The final exam consists of a three-page, double-spaced essay that compares the presidency of Ronald Reagan with that of William J. Clinton.

The sources for this paper are Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer, Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981-1989 and Michael Tomasky, Bill Clinton, plus Lichtenstein’s lectures and his articles posted on Gauchospace. There are many documents reprinted in the Jacobs and Zelizer Conservatives in Power, some of which you might want to use.

Feel free to define the precise nature of the comparison you make in this paper. The focus can be intensely personal or structured to take account of policies pursued by the entire Administration. I also urge you to concentrate on just one or two closely related subjects and themes. Here are some:

A. Welfare and health insurance programs: Clinton sought to make big changes, but was his administration all that different from that of Ronald Reagan?

B. Capitalism and class politics. Reagan cut taxes on the rich and broke the PATCO strike. Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy and was more sympathetic to labor. But he favored more free trade and financial deregulation. To what extent did the policies pursued by each Administration increase or decrease economic and social inequality and the power of workers to make their voices heard? How did any of this work out in terms of politics and the economy?

C. Foreign policy: to what degree did each Administration forge a new policy and to what extent did it succeed? What difference did it make that the Cold War came to an end?

D. Scandals engulfed both presidencies (Iran-Contra for Reagan; the Lewinsky affair for Clinton). Compare them in terms of causes, consequences, seriousness, and partisanship.

E. Personality and politics: Both presidents ended their tenure in office with high approval ratings.  Why was this? What were the sources of their popularity and to what extent did this reflect their personality as well as the policies they pursued?

You can devote your entire three-page essay toward an answer to one of the questions above, or you can combine and seek to answer two or even three. Depending on your skill and how you marshal your arguments and evidence, both choices are equally valid.

    Be sure to footnote correctly, using the examples below as a template.

President Reagan did not sweep all before him. Big government programs like Social Security and Medicare remained popular in the 1980s.

Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a speech delivered in March 1983 to a conference of evangelical Protestants. In that same speech, Reagan attacked the nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. by telling his audience that this disarmament movement would discourage the Soviets from negotiating seriously on arms control.

    James Carville, one of President Bill Clinton’s key advisers, once said that if he were ever reincarnated, he wanted to be reborn as the “bond market” because it was “the most powerful thing in the world.”