Reagan rising The decisive years, 1976-1980

FORTY YEARS AGO, the Republican Party was at a nadir. Gerald Ford had lost the presidency to a Democratic outsider named Jimmy Carter. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. The stench of Watergate hung over the G.O.P. establishment. (It didn't help that the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee operated out of a converted men's room in the Russell Senate Office Building.) The party's most popular national figure, Ronald Reagan, later said he was open to changing the party's name. An analysis in The New York Times pronounced the Republicans "closer to extinction than ever before." They only looked dead. Within four years, the G.O.P. picked up 49 seats in the House of Representatives and gained a majority in the Senate for the first time since 1955. In the 1980 presidential election, Reagan defeated Carter by 440 electoral votes, the worst loss ever for a Ronald sitting president. What happened? In "Reagan Rising: The Decisive Years, 1976-1980," Craig Shirley chronicles the Republicans' emergence from the wilderness. The story goes like this: After Ford's defeat, a guerrilla movement of conservative operatives staged an assault on the traditional economic orthodoxy of the G.O.P. Their goal was to "get rid of excessive regulations, tear down trade barriers, get government out of the business of managing the economy and most important, slash taxes to the bone." Republican leaders soon grasped the political appeal of the insurgents' agenda, particularly to middle-class suburban voters. The party became "more pluralistic, less interested in rank and more interested in new ideas." An assortment of long-forgotten figures receive credit for this transformation, notably Bill Brock, the former Tennessee senator who took over the Republican National Committee in 1977 and ignited its fund-raising machine. Reagan's role was less direct. When he announced his candidacy in 1979, Reagan was the prohibitive favorite for the Republican nomination, but he had done little to cultivate the grass roots, spending more time giving speeches to trade associations and business groups. To conserve Reagan's energy, John Sears, Reagan's campaign manager, insisted on keeping the 68-yearold former governor on ice, which fueled concerns about Reagan's age and keyed George H. W. Bush's upset victory in the Iowa caucuses. Reagan quickly recovered in New Hampshire ("I'm paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!"), fired Sears and coasted to the Republican nomination. Reagan's genius was to sell supply-side economics in a gauzy package of optimism, nostalgia and patriotic renewal. "Our country is a living, breathing presence, unimpressed by what others say is impossible," he said. Reagan didn't start the conservative revolution. But it's hard to see how it would have triumphed without him. Shirley, the author of books on Reagan's 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns, is a sure-footed and entertaining observer of the hurly-burly of national politics. He has a weakness for poll numbers, horse-race punditry and clichés: "The Democratic Party was to make even more headlines. And not in a good way." Shirley doesn't hide his contempt for Carter or the '70s, which he depicts as a time of near-unimaginable lassitude. The Washington establishment was "intertwined, inbred, crossbred"; the American people "had not only been mugged, but also shot, beaten, raped and left for dead by their own government." "Reagan Rising" doesn't deal with the negative impact of supply-side economics on the federal budget deficit and on the poor. But that's for another book. It's all too easy to forget that the 1980 election took place against the backdrop of recession, double-digit inflation, gasoline shortages, an intensifying arms race with the Soviets and the hostage crisis in Tehran. The country really was in trouble. A small-minded and demagogic politician might have exploited Americans' anxieties and appealed to their worst instincts. Accepting the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, Reagan said, "Can we doubt that only a divine providence placed this land, this island of freedom, here as a refuge for all those people in the world who yearn to breathe freely: Jews and Christians enduring persecution behind the Iron Curtain, the boat people of Southeast Asia, of Cuba and Haiti, the victims of drought and famine in Africa, the freedom fighters of Afghanistan and our own countrymen held in savage captivity." It's enough to make you weep. And not in a good way. ROMESH RATNESAR is a New America fellow and the author of "Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President and the Speech That Ended the Cold War."

In 1976, Ronald Reagan failed in his second try for the Republican nomination for president (the first was in 1968), and it seemed likely to be his last. According to Shirley, the Republican establishment felt the country would never accept a hard Right conservative. Yet Reagan persisted and won the presidency decisively four years later. In his third book about Reagan, Shirley, a journalist, biographer, and staunch admirer, tracks the period from Reagan's 1976 defeat to his victory at the Republican convention in July 1980. This is an engrossing, richly detailed saga filled with political figures obscure and familiar. Shirley doesn't soft-pedal the vicious political infighting within the Republican Party. Many of the political operatives, including some Reagan supporters, aren't shown in a favorable light. Reagan, however, remained largely above and unsullied by the fray, continuing to effectively preach his message of optimism and a vision that the economy, liberated from government interference, would thrive. Both political junkies and general readers should appreciate this account of the triumph of a conservative icon.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2017 Booklist