The Evolution of Mean: Satire in the American Elections of 1980 and 2008 Compared

A comparison of the American presidential elections of 1980 and 2008 seems, at first blush, to be an arbitrary choice. The former resulted in a Republican landslide under Ronald Reagan and the latter a Democrat victory under Barack Obama. Furthermore, the Reagan era has already been studied, whereas right now it seems premature to speak of Obama's legacy. Nevertheless, the two elections have numerous historical parallels. The 1980 campaign featured a president with dismal approval ratings who was seen as impotent in managing problems in Afghanistan and Iran, and whose domestic policies had given rise to stagflation and an energy crisis: “the stock market limped along… the housing business was in shambles, the auto industry was asthmatic, and the trade deficit was at an all-time high.”1 The description could as easily apply to George W. Bush's America in 2008. Jimmy Carter was demonized by some cynics as the worst president ever, and the appellation now seems both quaint and eerie. Humor columnist Dave Barry deadpans that calling something satire usually means “you will not laugh once.”2 Why is election satire important? Its study is critical because, just as fish do not realize they are in water, we do not realize how much of our popular culture is based on political humor. Occasionally the media recognize this condition. Slate pundit Troy Patterson wrote in April 2008 about “the Satire Recession,” arguing that modern news satire has declined into nothing more than “personality jokes”3 that rarely rise above cutesy, ad-hominem gags. Yet satire in the 1980 election also rarely rose above humor based on one-liners, and if anything, was safer and less partisan than that of the 2008 campaign. I would like to, in fact, make the opposite argument: in comparison to the 1980 American presidential election, the 2008 campaign featured satire which was more biting, more partisan, and was used by a media more aware of satire's political role and influence. The 1980 presidential elections shaped up as a perfect storm for incumbent president Jimmy Carter: “Inflation, recession, hostages, unemployment—they combined in a truly beatable combination.”4 The Democrat party was weakened by spats between Carter and his staff and a leadership challenge from Ted Kennedy, and even the balloons at the national convention refused to cooperate.5 Carter dismissed Reagan as a threat and undermined his own gracious southern reputation with increasingly negative campaigning. In the famous final debate, Reagan's legendary sunny disposition prevailed as he asked viewers, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The genial, telegenic former movie actor trounced Carter days later, winning by a margin in the popular vote of nearly 10%. The Democrats would not regain power for 12 years until Bill Clinton's victory in 1992. The severest criticism of the Carter presidency came from the newspaper press, in particular, cartoonists. As a visual medium, part of the joke was depicting Carter as a dwarf with giant lips, but the cartoons usually parodied what was seen as Carter's vacillation or ineffectiveness. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter was pictured as a Pollyanna “holding a deed to the Brooklyn Bridge that is signed by Leonid Brezhnev. The shocked Carter is saying, ‘You mean he lied to me?’“6 In another, a tiny Carter appears in an ant costume for a stage play, reduced to an insignificant role by his press secretary, while Ted Kennedy plays a grasshopper.7 Other cartoonists played on his supposed penchant for obfuscating, depicting Washington saying, “I cannot tell a lie,” Nixon saying, “I cannot tell the truth,” and Carter saying, “I cannot tell the difference.”8 Yet these quips were exceptions in the campaign of 1980. Apart from the National Review's more erudite audience, much of the media parodied not the candidates’ issues or actions, but their personal tics, the pseudo-satire based on personality which Patterson criticizes. Much of the spoofing was not really satire of the person or his politics, but rather riffing on comedic stereotypes. Ted Kennedy was introduced as “the senator from Pizza Hut.”9 Gerald Ford was a one-joke character on Saturday Night Live where Chevy Chase would play him tripping and falling in the pool. In my childhood in the early 80s there was a Canadian cartoonist named Ed Uluschak, and I remember that any panel set in a prison always had Nixon's nose peeking through the bars. During a canoe ride in April 1979, Carter reported that he was attacked by a swamp rabbit, which he struck with a paddle. The event suggested weakness; a biographer noted that Carter “had to deal with Russia and the Ayatollah and here he was supposedly fighting off a rabbit.”10 Yet the incident exploded into a running gag having less to do with Carter than with Monty Python. A Washington Post cartoon followed imitating a movie poster for Jaws, with the legend Paws. One learns what life in 18th century London was like by reading Pope. Good satire exposes reality. The purpose of much election humor in 1980, however, was to invoke laughter. Much of the lampooning is what Mikhail Bakhtin would call, in his work on Rabelais, the carnival style of folk humor. A medieval European festival day often involved parodies of secular or religious authority figures, and the church usually distinguished between something done “in ernest or in pley,” as Chaucer would say. Some written humor was biting, such as Jules Feiffer's cartoons on Nixon and Reagan, but much was playful teasing. In one Saturday Night Live sketch Carter guest-hosts a call-in show and a caller needs help with his acid trip;11 the joke is in the situation and not specifically on Carter. A Johnny Carson skit with Reagan also makes fun of Secretary of the Interior James Watt's name as Reagan misunderstands ‘Watt’ and exercising at ‘the Y’ in a “Who's on First” spoof which is only tangentially about Reagan.12 Although Bakhtin is speaking about medieval Europe, these “comic verbal compositions”13 still thrived in 1980, with radio singles featuring mock candidates answering questions with pop lyrics (in one Carter answers questions with Billy Joel's “Don't Ask Me Why”14) and political sendups in low culture such as Mad Magazine. Bakhtin also argues that a feature of folk humor is that its target includes the speaker; “it is directed at all and everyone.”15 It seeks to poke fun at the world the celebrants live in, but carnival humor essentially validates the establishment; the church and state support the world of the festival. Humorists knew that the business of television is entertainment, and there was no shame in befriending the candidate. Comedians such as Bob Hope made fun of Reagan with Reader's Digest-safe one-liners, saying the only reason people voted for him is that they were afraid he would “go back to acting.”16 This sort of fond send-up is more vaudeville than bite, and barely qualifies as satire, if at all. As Wagg says of 1960s satire, such humor operates within the system; it was “a bit of institutionalised cheek and the President laughed to confirm that this was OK.”17 The style is that of a celebrity roast, and one of Hope's DVD compilations is tellingly called “Laughing With the Presidents,” and not at. The lack of sting in 1980 election satire can also be seen in the general lack of partisanship. Bob Hope made jokes about Carter as he did with Reagan, saying “I don't know what people have against Jimmy Carter. He's done nothing.”18 Fairness is not an essential part of satire, and Orwell does not give the Soviets equal time in Animal Farm; but at the time it was expected or mandated that both sides be presented. Johnny Carson made fun of both Carter and Reagan, and print humorist Dave Barry was also careful to be bipartisan and inoffensive. His criticism of Reagan is also the ‘ forgetful old geezer’ trope and avoids becoming too pointed; in one of his books a chapter about Reagan is called ‘Napping Toward Glory.’ Elsewhere Barry posits that there is a secret ‘stupid ray’ aimed at the White House, as nothing else would explain how Carter, a nuclear engineer, would tell the press he was attacked by a rabbit.19, 201920 Columnist Art Buchwald jibed at both parties, but his humor also tended to be inclusive. One column lists the top lies by campaigning politicians; number 38 is “this is the best enchilada I've ever tasted.” 0 There was an assumption that satirizing both sides was playing fair, but the seriousness of a satirical attack is undermined if it is understood as jesting. The humorist is kidding, but “real satire means it.”21 There were also practical business reasons for ‘fairness’ in 1980. George Kaufman said, “Satire is what closes Saturday night.” Network television was broadcast to as wide an audience as possible, and the genuine satirist might, at best, alienate half his or her audience; at worst, his remaining audience might misunderstand. The safest route in election humor has always been to attack an oblique and impersonal target such as government or the election itself. Any number of quotations from Twain to Plato may be raised to cynically invoke the stereotype of the glad-handing congressman and the humorless bureaucrat; even politicians may join in, as Reagan did when he said that politics is the second oldest profession, but “it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”22 The candidates in the 1980 presidential election generally avoided satire themselves. Ford had attempted to joke about his clumsiness in an impromptu skit with Chevy Chase, to mixed results.23 Carter could have an acid tongue with journalists, once sighing, “I don't have very much for you today, so you can just put away your crayons.”24 Although Reagan could show flashes of temper and his off-the-cuff “We begin bombing in five minutes” joke about Russia during a sound check in 1984 was poorly received, he knew better than to antagonize the reporters who were covering him—although his staff publicly groused about wits such as Paul Conrad, who referred to the California governor as “Reagan Hood” for robbing the poor to give to the rich.25 Light needling of Nixon had worked for Kennedy in 1963, but not for Adlai Stevenson against Eisenhower in the 50s; Stevenson's learned jibes bombed, and the elections went down as ‘the egghead’ and ‘the general.’ Reagan initially seemed exempt from attack because of his age. A Conrad panel depicting politicians throwing their hats into a ring and Reagan tossing a cane was met with angry protests.26 Reagan was known as ‘the Teflon president,’ and so the target was usually his aides. James Watt was considered so anti-environment that Reagan himself could quip that Watt was “strip-mining the Rose Garden,”27 without obvious questions about who had appointed him. Reagan's running mate, George Bush Sr., would be dogged by cartoons depicting him as a lackey, and what was called the ‘wimp factor’ for Bush Sr. was likely a contributing factor in the later anti-intellectualism of the GOP. Yet Reagan was occasionally parodied. Before the election, Doonesbury did a feature called “The Mysterious World of Reagan's Brain,” where reporter Roland Hedley toured “an idyllic America, with 50 cokes, Burma shave signs, and hard-working white people.”28 Radical satirist Paul Krassner would write, “There was a fire in Ronald Reagan's library and both books were destroyed.”29, 302930 Over time the ‘Ronnie Ray-Gun’ cliché of the president as a doddering warhawk acting out his old movies became common, particularly after the Grenada invasion of 1983; even in his first election Reagan was derided by third-party candidate John Anderson as “a product of Eighteenth-Century Fox.” 0 Yet in 1980 Reagan was able to dispel most personal criticism with his famous sunny optimism. He was also so skilled at using satire himself to depict government as “the original evil empire, an institution berserk in a blizzard of paper”31 that he seemed funnier than the people reporting him. Nevertheless, he was a company man very much like Johnny Carson or Bob Hope, and his humor was mild and indirect; his assaults on Carter were limited to sighing, “There you go again” at the final election debate, and in doing so he gained the good will of the electorate. The nature of satire in the 70s and 80s should not be oversimplified as lighthearted. There were certainly examples of cutting satire in print media; in 1972, Senator Edmund Muskie wept after a his was an and followed saying, Muskie Muskie out of the presidential a was to deal with the at him. 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