Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (37 page)

But now that the spotlight was on Massachusetts, Card showed his own inexperience. “Bush has to win here,” he blurted out to reporters.
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Yet in the wake of the New Hampshire landslide, Reagan's organizations in Massachusetts and Vermont showed new signs of life. Vermont allowed crossover voting, meaning that Reagan could hope to pick up votes from conservative Democrats there. John Anderson could also hurt Bush by attracting some Democrats in the Green Mountain State.

Anderson believed that his “Anderson Difference” era-of-limits message would go down well among the tweedy set of Vermont and the moderates of Massachusetts—the same voters Bush was counting on. Anderson had taken a beating in New Hampshire, winning only 10 percent of the vote, but the national media now got behind his flagging campaign. Some liberals, disappointed with Kennedy, were also kicking Anderson's tires.

The Reagan campaign recognized that the Bush campaign would be weakened further if he failed to live up to expectations in these states. Reagan's Massachusetts campaign director, the twenty-seven-year-old Robert Dawson, wisely kept the focus and expectations on the other candidates: “This is Bush's best state and it may be Anderson's best state.”
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Facing unexpected challenges in Massachusetts and Vermont, the Bush team was forced to rearrange his schedule and spend even more time in those states. As a result, Bush could not devote as much attention to the tougher tests that would come later in the South and the Midwest.

The Bush campaign pushed a theme that was becoming prevalent in election reporting: that without Sears, Reagan would engage in some sort of ideological orgy and go too far to the right. Dave Keene, normally a shrewd operative, said he thought that Reagan would “move into an ideological corner” because his campaign could “fire up their base, but they can't expand their base.”
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He added that Reagan had let go “the 90 percent of the people who have talent.” “If they think they … can win with the B team,” Keene said, “then we're happy to play.”
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Keene wasn't thinking right. He was going through a messy divorce and was in the unfamiliar Bush country club, working with moderates against all his friends in the Reagan campaign and the conservative movement. He was miserable and it showed. The crushing defeat in New Hampshire did not help his mood. Campaign secretaries fled his office in tears. He was so hard on one poor young woman that she quit in exasperation. The Bushes heard about the incident and indirectly let Keene know they were unhappy with his behavior. Jim Baker called Keene into his office ostensibly to deliver this message. Baker talked around the divorce and the Bushes' concerns. Keene, knowing how the Bushes felt about marriage, thought, “Uh oh, here we go,” until Baker said, “Now, do you have a good lawyer?”
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T
HE
GOP
BASE OF
support had changed over the past hundred years. In the years following the Civil War, the GOP's strength had been in the Northeast and the Midwest. States like Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois were routinely Republican. The Democrats' stronghold was the South, fueled by anti-Republican rage over the Civil War, initiated by a Republican president, and Reconstruction, brought on by a vengeful Republican Congress. The New Deal and the rise of labor politics altered the course; onetime Republican states became Democratic. Jimmy Carter had won the presidency in 1976 by stitching together the old New Deal coalition of the South and the industrial Rust Belt.

But that was a last hurrah. The GOP's base had moved to the West and the South. Texas was moving into the GOP column and California, along with the
rest of the West, was now reliably Republican, especially in presidential contests. It was significant that Reagan, Bush, Connally, and Howard Baker all hailed from the South or the West.

The new GOP embraced the western culture. These were states settled by men and women of courage and fortitude, by hardy individualists, conservative in their outlook and suspicious of government. The broad expanse of terrain imbued their culture and their character. Being at a great distance from the seat of their national government added to their “we don't need no stinkin' Washington” populist outlook. Notably, both Texas and California were once independent republics before they joined the Union.

The GOP was changing as America was changing. Texas and California together had more wealth than New York and New England combined.
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Dallas, which had become a pariah city after 1963, had by the late 1970s been rejuvenated. It had even become the setting—and the name—of a hugely popular evening soap opera. American workers in the North, increasingly frustrated with the economy, government regulations, crime, education, and the weather, migrated in greater numbers to warmer climes than had those who had crossed the plains a hundred years earlier. The Democratic Northeast was losing population while the South and West gained voters.

The changing demographics were on the minds of all political types because the U.S. government was getting ready to launch the census. The Constitution required a nose count of Americans every ten years. At stake was the apportionment of congressional districts and thus presidential electoral ballots. Democrats worried that with the census counting illegal aliens, GOP states like California and Texas would pick up new congressional seats.

Like everything else bureaucrats and politicians got their hands on, the census had become grotesque and unwieldy. The short form had nineteen questions, eighteen of which conservatives thought were none of the government's business. The long form had a whopping forty-six questions. Bureaucrats arrogantly pointed out that the long form would take “just” forty-five minutes to complete. Even liberals worried about questions that could make people feel “uncomfortable.” Indeed, the Census Bureau prepared a report revealing, “Many people believe that Americans are less willing now than in the past to cooperate freely with officialdom.”
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Big money, including the spread of federal pork, was at stake, and of course, many of the none-of-your-business questions were the result of lobbying by Madison Avenue. Marketers wanted taxpayers to pay for information they could use to cram new products down the American consumers' throats.

The nosiness of government was easy pickings for Reagan. He made bureaucrats
look foolish when he told audiences that he refused to tell Uncle Sam how many toilets he had in his home.

G
EORGE
B
USH, TRYING TO
recover from the loss in New Hampshire, went hard after Reagan. He wasn't about to roll over and play dead for anyone.

Bush told a group of reporters, “I can't see Reagan going much farther to the right, that's pretty hard to do.” He also slammed Reagan on foreign affairs—a topic very much in the news and on the minds of government officials. Congress had approved a $75 million aid package for the “revolutionary junta” of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, hoping to “curb the leftist tilt.”
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Meanwhile, the brutal fight in Afghanistan was raging, and it was dawning on the Soviets that their attempted takeover might take longer than expected. Bush attacked Reagan for his proposed blockade of Cuba to punish the Soviets for the Afghanistan invasion, calling it “almost an act of war”
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and “irresponsible rhetoric.”
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Bush also took it to Reagan on the economy. In Chicago he said that Reagan was making a “phony promise” to freeze or reduce federal spending. Bush said that his opponent needed to “get specific” about budget cuts and reduction in the size of the government, and accused Reagan of wanting to cut Social Security for retirees. “It's a cinch to go for the punch-line out there—the easy promise. But I'm going to avoid the simplistic.”
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Reagan was not about to let Bush's charges go without a response. He accused Bush of “bland generalities,” adding, “I don't recall him ever being specific about anything.”
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But if these guys thought national politics was tough, they hadn't seen nothin.' In Dade County, Florida, hundreds of people from all lifestyles were running for spots on the Democratic County Executive Committee. Each had a unique reason for running. “Michael Smyser is running against Seth Sklarey. He says Seth is ugly.” Another candidate, Nancy Abrams, was said to be “easy to hate.” Nancy and her ex-husband had carried some weight in Florida politics, but they went their separate ways in marriage and then again over Carter and Kennedy—Nancy stayed with Carter.
People
magazine did a story on their divorce.
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Of the whole local mess, the
Miami Herald
entertainingly wrote, “The rumors fly. So-and-so doesn't really live in her district. His endorsements are false. She never went to any party meetings. He's a homosexual. She's a power-hungry man-eater.” The Republicans watched with bemusement from the sidelines. “We try to be polite, dear,” Jane Warren, the Republican secretary, told the
Herald
. Of course, the local GOP had its own issues. In a recent Republican contest, Letitia Godoy found herself in a fight with her opponent over who would be listed first on the ballot. Her opponent was her own mother—Letitia Godoy.
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All of this Sturm und Drang was over offices that paid exactly nothing. There were some benefits to the job, though, by the account of one candid local official. “What do I do as a committeeman? Things like fixing traffic tickets and jury notices.”
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Democracy in America was a beautiful thing.

“
Maybe he's developed a slice.
”

I
n early March 1980, Lou Cannon wrote a remarkably candid piece about Ronald Reagan for the
Washington Post
's “Commentary” section. “Reagan has been depicted in this newspaper and by this correspondent as being old, tired and hard of hearing,” Cannon penned. “His capacity to be president has been questioned.”
¹

But what was “remarkable,” he added, was that Reagan had “chosen to grin and bear it. I have covered every campaign of Reagan's, seeing him on bad days and good. He can become angry or distraught or confused about what has been said about him. But I have never known Reagan to hide out on his ranch and refuse to answer questions. Nor has he treated those who reported critically about him with special disfavor. He has, on the contrary, been unfailingly courteous and responsive to his media critics, never whining about the treatment he has been given or suggesting that the liberties of the press should be curtailed.

“The word … to describe Reagan is ‘manly.’”
²

Now the “manly” Reagan was surging. George Bush's decision to redouble his efforts in Massachusetts and Vermont seemed not just prudent but critical by this point. A new Boston Globe poll released just four days before the primaries showed that Bush's once-massive lead in the Bay State had all but disappeared: Reagan and Bush were essentially tied, at 33 and 36 percent, respectively. John Anderson's strategy was paying off, as he scored an impressive 17 percent. Only Howard Baker fared poorly, polling at just 6 percent.
³
The race had gotten so tight that the candidates shuttled for a week between the two New England states by car and plane. Except for Reagan, that is: He adhered to the previous plan of
spending only one day in Massachusetts. Most of his effort would go into a mailing to 270,000 of the state's Republicans.
⁴

Bush was doing his best in Massachusetts to push Reagan into a right-wing corner and Anderson into a left-wing corner so he could seize the middle for himself. The primary, he said, would, “sort out the fringe candidates.”
⁵

The stunning breakdown in New Hampshire called for a radical change in Bush's message. Bush's adman, Bobby Goodman, huddled with Jim Baker, Dave Keene, and their candidate. They decided that they could not keep dancing around the age issue. The most effective way to attack Reagan's age, they concluded, was to create commercials featuring senior citizens speculating that Reagan couldn't have the necessary vitality anymore because they didn't have it anymore. “Onerous geriatric judgments” was how Evans and Novak put it.
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Bush began telling Republicans that “a vote for Anderson is a vote for Reagan.”
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Anderson didn't much like being called anybody's cat's-paw. He crisscrossed the state, and pledged to keep campaigning until he ran out of clean laundry. Anderson told voters, “There is something different about me,” or, speaking in the third person, “There is something different about John Anderson.” His speeches were liberally sprinkled with the words “I” and “my.”
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Bush, more than gun-shy after the Nashua experience, ran away from a proposal to debate Howard Baker in Vermont, screaming “ambush.” Baker wryly took stock of Bush's response and said, “George must have suffered more from New Hampshire than I thought.”
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Adding to the Bush team's aggravation was the fact that the mudslinging was intensifying with John Connally in South Carolina. Connally had accused the Bush campaign of “dirty tricks,”
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charging that a black supporter of Bush's was spreading “‘walking-around’ money” throughout the state. The charge was scurrilous, but Connally soon became embroiled in his own controversy. Bush backer Harry Dent—who loathed Connally almost as much as he despised Reagan—accused Connally of attempting to buy the black vote. Dent would not let the issue go, and the fight between the two campaigns turned ugly.
¹¹
John Connally III, acting as his father's newest campaign manager, called Bush “reprehensible.” A Bush spokesman fired back, using a polysyllabic obscenity, and called young Connally's charges “a lie.”
¹²
Bush's aides fretted that their campaign was wasting time going after the wrong man, but Reagan couldn't have been happier. The more time the two Texans spent banging on each other, the less time they had to go after him. He could stay above the fray.