By Charming the Washington Crowd, Reagan Put a Lock on His ‘Popularity’

There they go again. In assessing Ronald Reagan’s probable influence in the coming presidential election, U.S. News and World Report recently claimed that Reagan is “far and away the most revered politician of his times” and that “voters love Reagan” even when they disapprove of his policies. U.S. News asks only if Reagan can transfer his “glow” to Vice President George Bush.

Leading journalists have been reporting that the American public loves Ronald Reagan since the final tally in the 1980 election (in which Reagan won less than 51% of the vote). Within six months of his taking office, Reagan was routinely described as the “Great Communicator.” Six years later, Time magazine asserted that Reagan “has come to communicate with the American people on a tribal level.”

But we may have been misled. The record shows that in his first two years in office, precisely the period during which his reputation as a popular leader was firmly established in the media and while opposing politicians ducked and covered to avoid his supposed juggernaut of popularity, Ronald Reagan regularly scored lower approval ratings and higher disapproval ratings than any other newly elected President since World War II.

Six months after Reagan’s inauguration, the Gallup Poll reported that 60% of those polled approved of his job performance and 28% disapproved--a seemingly good result--but the comparable ratings for Jimmy Carter were 63% approval, 18% disapproval; for Richard M. Nixon 63% and 16%; for John F. Kennedy 71% and 14%; for Dwight D. Eisenhower 71% and 15%.

Reagan’s average Gallup approval rating for his first year was 58%, compared with Carter’s 62%, Nixon’s 61%, Kennedy’s 75% and Eisenhower’s 69%. For the second year, Reagan’s average approval rating was 44%, compared with Carter’s 47%, Nixon’s 57%, Kennedy’s 72% and Eisenhower’s 65%.

Neither is there polling evidence from this period for the notion that the public liked Reagan as a person even when it disapproved of his politics. In Gallup polls that measured personality approval rather than job performance at roughly equivalent points in their terms in office, Reagan’s 69% approval trailed Carter’s 72%, Nixon’s 78%, Johnson’s 80%, Kennedy’s 86% and Eisenhower’s 84%.

So why should a sense of Reagan’s enormous popularity have been firmly planted when the leading polls consistently contradicted it? Why did reporters apparently believe and write as if Reagan’s popularity was inviolate and transcendent? Why did James Reston report in the New York Times in March, 1981, that Democratic leaders in Congress “concede that the President has public opinion on his side” on the very day on which Gallup reported him to have the lowest job-approval rating of any newly elected President after two months in office since scientific polling began? Why, two months later, did Newsweek assert that Reagan’s popularity ratings in some surveys were “the highest in polling history”? No evidence supports this. Except for a blip of high ratings after the March 30, 1981, assassination attempt, Reagan never even had a honeymoon in the polls.

The answer has nothing to do with press “bias” but with the overlooked importance of face-to-face communications in the television age.

Washington journalism is an oral society at the center of a national print and broadcast culture. What may have been Reagan’s greatest strength as a communicator was not the well-trained radio voice or professional actor’s skills but his frequent Hollywood role as “best friend.” Reagan has been the kind of guy whom the press and the Washington elite just can’t stay mad at.

Before Ronald Reagan was in office two months, the Washington political Establishment was under the spell of the President’s charm, according to insiders. Members of the press corps generally liked Reagan regardless of their own political leanings. Reagan was particularly solicitous of Congress, in real contrast to Carter. Even then-House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. commented publicly that Reagan was extremely likable. By the fall of 1981, Haynes Johnson of the Washington Post concluded, “For the first time in years, Washington has a President that it really likes.”

The operative word here is Washington. Whatever the general public was feeling was surprisingly irrelevant; Reagan and his expert staff had won the applause of local opinion makers and politicians.

Of course, Washington would not long have been impressed if Reagan had offered nothing more than bonhomie. Washington admires success, and this President delivered with early legislative victories.

Taken together, likability and legislative success helped Reagan’s persona fit remarkably well the tendency of the news media to judge the President’s skills as a politician and as a marketable image rather than to evaluate his public policies. The result, in covering Reagan, was to minimize the elements of the early years of the Reagan presidency--his policies--that were not playing well in Peoria and to exaggerate the elements that--whatever their effect in Peoria--were playing well in Washington.

In his first years, then, the perception of Ronald Reagan’s widespread popularity with the American people was in large measure a projection of his popularity in Washington itself, coupled with his effective handling of Congress.

All this is not to deny that by 1984, in the middle of a buoyant economy, an overwhelming number of Americans preferred Reagan to Walter F. Mondale. Nor is it to deny that in his second term Reagan’s approval ratings were, until the Iran-Contra scandal, very impressive.

It is to suggest, however, that Bush should not count too heavily on trying to take over the Great Communicator’s golden glow--or worry too much if he cannot. Reagan’s “popularity” has been greatly exaggerated. We misperceived it and still misremember it, thanks to a surprisingly insular Washington Establishment that ignored the polls and confirmed its own face-to-face impressions by talking to itself.