John A. Farrell is the author of Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century, a biography of the late Speaker, and Richard Nixon: The Life, an upcoming biography of the 37th president.

America has experienced another election like this one. In November 1980, another orange-haired émigré from the entertainment world—another Republican candidate detested by liberals as dimwitted and dangerous—captured the hearts of slighted working-class voters, 44 states, 489 electoral votes and the presidency.

For those who remember Ronald Reagan, the memory of that night endures. It wasn’t just the shock of Reagan crushing an incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, it was who else lost: a whole roster of liberal Democratic fixtures like Senators Birch Bayh, George McGovern and Frank Church. The Republicans took control of the Senate, and Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms became committee chairmen. The Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson—even the bedrock achievements of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—seemed in jeopardy.


Ronald “Ray gun”—whose hair Gerald Ford once derided as “prematurely orange”—had his finger on the nuclear button. And minorities? Opening his general election campaign, Reagan made a celebrated appearance at the Neshoba County, Mississippi fair, just a bit down the road from where three civil rights workers had been slaughtered in 1964. “I believe in states’ rights,” he told the crowd.

And yet, just two years later, the Reagan Revolution ground to a halt, whipped in the midterm elections of 1982 by House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s Democrats. The Democrats picked up 26 seats. The liberal welfare state endured. Progress in civil rights continued.

How did Tip and his allies do it? There may be lessons for today’s distraught Democrats in that story. O’Neill chose to oppose, but not obstruct.

From the start, O’Neill’s goal was to make the Republicans take ownership of the painful inevitabilities of globalization’s economic turmoil, and the hardships that would result from Reagan’s ill-conceived prescriptions.

He didn’t back down rhetorically. Few were as vocal as O’Neill when it came to criticizing Reagan. He stood like an oak, skewering the president as a tool of the wealthy, a creature of the country club, as a mean old “Ebenezer Scrooge.” But the speaker controlled the House floor, and he could have kept Reagan’s tax and budget cuts from a vote. He chose, instead, to give the Republicans the rope they clamored for—betting it would ensnare them.

“We’re going to cooperate with the president. It’s America first and party second,” O’Neill said, just days after the Reagan landslide. “We’re going to give ‘em enough rope. They can use it either to herd cattle, or make a mistake. … They’ve got to deliver.”

So that was the strategy. But it wasn’t so easy.

Republicans couldn’t believe their luck. The new national spokesman for the Democratic Party was a shambling, old, cigar-smoking congressman, coming off a bad season. The speaker, “with his massive corpulence and scarlet varicose nose, was a Hogarthian embodiment of the superstate he had labored so long to maintain,” said David Stockman, who emerged as Reagan’s budget director. The Republicans had run television commercials throughout the 1980 campaign, lampooning O’Neill as a fat, thoughtless driver of a gas-guzzling whale of a car. He was “a defender of evil things,” Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan recalled.

The Republicans had picked up 33 House seats in the 1980 balloting, but O’Neill recognized that his House Democrats had, collectively, taken 51 percent of the vote amid the Reagan landslide. As he liked to say, all politics was local. Saving the House—preserving that base of power—was his top priority. He knew, as well, that Reagan’s victory had a half-full aspect to it: It was built on low Democratic turnout, which hurt Carter as much as Republican gains. So he needed to inspire Democrats to come out and vote in 1982—even as he knew that his stand-aside tactics would yield demoralizing early defeats.

The strategy would subject O’Neill to both political and personal agony, the speaker’s top adviser, the late Kirk O’Donnell, once told me. But if O’Neill had used parliamentary tricks to block Reagan’s program, “in the crisis the nation was in, in the sense that there was an overwhelming need for change, that there was an overwhelming sentiment that the President should be given a chance, the Democrats would have been blamed for obstructionism.”

So O’Neill would speak out against Reagan—slim down, buy new suits, listen to what his young, media-savvy aide Chris Matthews was telling him about employing television in the media age—but not use parliamentary tricks to deny the president an up-or-down vote. Quite the opposite: O’Neill set up charts in his office so he could track and ensure that Reagan’s program moved swiftly through the legislative process. Trouble was coming—there were forecasts of a recession for 1982—and O’Neill wanted “Reaganomics” to get the credit.

“The genius of the speaker is that he went out and became the leading opponent to a program that he was putting on the fast track,” O’Donnell said, with a grin. “It was a brilliant tactic.”

Things did not go well, at first. Reagan soared to near-mythic popularity when he gallantly endured an assassination attempt in early 1981. All that summer, House and Senate liberals lost time and again to a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. “What’s happening to me? What’s happening to me in Washington?” O’Neill said to a constituent as Washington Post reporter Tony Kornheiser stood by, listening. “What’s happening to me is, I’m getting the shit whaled out of me.”

Throughout, O’Neill kept faith and aimed for the day when he could stand in front of the cameras and define the terms of the 1982 election. “From now on, it’s Reagan’s budget,” the speaker declared, when the president’s plan passed Congress, and the hour arrived in September. “From now on, it’s Reagan’s unemployment rate. From now on, it’s Reagan’s inflation rate. You can’t criticize the Democrats. It’s Reagan’s ball game.”

Reaganomics proved a failure. The “supply side” tax cuts were gimmicks. Stockman was compelled to target Social Security, infuriating seniors. The economy lurched into a serious and painful downturn and the American working class, hammered by layoffs and plant closings, deserted the Republicans in 1982.

Reagan won reelection two years later, but only after he forsook his dream of shrinking the federal government. He went on, as presidents are wont to do, to focus on foreign affairs and negotiate with Mikhail Gorbachev. The guts and muscle of the New Deal and the Great Society endured. The federal budget grew fat and swollen, dotting the Maryland and Northern Virginia suburbs with defense contractors and government consultants. Reagan didn’t drain the swamp in Washington: He made it the imperial capital it is today. Along the way, he raised taxes—seven times. You can look it up.

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History doesn’t necessarily rhyme, just as Ronald Reagan was no Donald Trump. Reagan had a clear, principled vision. He revered America and its institutions. He surrounded himself with top-notch talent. He was an experienced political leader who had learned how to win, lose and compromise as governor of California. Moreover, Congress and the press were coherent, powerful forces. For all his gifts, Reagan had to acknowledge those realities.

Trump, on the other hand, is a far more protean figure—with a demonstrated knack at promising the moon and the stars, shrugging and slip-sliding away when he fails to deliver. He is deft at exploiting class and racial division. And with his use of social media, and a right-wing gang of cable television and radio commentators who share his disregard for the fact-based world, he will not be an easy horse to saddle with blame. No doubt he’ll find other whipping boys.

And the results of Nov. 8 brought nothing if not a lesson in humility to scribes who draw conclusions from insufficient or misread data. Yet, given the tides of politics and business, Democrats may have the opportunity to saddle Trump with all the ills he railed against—and much of what his white working-class constituency voted against.

First, Trump could be in an even more vulnerable position than Reagan was politically; he won barely more than 47 percent of the vote, and Hillary Clinton surpassed him by more than 1 million in the popular vote. Nor do Republicans have decisive majorities in the House and Senate.

And the world, they are already discovering, is an unwieldy place. Wall Street banks won’t yield the Treasury Department to right-wing populists. Manufacturers won’t stop seeking low-wage workers because President Trump was elected. Immigrant women won’t stop bearing children. Health care costs won’t plummet. Powerful special interests won’t stop trying to rig the system. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News won’t stop finding cause to complain. Trade wars won’t bring on economic bliss. The planet won’t stop cooling. Tea Party Republicans won’t suddenly become reasonable, nor will Middle Eastern fanatics. American soldiers won’t stop dying. Hurricanes and microbes won’t stop at borders. Roads and bridges won’t repair themselves.

Within hours of Trump’s election, House Speaker Paul Ryan and his Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill were repudiating the president-elect’s plan to build a wall along the Mexican border. Veterans from Wall Street, meanwhile were lining up to work in the Trump administration despite the president-elect’s pledge to “drain the swamp.”

It is difficult to see what a Trump-led Republican program will be (he promised to raise defense spending, slice taxes and not touch Social Security and Medicare during the campaign), but the best course for the Democrats may be to step aside, let it pass and bet it falls victim to its flaws and contradictions. That means, for Senate Democrats, a shrewd and judicious use of the filibuster.

Along the way, the Democrats should embrace the parts of the new president’s platform that fit liberal objectives, and share in the credit when they are enacted—driving wedges into the opposition. The Democrats did it in 1986, when they joined with Reagan on tax reform, infuriating then-Rep. Newt Gingrich and other right-wing Republicans and sparking a minor insurrection.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, today’s leader of the House Democrats, was quick to take advantage of one contradiction in the Trump/Republican platform. She immediately invited Trump to make good on a campaign promise and join Democrats in passing a massive public works program, to put people to work at high-wage construction jobs, repairing the nation’s worn infrastructure. One could hear the Freedom Caucus, proud at shutting down the government to stop federal spending, gnashing its teeth.

The nightmare scenario, for the Democratic Party—and the country—is that, no matter how bad things turn out, O’Neill’s strategy will be found obsolete: that the white electorate’s sense of grievance is so deep and ingrained that Trump can duck responsibility and shift it to the “global special interests,” ethnic and racial minorities, nasty women, immigrants and others he attacked in his campaign.

But at least, at the start, the American people should be given a chance to judge him as he is, and what he stands for. And that may require the painful strategy of opposing, not obstructing.