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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
Over time the ‘Ronnie Ray-Gun’ cliche 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.”30 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 mean-spirited editorial appeared