his challenge of President Obama’s American birth. Debate questioners also tried to bait Reagan, but “Reagan was very much a master at answering questions the way he wanted to,” Shirley said. “He never got on the defensive.”
One parallel between Trump’s performance and Reagan’s during the 1980 debate is the divergent reaction of pundits and the public. He said the immediate post-debate reaction of experts was that Carter had won. The Washington Post’s Tom Shales wrote that Reagan “let himself get backed into corners by Carter.” Tom Brokaw, then host of “The Today Show,” praised Carter’s performance. The best The Washington Star could say about Reagan’s performance is that he did not do “anything stupid.”
A funny thing happened when the polls started trickling in, though. The New York Times reported an internal Republican poll of independents indicated that twice as many people rated Reagan the winner.
Carter pollster Pat Caddell dismissed the results as the product of an older and more conservative debate audience. But other polls confirmed that regular Americans judged Reagan the winner.
“Carter, like Hillary Clinton, was talking to the elites,” Shirley said. “The dynamics are very, very similar. All the elites, they all went on network television and said Carter had won and Reagan had lost … It was a complete disconnect between the corrupt elites and the people.”
Similarly, Trump came out the winner of several snap polls conducted online by various news organizations. Although unscientific, Shirley said, those results may indicate that Trump connected better with the audience than he did with professional scorekeepers.
Reagan was a naturally gifted performer, comfortable in front of a camera after years as a Hollywood actor. But Shirley said Reagan’s success was also the product of experience and preparation. By their 1980 encounter, Reagan already had debated a half-dozen times or so in the primaries. He also had debated independent candidate John Anderson.
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Carter, by contrast, had not debated since 1976.
Reagan zinged Carter during that debate with a famous parry that is among the Gipper’s most memorable lines: “There you go again.”
Shirley said the line was not the product of happenstance. He said then-Rep. David Stockman, who would become Reagan’s budget director, played the role of Carter in mock sessions and relentlessly hammered Reagan on the environment. Annoyed, Reagan snapped, “Damn it, there you go again.”
Reagan’s campaign aides laughed, and he decided to tuck that line away, Shirley said.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
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