February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The long-held view that Irish-American Catholic voters were tied permanently to the hip of the Democratic Party began to erode in the years following President Kennedy’s assassination. The connection had been well and truly sundered by the time Reagan came bounding out of California to secure his party’s presidential nomination in 1980.
American society had been traumatized by many of the events of the previous 20 years, and millions of voters, many of them blue collar and Catholic from various ethnic communities, including the Irish, were looking for a candidate who projected an aura of patriotism and faith, espoused strong foreign policy, and unequivocal and uncompromising positions on social issues such as abortion and crime.
In Reagan they found their man. The so-called “Reagan Democrats” were born and many of them have never turned back to the Democratic fold. But some did. And enough of them did in 1992 when Bill Clinton made a pitch for their support from the center of his party’s platform.
And then the pendulum swung away from Clinton again. In 1994, for the first time, a majority of American Catholics voted for the GOP in the off-year congressional elections.
This election year, both parties will be looking to woo the Reagan Democrats, millions of Irish Americans among them, especially in key swing states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Lawrence B. Goodheart, who teaches history the at University of Connecticut, described in an interview the movement of voters described as Reagan Democrats as “the moment when a significant number of Irish Americans came away from the left and became part of the mainstream of party politics.”
The Reagan era, he said, marked a time when many immigrant groups with longstanding ties to the Democratic party also had acquired greater wealth, social acceptance and a profound sense of patriotism.
“They became middle class and they saw Reagan as someone who would help them preserve what they had attained,” said Goodheart, whose academic brief includes Irish studies. “Half of the AFL-CIO went on after 1980 to back Reagan.”
It was an extraordinary political shift and it directly led to the solid Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives to this day.
Prof. Goodheart noted, however, that the same political realignment had not been maintained by presidential voters. Bill Clinton had indeed won back many Reagan Democrats in 1992 and especially in his landslide victory of 1996 by promising and producing a stronger economy.
New York Democratic Party activist John Connorton, who makes it clear that he is not, and never was, a Reagan Democrat, said that he had nevertheless found reason to admire the 40th president.
Connorton, who ran Democrat Gary Hart’s New York campaign in 1984, said that despite spiraling budget deficits during the Reagan years, many who might be described as Reagan Democrats had admired Reagan for his patriotism, his optimism and his values.
“He had grace and dignity and a marvelous sense of humor and he deserves credit for winning the Cold War, restoring optimism to the country and making most Americans proud to be Americans again,” Connorton said.
“Ronald Reagan and the pope, for very different reasons, were the most responsible for the victory in the Cold War. Now it’s time to focus on the good things that he did.”
Attorney and Democratic party activist Frank Durkan said that Reagan’s tax policy had “pulled a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Democrats” into “falling for the idea that they were getting a tax deduction only to be met with the specter of social security being robbed to pay for it.
“But he pulled back from that and it was big of him to admit he had made a mistake on that,” Durkan said. “I think [former New York governor] Mario Cuomo got it right when he said that Reagan was more persona than politics. But that persona was significant as evidenced by the level of mourning this week.”
One man who had a close up of the Reagan person on more than one occasion during the 1980s was Vincent Dowling, formerly of the Abbey Theater in Dublin and now a U.S. citizen resident in Massachusetts.
Dowling said that as a Democrat he had not voted for Reagan but had been delighted to respond positively to three invitations during the Reagan presidency to perform at the White House.
“He transcended politics when you met him,” Dowling said. “He was a beautiful, thoughtful, bright and funny man, and I would not have missed meeting him for anything in the world.”
Dowling, however, regrets the fact that Reagan, who began his political life as a Democrat, had ended up in the GOP fold. This, he believed, had been a tragedy for the Democrats and, beyond the party, America and the world.
While Irish-American Democrats who would not describe themselves as Reagan Democrat are finding it easy to heap praise on Ronald Reagan in certain contexts this week, they are less forgiving when it comes to the Reagan presidency and the Northern Ireland Troubles.
“When I think of Reagan I also immediately think of Margaret Thatcher,” Durkan said.
With regard to Northern Ireland, said Durkan, Thatcher had actively repressed the forces of change while Regan chose either to ignore the situation or endorse Thatcher’s policies.
“She was the dominant partner. Reagan avoided the North because he wasn’t going to cross Thatcher,” Durkan said.
For one Irish American who followed the North’s problems over many years, Reagan missed a golden opportunity to intervene positively in the first months of his first term.
Larry McCarthy, who lives in Cleveland, said that Reagan had never intervened in the 1981 hunger strikers despite his closeness to Thatcher and the influence that he might have been able to exert on her thinking.
“This was the supreme moral moment of his life, but it turned into a tremendous moral lapse on his part,” McCarthy said.
(Susan Falvella-Garraty [sfgarraty@irishecho.com] contributed to this story.)