A Republican presidential challenger campaigning in the South Bronx against an inflation-ridden and unpopular Democratic incumbent. I’ve seen this show before.
It was August 5, 1980, when Ronald Reagan, the GOP nominee against President Jimmy Carter, traveled to the troubled borough of New York City to deliver his message of “Make America Great Again.”
Reagan had been encouraged by his ally, Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY), to go to the inner city, there to preach the gospel of tax-rate cuts, enterprise zones and overall hope. Reagan did just that, standing on the very spot where Carter had stood three years earlier, there to make unfulfilled pledges about an economic renaissance for the ‘hood.
I was a young and junior staffer on the Reagan campaign back then, and so I watched what I could on network TV and glanced at scraps of wire copy coming off the AP ticker.(Nothing was digital back then.)