Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (50 page)

Reagan was asked at one press conference why he was making so many mistakes on the road. Rather than blaming his staff, Reagan said he was doing his own research and not checking his facts thoroughly the way he should have been.

Newsweek
published its own detailed story compiling Reagan's string of misstatements. When the magazine asked Congressman Guy Vander Jagt, head of the GOP's House campaign committee, whether he thought Reagan was “shallow,” he coldly replied, “It depends on how you define ‘shallow.’”
²³

The gaffe issue became an out-of-control brushfire. Long reports in the
New York Times
,
Washington Post
,
Time
, and other media outlets detailed Reagan's problem with misstatements. Reagan was right when he spoke about “incest” among the media: one story tended to generate another story in which the first story was cited. This had happened to Reagan the year before with the age issue, and now he was going through it again with questions about his intelligence. Some of the “catches” by the media, such as how many employees worked just on government compliance forms at General Motors, were legitimate errors by Reagan. He said the number was 23,000. In fact, 24,000 worked on government-mandated programs at the automaker, but only 5,000 actually filled out reports for Washington. Other errors were niggling. Reagan sometimes mentioned that the third chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, was not a lawyer. Reporters
jumped on him for this. Actually, Marshall had not gone to law school but had “read for the law.”
²⁴

In April, the remaining candidates of both parties appeared in close succession before the annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington. Reagan, in his speech before the newspaper editors, seemed uneasy and tentative. He read from a prepared text instead of from his usual note cards. His campaign was test-driving some new themes: that “blue-collar workers, ethnics, registered Democrats and independents with conservative values” would be part of his new majority coalition. They would be brought together because of shared values: “the family, neighborhood, work, peace-through-strength and freedom-through-vigilance.”
²⁵

The
Los Angeles Times
noted that Reagan's speech “was received in utter silence” by the editors.
²⁶
Before taking questions from the hostile crowd, Reagan nervously joked, “Do I get a cigarette and a blindfold?”
²⁷
One editor in attendance, Edwin Guthman of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, expressed his disdain for Reagan, saying that the governor “is living in a world that is as remote from the realities and challenges of the 1980s as any 1930s Hollywood happy ending could be.”
²⁸

Americans, though, did not agree with the mandarins of the press. About 60 percent of his countrymen now thought Carter had been too weak in dealing with the ayatollah and that his handling of the Soviets had been too soft, according to a survey commissioned by
Time
magazine. Carter's image as a strong leader was in full retreat and Bush's had evaporated. The only candidate whom the American people regarded as a strong leader was Reagan.
²⁹

Bush still could not figure out that Reagan's appeal wasn't just about delivering a good speech. In his own remarks before the newspaper editors, Bush said, “The process has put a lot of emphasis on theater, on charisma. What I must do is recognize that I will not be able to outdo my principal opponent on the 30-second clip. Nor can I outperform him on the applause meter.… He's just better than I am at that.”
³⁰

Reagan and his followers, however, found vindication for what they were doing. For the first time in the campaign, Reagan actually moved ahead of Carter in the national polls, 44 percent to 43 percent.
³¹
True, it was within the margin of error, but they took the poll as a sign that his conservative message was getting through to his fellow citizens. The gaffe issue was so much eyewash as far as Middle America was concerned.

R
ELIGIOUS CONSERVATIVES WERE BECOMING
fully engaged in the 1980 campaign, mostly supporting Reagan, despite the fact that he was a divorced man who had
once supported the ERA and that as governor he had signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country. Reagan flipped on the ERA, and shortly after signing the abortion bill he said he'd been sold a bill of goods and expressed lifelong regret over signing it.
³²

Religion had been a part of the American political scene since the days of the Revolution, but never had political participation been organized from the pulpit in this fashion, with the possible exception of the activist clergy of the 1960s who protested against the Vietnam War and in favor of civil rights. But the right-wing evangelical tide now swelling in America was dwarfing anything the Berrigan brothers and their cohorts had done during the heady days of the counterculture.

Most religious leaders had eschewed direct activism (“Render unto Caesar …”). Politics was of this world, while they were concerned with the next world. Carter, Communism, and the culture changed their outlook. Carter had run as a born-again Christian in 1976, making much of his faith, and evangelicals had responded enthusiastically, giving him 60 percent of their vote over Ford and Ford's outspoken wife, Betty, who supported the ERA and abortion and had scandalously condoned a hypothetical affair by her daughter. But evangelical leaders and voters quickly became disaffected with Carter and the Democratic Party, which was more and more being dominated by sideshow politics and special-interest groups. They also were motivated by the profound changes wrought during the 1960s and 1970s. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll didn't sit too well with these people. Finally, they were terrified by the march of atheistic Communism around the world, and by President Carter's inability (or disinclination) to halt it.

The “Silent Majority,” as Nixon had once called them, would be silent no longer. Evangelicals formed their own political organizations, including the Moral Majority, the Religious Roundtable, and the National Christian Action Network, and were marshaling their resources to stand up to the cultural forces they feared were tearing society apart—and to do battle with the president.

Bush acknowledged the rise of religion in speeches across Pennsylvania. In Doylestown, he told Christian voters, “The proper role of government in the 1980s should and must be to encourage the institution of home and community on which our society is based and to preserve our religious diversity.” It was a significant break from the past for the reticent Episcopalian. By his culture and his faith, Bush was taught not to talk about religion in public. Now he went even further, contrasting the religious tolerance in America with the intolerance he had witnessed as U.S. envoy to China.
³³

T
HE
P
ENNSYLVANIA
GOP
PRIMARY
was part “beauty contest” and part delegate selection, but one had no bearing upon the other. It was possible to lose the beauty contest and still win the majority of delegates. Pennsylvania's primary rules made it possible for GOP voters to pick their neighbor who was running as a delegate for one candidate while also pulling the lever for another candidate. Delegate candidates would not be identified as to whom they were affiliated with, the same as in Illinois, so the Reagan and Bush operations would have to conduct guerrilla activities to alert the local Republicans.

Not so on the Democratic side, where apportionment of delegates would be directly tied to the popular vote.
³⁴
Carter was in a tailspin, and even though logic dictated that Kennedy could not catch him, logic was suspended. Kennedy continued to batter the president day in and day out, predicting a worse economy than under Hoover.
³⁵
Oddly, Kennedy was now earning the hosannas of devoted liberals who had watched him get pasted in one primary after another. As he soldiered on, a certain nobility attached to him. The media and the elites had turned on Carter and now they cheered the valiant Kennedy. He must have felt like a modern-day Caesar. First the media hordes loved him, then they killed him, and now they mourned him.

Kennedy was so devoted to his cause that he had attempted to get Congressman Morris Udall of Arizona, a liberal of great self-deprecating wit who had run a fairly strong campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1976, to run in his stead, but the legal hurdles were too great, so Teddy vainly fought on.
³⁶
He must have been bitterly disappointed that so many friends he'd helped over the years had cut and run on him, but he never complained, at least publicly. His aides and family were less circumspect. When he became reflective, he twisted a lock of hair behind his left ear, a habit eerily reminiscent of his brothers. He contemplatively told a reporter, “Everyone … is three individuals. What you think you are. What you are. And what others think you are.”
³⁷

R
EAGAN'S POLLSTER
, D
ICK
W
IRTHLIN
, was not only a quiet and gentle Mormon; he was also one of the most perceptive students of American culture and politics. In mid-April, he did a remarkable thing. He took a poll in which he did not ask the American people what they thought about Reagan or Bush or Kennedy or Carter; he asked Americans what they thought of themselves. The results were starkly revealing. Those at the highest end of the scale of “well-developed confidence in self” were Reagan's strongest supporters. Another pro-Reagan group consisted of those who could be labeled “self-assertive.” These people typically took responsibility for their actions and tended to be pro-life and pro–gun ownership. According
to Wirthlin, these Reagan supporters skewed heavily Catholic, ethnic, blue-collar, and Democratic. Another group in Reagan's camp was the “optimistic.” These were Americans who believed in the future and that they had control over their own destinies.
³⁸

The pollster found, in short, that Reagan was appealing to a new values system that was not part of the old formulaic Republican message. By narrowing his message, Reagan was broadening his base. Wirthlin said, “The statements that Reagan makes about what the nation can do to recover its freedoms and its greatness help reduce the uncertainty of the future.… The assumption that we're making is that [these voters] will vote for a political change.”
³⁹

On the stump, Reagan was often just winging it, without using his speech cards. As the long primary season wore on his voice sometimes weakened, especially at the onset of making remarks. But as the crowd warmed to him, he seemed to gather strength from them and his voice would mostly boom again.
⁴⁰
Eleanor Roosevelt once observed that John Kennedy had the same quality as her husband, that they gathered inner strength from their audiences.
⁴¹
Reagan was in the same mold.

“Americans aren't losing their confidence, they're losing their shirts,” Reagan said to supportive crowds.
⁴²
But to seasoned Reagan watchers, he was getting ragged and sloppy. He didn't have the time now to work on the details of his speeches the way he had before, and there wasn't enough staff help. It was the price one paid for being a front-runner with little money.

Even as elites in the media, government, and the academy were scrutinizing Reagan's every move, they were coming to terms with the possibility that he could be elected president of the United States. Many were manifestly scared. Even the moderately conservative British magazine
The Economist
had a cover that announced, “It's time to think the unthinkable,” referring to a possible Reagan win.
⁴³
This from a publication that had supported, albeit with doubts, the election of Margaret Thatcher a year earlier in Great Britain.
⁴⁴

During a campaign stop in North Carolina, whose primary would be held two weeks after Pennsylvania's, Reagan was introduced by the Tar Heel State's own Jesse Helms. Senator Helms spoke of a “coalition of shared values” and referred to a movement that was as much about spiritual matters as it was about ideology. He said, “It may well be that God is giving us one more chance to save America.”
⁴⁵
The elites snickered, but millions not only knew what Helms meant, they agreed with him.

A
COMIC-DRAMA WAS PLAYING
out in the Bush campaign. Months earlier, while assembling the campaign's operation, both Jim Baker and Dave Keene had resisted
traveling with Bush. It wasn't personal, but both could take candidates only in small doses. So they recruited a stalwart conservative, writer Vic Gold, to travel full-time with the candidate. Gold suffered no fools and was a rough operator, but he was a superb, erudite attorney and one of the best wits and writers in Washington. He also had a temper like few men in politics.
⁴⁶

Gold had come out of southern politics in the 1950s. He worked as deputy press secretary for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and later was press secretary for Vice President Spiro Agnew in the Nixon White House. Gold had left, quitting many times in a fit of pique, before Agnew resigned. He was already a legend before he swore off politics to concentrate on his writing career. The specter of out-of-control journalists and dumb Republicans playing into their hands disgusted him. He became a feature essayist for a number of publications, including
National Review
,
The American Spectator
, and the
Washingtonian
, and a regular commentator on ABC's
Good Morning America
opposite longtime liberal and scion of Hollywood royalty Frank Mankiewicz. Gold's dinner friends included Frank Sinatra and baseball great Stan Musial. In 1979, Gold was a contented man, far from the political free-fire zone.