Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (104 page)

Ellis turned to Reagan and the Gipper was primed. He utterly rejected what he characterized as Carter's suggestion “that inflation somehow came upon us like a plague and therefore it's uncontrollable and no one can do anything about it,” calling the idea “entirely spurious” and “dangerous.” Contrary to Carter's argument, Reagan calmly pointed out, inflation in Ford's last term was at a tolerable 4.8 percent, but by 1980 it was at an annual rate of 12.7 percent, not the 7 percent that the president had argued. Reagan agreed that some new jobs had been created under Carter, “but that can't hide the fact that there are eight million men and women out of work in America today and two million of those lost their jobs in just the last few months.” He blasted Carter for saying that to get inflation under control, America would have to accept more joblessness and less productivity.
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Reagan laid into the root cause of inflation: out-of-control government spending. He said Carter had blamed a host of other actors for inflation, including OPEC and the Federal Reserve; Carter, Reagan said, “has blamed the lack of productivity on the American people; he has then accused the people of living too well, and that we must share in scarcity, we must sacrifice and get used to doing with less.” That would not do for Reagan: “We don't have inflation because the people are living too well. We have inflation because the
government
is living too well.”
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Recognizing that his time was running short, Reagan summarized his position succinctly: “Yes, you can lick inflation by increasing productivity and by decreasing the cost of government.”
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It was a turning point, though few in the hall knew it. Reagan was making the case to the American people that they were not to blame, as it seemed Carter and official Washington had suggested for four years. Inflation could be beaten. Reagan had settled in, had shaken off the early jitters, and was talking to the American people—more than 100 million of whom were watching, with millions more listening on their radios.
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At his next chance to speak, Carter chided Reagan again on the “Reagan-Kemp-Roth” plan, calling it “highly inflationary.” Carter said Reagan's suggestion to eliminate the minimum wage was “a heartless kind of approach to the working families … which is typical of many Republican leaders.”
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The GOP nominee homed in on the savaging of his tax-cut plan. “I'd like to ask the president: Why is it inflationary to let the people keep more of their money and spend it the way they'd like, and it isn't inflationary to let him take that money and spend it the way he wants?”
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Bingo. Reagan's so-called simplicity must have grated on Carter, but his common sense struck a chord with the American worker.

When William Hilliard asked a question about the plight of the cities, Reagan had a proposal courtesy of Jack Kemp. Reagan proposed “development zones” to provide tax incentives and reduced regulations in distressed urban areas as a means of attracting business and investment to the municipalities. He painted a picture for the audience of his recent unpleasant experience in the Bronx: “You have to see it to believe it. It looks like a bombed-out city—great gaunt skeletons of buildings, windows smashed out, painted on one of them ‘Unkept Promises,’ on another 'despair.'” Reagan reminded his audience that Carter had gone there in 1977 promising everything, delivering nothing.
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Though Reagan handled Hilliard's follow-up question awkwardly, he had skillfully reminded Americans of the failed Carter record, of four years of broken promises.

Carter, in his rebuttal, offered the usual liberal bromides of more government spending. Speaking like a technocrat, he threw out statistics and big figures that surely sounded like fingernails across a blackboard to the people watching at home. At his conclusion, he accused Reagan of being insensitive to racism.
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It was clear that Reagan's calm demeanor was starting to annoy Carter.

Carter spoke of America as if it was no longer a melting pot but instead something akin to a patchwork quilt, where immigrants could preserve “their ethnic commitments” and “their relationships with their relatives in foreign countries.”
Carter was in full pander mode now, as he spoke about the exclusion of minorities from “the affairs of government” and how he had appointed blacks, women, and Hispanics to government jobs. Patronizingly, he said, “To involve them in administration of government and a feeling that they belong to the societal structure … is a very important commitment.”
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Reagan should have knocked it out of the park in his response, but instead he answered disjointedly about unemployment among blacks and the minimum wage. He only touched on government programs as “dead-end” jobs. He had given Carter an opening, which the president took advantage of when he again accused Reagan of “insensitivity” to the plight of poor people. “This, to me, is a very important difference between him and me,” Carter said.
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Now it was Barbara Walters's turn. She did not ask the president what kind of tree he was. Rather, she bore in on the issue of the hostages, which had been the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room for the past forty-five minutes. She pointed out that Israel had a zero-tolerance policy on hostages: Israeli hostages were treated the same as soldiers, and the government would not negotiate with terrorists for the lives of either. Carter, of course, had spent a year negotiating with terrorists for the lives of more than fifty Americans in Tehran. He ducked the question and talked obliquely about how terrorism was “one of the blights on this world.” He meandered and took another shot at Reagan, accusing him of supporting the spread of nuclear weapons.
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Walters was unsatisfied with Carter's answer and got more specific, asking whether offering military spare parts wasn't “reward[ing] terrorism.” He answered weakly again, using only a few seconds of his allotted time.
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Clearly, he wanted to move on.

Walters repeated her original question to Reagan, and the challenger jumped all over it—nailing Carter in the process: “Barbara, you've asked that question twice. I think you ought to have at least one answer to it.” Reagan, though, was in a predicament. As much as he wanted to slam Carter's policy toward the ayatollah, the situation in Tehran was ticklish. “Your question is difficult to answer because [of] the situation right now,” he said cautiously. As he acknowledged in his response, he didn't want to say anything overtly aggressive that might inadvertently delay the return of the hostages or cause them harm.
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So he pursued a safe course, defending himself over Carter's false accusation that Reagan had a “secret plan” to secure their release and then calling for a “complete investigation as to … why they [the hostages] have been there so long.… And I would suggest that Congress should hold such an investigation. In the meantime, I'm going to continue praying that they'll come home.”
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Walters asked Reagan a follow-up on overthrowing or supporting governments that did not conform to the principles of the United States. Reagan was dubious about interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, as a new government installed by the United States might be more noxious than the old one. Carter, when he was offered rebuttal time, said petulantly, “I didn't hear any comment from Governor Reagan about what he would do to stop or to reduce terrorism in the future.”
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At the debate's halfway mark, two things were clear. The first was that Reagan was the master of subtlety while Carter had all the subtlety of a blunderbuss. The second was that Reagan was getting under Carter's skin. Carter glared at Reagan periodically.

In the second half of the debate, the format changed: there would be no follow-up questions from the panelists, but the candidates themselves could take two cracks at rebutting, offering a follow-up question, or just making a comment.

Stone asked Reagan about arms control and his suggestion to “scrap” SALT II. Reagan handled the question with aplomb. He pointed out that while both Carter and Mondale blamed him for blocking their cherished treaty, it was the Senate Armed Services Committee, controlled by the Democrats, which had “voted ten to zero, with seven abstentions, against the SALT II treaty and declared that it was not in the national security interests of the United States.” Reagan once again got in a subtle dig at Carter when he reminded the president that when he had pushed the Soviets for actual reductions in nuclear arms, the response from the Kremlin was “nyet.”
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A murmur of laughter was heard in the hall.

The same question went to Carter and he moved in on Reagan like Sugar Ray Leonard. “There is a disturbing pattern in the attitude of Governor Reagan” on the issue of arms control, Carter curtly said. “He has never supported any of those arms control agreements.… And now he wants to throw into the wastebasket a treaty to control nuclear weapons.” Carter closed in. “When a man who hopes to be president says, ‘Take this treaty, discard it’ … that is a very dangerous and disturbing thing.”
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When it came time for Reagan's rebuttal, he threw it back in Carter's face. “If I have been critical of some of the previous agreements, it's because we've been out-negotiated for quite a long time. And they [the Soviets] have managed, in spite of all of our attempts at arms limitation, to go forward with the biggest military buildup in the history of man.” Carter had noted that the SALT treaty had been negotiated “by myself and my two Republican predecessors,” but Reagan dismissed this comment as misleading, pointing out that Gerald Ford “is emphatically against this SALT treaty.” Reagan buttressed his case by telling the audience
that it was two Democratic senators, Henry Jackson of Washington and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, who were carrying the fight against the treaty on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Finally, Reagan rejected claims that he supported “throwing away” the treaty: “I am not talking of scrapping. I am talking of taking the treaty back and going back into negotiations” with the Kremlin to press for real arms reductions.
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Carter was finding to his dismay that Reagan was not an empty suit who was lost without his four-by-six cards. He seemed to be frustrated that Reagan had parried so many of his punches. “Governor Reagan is making some very misleading and disturbing statements,” he said. Carter scored Reagan for wanting nuclear superiority over the Russians, even though recent polling showed that a strong majority of the American people wanted superiority, not the parity that Carter was advocating. He closed his rebuttal by saying that Reagan's “attitude is extremely dangerous and belligerent in its tone, although it's said with a quiet voice.”
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Reagan began his rebuttal by saying, “I know the president is supposed to be replying to me, but sometimes I have a hard time in connecting what he's saying with what I have said or what my positions are.”
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Then he calmly restated his position on reopening negotiations with the Soviets.

Carter had the last word on this question. One that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

“I think to close out this discussion it would be better to put into perspective what we're talking about. I had a discussion with my daughter, Amy, the other day before I came here to ask her what the most important issue was. She said she thought nuclear weaponry and the control of nuclear arms.”
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The crowd tittered with derisive laughter, and Carter's aides buried their faces in their hands. Carter looked up into the audience as he heard their reaction. Americans around the country laughed aloud. Reagan knew well enough to leave things alone when your opponent was screwing up. No one bothered to pay attention to the rest of Carter's answer.

The questioning moved on to energy, exploration, conservation. Little interesting was said by either man except that Carter kept pawing at Reagan. “Governor Reagan says that this is not a good achievement.” “Governor Reagan's approach to our energy policy … is to repeal or to change …” “The air pollution standard laws … were passed over the objections of Governor Reagan, and this is a very well-known fact.”
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Reagan brushed off the charges.

The topic moved to Social Security. This issue was supposedly another hot potato for Reagan, but he fielded it cleanly. Indeed, he displayed complete command
of the subject, conducting a national tutorial on the troubled and bankrupt retirement system as he explained how a program “trillions of dollars out of balance” must be “put on a sound actuarial basis.” He even managed to turn the topic around and hit Carter for the “biggest single tax increase in our nation's history.”
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Carter jabbed Reagan on his previous musings about making Social Security voluntary, but patiently, as if leading a slow student through a lesson. Carter grinned, pleased with himself. Reagan replied, “Mr. President, the voluntary thing that I suggested many years ago was that [with] a young man, orphaned and raised by an aunt who died, his aunt was ineligible for Social Security insurance because she was not his mother. And I suggested that if this is an insurance program, certainly the person who's paying in should be able to name his own beneficiaries. That's the closest I've ever come to anything voluntary with Social Security.”
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Reagan looked directly at the president as he spoke. Carter returned Reagan's gaze for a time, but then turned his head to look out at the panel of questioners.

Carter was on the defensive over Social Security, pledging not to change the system or the relationship between Social Security and Medicare. Then he attacked Reagan again—one time too many as it turned out. “Governor Reagan, as a matter of fact, began his political career campaigning around this nation against Medicare.” Carter added a few perfunctory comments about national health insurance and then finished by saying, “Governor Reagan again, typically, is against such a proposal.”
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