In 1984, Ronald Reagan’s reëlection campaign broadcast an advertisement that became known as “Morning in America.” It was a soaring montage about a country that it described as “prouder and stronger and better” than ever. Written and narrated by Reagan’s adman Hal Riney, it featured a bride on her wedding day, a family in a new home, and the purple light of dawn breaking over the U.S. Capitol. The stagecraft, as much as any other factor, would enshrine Reagan’s particular brand of American optimism—gauzy, encompassing, non-specific—and it would inspire candidates ever since to attempt to conjure that energy again.
At some point, though, an alternative conservative message emerged. In October, 2010, Joe Manchin, the right-leaning Democratic governor of West Virginia, who was at that time running for the U.S. Senate, appeared on televisions across the state, striding, wearing jeans and a windbreaker, against the backdrop of a forest in autumn. Not breaking much rhetorical ground, he said, “I’ll take on Washington and this Administration to get the federal government off of our backs and out of our pockets.” Then he lifted a rifle to his shoulder. “I’ll cut federal spending, and I’ll repeal the bad parts of Obamacare. I sued the E.P.A. and I’ll take dead aim at the cap-and-trade bill, because it’s bad for West Virginia.” He chambered a round in his rifle, aimed, and fired a bullet through a copy of climate-change legislation, which was pinned to a target downrange. The camera zoomed in on the entry point, a few inches below the introductory language of the bill, which began, “In the Senate of the United States…”
Firearms have been a reliable prop in campaign ads since at least the days of Barry Goldwater, but firing them into the text of duly proposed or approved federal legislation represented a new stage in the theatrics of American politics. A few months after Manchin unveiled his take on legislative-death-by-firing-squad, a gunman in Tucson killed six people and wounded thirteen others, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Reporters asked Manchin if he would make the ad again. “I can’t say that we would,” he said, in a reflective moment. But he stood by the decision to make the ad in the first place, saying that “a horrific act should not and cannot be confused with a metaphor about a piece of legislation.”
Manchin won his race, and his ad was seen as a success. It was followed by imitators who sought to outdo the original. In 2012, Ron Gould, a Republican congressional candidate in Arizona, did not satisfy himself with a fixed target. He loaded a copy of the Affordable Care Act—or, at least, a stack of paper meant to look like House Resolution 3590—into a skeet-shooting machine. “This is what I’d do to that law,” he said, and shouted, “Pull!” He fired, leaving a cloud of smoke and shredded paper fluttering against a bright-blue desert sky.
On “The Daily Show” last week, Jon Stewart highlighted the latest, and most ambitious, addition to this arms race: Will Brooke, an avuncular Republican vying for the nomination in the race for Alabama’s Sixth Congressional District, appears onscreen to “talk about two serious subjects: the Second Amendment, and to see how much damage we can do to Obamacare.” Brooke loads his copy of the Affordable Care Act into the bed of his truck, drives it out to a field, and wrestles it onto a target. He then shoots it several times with a handgun, and looks disapprovingly at how well it survived the engagement. From a rack of other guns, he selects a rifle and fires several rounds into the block of paper, but once again finds the results lacking.
Next, Brooke moves on to what appears to be an M16-style weapon and squeezes off four rounds, as shell casings fly. Stewart noted that “these candidate-shoots-a-law ads are like ‘Die Hard’ sequels—each one is going to be crazier and more desperate than the last. It’s hard to imagine what could come next. Well, not that hard …” He then cut to the correspondent Jason Jones, who reënacted the torture scene from Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” this time with a bloodied, Obama-backed federal bill duct-taped to a chair. For similar effect, “The Daily Show” might simply have shown the rest of Brooke’s ad, which continues with the candidate holding up what’s left of the bill, and saying, “We had some fun, and knocked some holes in it, but we didn’t quite get the job done. Looks like we’ll have to resort to more extreme measures to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with a market-based solution.” And then he runs it through a wood chipper.
It’s tempting to chalk up this iteration of political stagecraft to the usual drift: the unthinking accretion of vulgarity, a race to the bottom that is taken for granted to such a degree that lingering on it can look churlish. But it’s worth pausing to mark the occasion. When Joe Manchin, and those who have followed his lead, embraced what he described as the “metaphor,” what, precisely, was their metaphor representing? It sounds, at first, like a venerable American idea: resenting the reach of the state, after all, is as old as the Republic. But there is a difference when that resentment comes from inside the state itself, when the most full-throated arguments against government are coming not from activists on the outside but from those on the inside. It is a politics in which the practitioners of government, those who seek the highest offices in the land, declare open season on the laws they are charged with passing and enforcing.
There was, it seems, no single moment when it became plausible for politicians to go on television to gun down legislation. It was, perhaps, inevitable in the age of self-hating government, defined by a sensibility that Robert G. Kaiser, the former managing editor of the Washington Post, described in an essay last month upon his departure from the capital after five decades covering politics. He had witnessed the arrival of “a cynical and often uninformed hostility, befitting the age we live in,” he wrote. “And it has many adherents in a country with an elaborate regulatory and welfare state that many like to pretend we don’t really have, don’t really need and don’t really like—three blatant falsehoods.” (Manchin, in fact, knows that truth better than most; nearly twenty-seven per cent of personal income in West Virginia comes from federal payments, which is the highest rate of any state.)
The visual vocabulary of Ronald Reagan seems far away. It’s hard to know what he would have made of firing guns into acts of Congress. But, for all of the contemporary conservatives who idolize Reagan, many have parted company with his ambitions for America. When he talked about small government, he was not arguing for the illegitimacy of law. He was campaigning on a platform of inspiration, not destruction. He offered people a hymn, not a dirge. Thirty years later, the best his heirs can muster is the promise of mourning in America.
Above: A still from Joe Manchin’s “Dead Aim” advertisement.