Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (106 page)

Carter's mission had been to “make Reagan the issue,” and unfortunately for the president, he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. More than 105 million people had watched the debate, according to
Newsweek
, making it by far the most viewed debate in American history.
⁸
Those millions of viewers had learned that the Californian was not a mad bomber, he was not an empty suit, he was not a mean man who would throw old people out into snow banks, he was not a bigot or stupid. They discovered a man far different from the one portrayed by the Carter campaign; Rafshoon's July memo, typical of the way the president's men dismissed their opponent, contemptuously referred to Reagan as “too old, not smart, too simplistic, doesn't read, naieve [
sic
], inexperienced, right-wing.”
⁹
Instead, viewers saw a man of humility but self-confidence, a conservative who believed that compassion came from the home, the church, and the community and that it could not—and more importantly should not—be imposed by governmental fiat.

Carter had been right when he said that there were “stark differences” between the two candidates.
¹⁰

But many of the elites—a.k.a. the “Beautiful People”—were not sure how to respond. It couldn't be possible that Ronald Reagan—
that actor
—had beaten President Carter, could it? Nawww.

Therefore, like the townspeople in the tale of
The Emperor's New Clothes
, they scurried to the safety of their elitist friends to say that President Carter had won the debate because other members of the elites said Carter won the debate. “All the people throughout the city had already heard of the wonderful cloth and its magic and all were anxious to learn how wise or how stupid their friends and neighbors might be.”
¹¹

In their postdebate analysis, CBS correspondents Dan Rather, Lesley Stahl, and Bill Plante all chatted up Carter's performance. In the minority were Walter Cronkite and Bruce Morton, who were mildly impressed with Reagan, but only because he had not screwed up. Jack Germond and Jules Witcover agreed and wrote backhandedly that Reagan hadn't done “anything stupid.”
¹²
The next morning on the
Today
show, anchor Tom Brokaw dwelt favorably on Carter's handling of the SALT II issue.
¹³

The
Washington Post
gave additional comfort to the elites the morning after as David Broder wrote in a story headlined “Carter on Points, but No KO” that Carter
had kept Reagan on the defensive throughout. “In a confrontation where most of the time was spent on Carter's preferred issues—and not the economic record of the last four years, on which Reagan would have preferred to focus—the incumbent repeatedly managed to work in a partisan appeal to his fellow Democrats.”
¹⁴

The TV critic for the
Post
, Tom Shales, wrote, “As TV personality, Carter looked … basically unflappable. Reagan let himself be backed into corners by Carter punches to the face and body.”
¹⁵

In the
Washington Star
, the august Mary McGrory wrote, “Ronald Reagan showed the superficiality and insensitivity to such matters as the nuclear threat and race relations that makes people nervous about putting him in the Oval Office.”
¹⁶

Fred Barnes, a reporter for the
Baltimore Sun
, watched the debate and, like his peers in journalism, thought Carter had won. After the debate Barnes headed to Philadelphia to cover a campaign story, and while listening to Larry King's radio show during the drive he was astonished to find all the callers saying that Reagan had won.
¹⁷

The callers' response was no fluke. The
New York Times
had assembled a focus group made up of a cross-section of voters from the greater New York area, including many who before the debate had planned to vote for Carter or had been undecided. Not now. One pre-debate undecided voter, a woman from Connecticut, said Carter was “offensive and belligerent.” She was among those now leaning toward Reagan. Even some of those who said they planned on voting for Carter praised Reagan's performance and panned Carter's. A Rutgers professor from Brooklyn said of Reagan, “I had to hand it to him. He is very reassuring. He comes across so graceful. Without substance, though.” She complained bitterly about Carter's “self-righteousness, his hyperbole.” What's more, the group exploded in guffaws over Carter's assertion that he'd discuss nuclear policy with his daughter, Amy.
¹⁸

Still, there was an utter and complete chasm between the paper's coverage of the debate and the reporting on its little focus group.

Even more telling was the Associated Press poll taken immediately after the debate. The survey showed that fully 46 percent of the respondents thought Reagan had done a better job while only 34 percent said Carter had performed better.
¹⁹

The poll was conducted too late in the evening for the East Coast papers to report on it. When mainstream media figures did learn of the late-night survey, they generally dismissed it, claiming that the poll had been tilted toward “Reagan Country” in the West.

Conservative columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell saw it differently, saying that it was the distinction between the “Wise and the Wisenheimers.”
²⁰
Tyrrell had a point. There was a huge disconnect between the insulated elites and the rest of the
country. The difference was as stark as that between a delightfully amusing little Chardonnay and a frosty bottle of Carling Black Label beer. A union man with the roofers said after the debate, “If Reagan was a Democrat, he'd been in the White House in January.”
²¹
For millions of Democrats, Reagan spoke their language, even if he didn't mangle his verb usage.

One of the few Beautiful People who did understand what had transpired in Cleveland was Sam Donaldson of ABC News. After leaving the hall, he spotted Jody Powell and Hamilton Jordan backslapping each other and congratulating themselves on Carter's “win.” Donaldson knew otherwise and yelled out, “Your man blew it!”
²²

Ted Kennedy was another exception among the elites. He watched the debate with a group of high-powered Democrats at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. At the conclusion, remembered Bob Shrum, “they're all cheering and they're saying Carter won.” When Shrum got into the limousine with Kennedy to head to the airport, Kennedy told Shrum, “He just got killed.”
²³
Kennedy wasn't referring to Reagan.

Warren Mitofsky, the much-esteemed head of survey research for CBS, said on the night of the debate that instant public commentary after such debates meant little. What was more meaningful, he argued, was what people thought several days after, when they had time to digest things, talk to friends and family, and formulate an opinion.
²⁴

Dick Wirthlin had been running daily tracking polls for weeks now. Wirthlin's overnight tracking after the debate had Carter blip up by three points in a head-to-head matchup. But a few days after the debate, the Republican pollster's internal numbers on the “who won the debate?” heavily favored Reagan: 41 percent thought the Republican had won, while only 26 percent thought Carter had, with the balance saying either “undecided” or “neither.”
²⁵

Wirthlin's internal numbers were supported by an ABC call-in poll done the night of the debate. Although mired in controversy (as we'll see later), the callers overwhelmingly supported Reagan by a 67 to 33 percent margin.

Two days after the showdown, CBS News released a nationwide poll that only confirmed what Middle America already knew: Ronald Reagan had won the debate—by a margin of 44 percent to 36 percent, Americans thought Reagan had outperformed the president.
²⁶

N
EW ENDORSEMENTS ROLLED IN
for Reagan. For the first time in its history, the National Rifle Association fired a twenty-one-gun salute and warmly endorsed the Gipper. In addition,
TV Guide
, with a circulation of 18.9 million, endorsed
Reagan—the first endorsement ever by the popular magazine. The publisher was Walter Annenberg, who had once been Richard Nixon's ambassador to the Court of St. James.
²⁷

The
Washington Post
issued its judgment the Friday before the election, coming in for Carter, but only reluctantly. The long piece actually had more praise for Reagan than Carter. The
Post
conveyed its lack of enthusiasm when it sourly noted, “A just God will hear the prayers of
all
those who wish this campaign soon to be over.”
²⁸

The
Post
was like many of the big-city newspapers in endorsing Carter over Reagan. It was not representative of newspapers overall, however. In fact,
Editor and Publisher
magazine found that 443 daily newspapers with a combined circulation of 17.6 million had endorsed the Gipper, while the president had received the support of 126 editorial pages with only 7.8 million readers.
²⁹
When the
New York Post
endorsed Reagan, Carter petulantly called the publisher, Rupert Murdoch, to chew him out. He complained that “the Australian-born Murdoch is not even a U.S. citizen.”
³⁰

T
HE DAY AFTER THE
debate Carter went to Pittsburgh to begin the frenetic last days of campaigning. One newspaper called this closing segment of the campaign a “six-day political death march.”
³¹
After spending so many months employing the Rose Garden strategy, Carter was now campaigning all-out. He was covering as much ground as possible, putting in long days until Americans voted on Tuesday, November 4. Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas, Tennessee, and California were just some of the pivotal states he would hit in the scant few days remaining.

The last-minute swing through Reagan's California was a shot across the Republican's bow, but Reaganites dismissed the president's incursion to reporters. Dick Richards, Reagan's political director for the West, considered Carter's planned trip to California no less than a fool's errand.
³²
But the Reagan campaign sweated enough to buy an additional $25,000 worth of TV time in Los Angeles to run the weekend before the election.
³³

The mood on Carter's plane was jovial. The president voiced confidence on the trail. In Missouri, he reminded the audience that JFK had once said that in twenty years Republicans would praise Harry Truman, then added, “I predict that twenty years from now Republican candidates might even be saying nice things about Jimmy Carter's second term.”
³⁴
After being met by tens of thousands of union members in New York City's Garment District, Carter wrote in his diary, “A lot of electricity. Excitement.” Clearly, he thought he was going to win.
³⁵

There were, however, reasons for apprehension. The fact that he had to devote so much time to southern states was itself a problem. Carter had taken all of the South in 1976, and now his administration was serving up millions in federal pork to the region. It was a worrisome that Florida, Mississippi, Texas, and Tennessee weren't safely in his column.

The “big four” industrial states bordering the Great Lakes—Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, for a total of ninety-nine electoral votes—were all too close to call.
³⁶
But Don Totten, Reagan's Midwest political director, knew the region like his own mother's face and was confident about his on-the-ground squad.
³⁷
Meanwhile, Carter himself acknowledged that he was trailing in New Jersey.

A new national survey said that 48 percent of adult blacks either were not registered to vote or were not planning on voting.
³⁸
This was further bad news for Carter, who needed the black vote badly. In several states, including Ohio and Mississippi, black voters had provided the critical margin for him four years earlier.

An embarrassing story came out that Carter's campaign was running ads in urban areas falsely charging John Anderson with having opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 when in fact he had voted for both. Trying to keep blacks from switching to Anderson, the Carter campaign ho-humly took credit for the ads without apologizing for the lie.
³⁹

Adding to Carter's worries were continued rumors about the Iranian hostages. The latest rumor the administration had to fight off held that the president was about to fly to a military base in Wiesbaden to greet the released hostages. Evans and Novak breathlessly reported that a deal had been worked out two weeks before the election, “sealed in a handshake” between White House counsel Lloyd Cutler and Iranian negotiators. Cutler hotly denied the column.
⁴⁰

There was no such deal. In fact, as Walter Mondale remembered years later, “Khomeini was playing us like a cat and a mouse … dangling hope and then crushing it.”
⁴¹

A
LTHOUGH MULTIPLE INDICATORS SHOWED
that at least a plurality of Americans thought Reagan had bested Carter during the debate, a minor controversy arose relating to a poll run by ABC's popular news program
Nightline
.
⁴²
In the days before the debate ABC had heavily promoted a survey in which people could phone in to vote on who they thought won the showdown. Once the debate ended, ABC revealed two phone numbers that viewers could call: one to register a vote for Reagan and another to vote for Carter. Each call cost fifty cents.
⁴³