Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (55 page)

But the Reaganites made the new order clear to all, telling reporters that they were “calling the shots” and that if Brock wanted to keep his job, he'd better dance to the Reagan tune. They let Brock make the Ford announcement only as a “matter of courtesy.”
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Former president Richard Nixon, by everyone's agreement, would not be invited to speak to the party that he'd once lorded over.

When a reporter asked Brock whether he would stay on if Reagan was the nominee, he guardedly said, “I think the Governor would prefer to speak for himself.”
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Brock got some good news when a survey he'd commissioned found that Republican Party identification had grown to 30 percent, up from the 24 percent where it had been stagnating. Meanwhile, Democratic Party identification had dropped, from 46 percent to 40 percent.
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It was the first inkling of a Reagan-spearheaded realignment.

In even better news, Brock's RNC was light-years ahead of the Democratic National Committee in fundraising. The RNC had already raised $9 million of an expected $19 million while the DNC, despite the advantages of incumbency, had raised only $1.5 million with a staff of just fifty.
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Reagan went to Indiana for a whirlwind of campaigning. Pennsylvania and Texas had thrown a scare into him. It was not beyond possibility that Bush could rebound, especially given his huge money advantage. Reagan couldn't coast or stumble again.

Thousands of energized Hoosiers met Reagan across Indiana. On the stump, he said it might be possible for the GOP to gain control of the U.S. Senate for the first time since the early 1950s.
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He also loved to tell a corny joke that always got a big laugh. He would relate to audiences about how he and Nancy were campaigning in the Midwest when they met up with an old man who didn't recognize the Reagans. Reagan gave a hint: “We're from California.” No response. “We're in the movies.” No response. “My initials are RR.” Eyes brightening, the old man yelled, “Ma, come quick. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are running for president.”
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While in Indiana, Reagan went to see an old friend, Colonel H. N. Park. They had been pals years before in Des Moines. Park remembered Reagan in those days as someone “who made things happen.” Reagan, he said, was “handsome, well-mannered … yet could party with the best of them on a Saturday night.” As young men, they often gathered at the Moonlight, a gin mill outside of town.
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Dick Wirthlin was already writing a 176-page plan for the fall campaign. He identified several “Conditions of Victory” needed for Reagan. These included expanding his appeal to draw the support of “moderates, Independents, soft Republicans and soft Democrats.” He advocated holding back on campaign spending until the final twenty days before the November election. Reagan's pollster also urged the campaign to search for ways in which to “neutralize Carter's ‘October Surprise,’” which Reagan's men believed would be the dramatic release of the hostages in Iran.
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Reagan's campaign temporarily dealt with the gaffe issue by eliminating any statistics he might cite in a speech unless and until they were verified and reverified. By now, many in the media were lying in wait, just hoping to catch Reagan making a mistake on the stump. So was Bush.

Another solution under discussion was to bring Stu Spencer back into the Reagan fold. Spencer, since 1966, had had an “off again, on again” relationship with the Reagans. He'd run Reagan's successful campaign in 1966 for governor and was involved in the successful 1970 reelection. Around that time, he'd lost some political business and blamed Ed Meese and others around Reagan for dropping
dimes on him. The relationship bottomed out after that. In 1976, Spencer signed up with Gerald Ford, telling people, “It's one thing to elect that right winger governor, it's another to elect him as president.”
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Late in the spring of 1976, in the heat of the campaign, Reagan had been asked a hypothetical question about quelling the situation in Rhodesia, which was going through a bloody civil war as it transitioned from white minority rule to black majority rule. Reagan postulated some sort of international peacekeeping force, including American troops to prevent more bloodshed, nothing more. Spencer wrote radio and television scripts for Ford making an analogy to Vietnam. The tagline was, “Remember, Governor Reagan couldn't start a war. President Reagan could.” Reagan was beyond furious, first at Spencer and then at Ford because he defended the commercial and made sport of Reagan's anger. The “warmonger” issue backfired on Ford in the California primary, because the charge just didn't jibe with the voters' actual experiences of Reagan as governor. But it contributed to the deterioration of an already bad relationship between the two men.
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Four years later, the rift between Reagan and Spencer had somewhat healed. Mrs. Reagan, to her credit, knew that her husband, despite all the past dustups, respected Spencer and that Reagan needed someone on the plane to hold his hand and eliminate or at least minimize the misstatements. Spencer also had front-line experience in presidential campaigns and knew that general elections were fought differently from primary contests. At Nancy's direction, Mike Deaver and Wirthlin quietly approached Spencer about the Prodigal Son coming home. Spencer laid out some conditions, and when these were met, he later joined the campaign.
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At an early meeting, Karen Spencer joined her father for a drink with Bill Casey. Spencer already had a reputation for having terrible taste in clothes, but even his daughter was appalled when he showed up wearing “white socks, yellow pants, a blue shirt, and a red tie.” If that weren't bad enough, he was also wearing golf shoes—with the cleats still in them. She remembered that neither she nor her father could understand one word Casey said: “He just sat and mumbled into his tie.”
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At one point—before Spencer came back aboard—he and Deaver had run into each other in the lobby of a New York hotel. There had been bad blood between the two for a number of years, but they decided to get a drink and hash things out. Many drinks later—Spencer was counting swizzle sticks—they patched things up and renewed their old friendship. But Spencer also warned Deaver, “If you ever fuck with me again you are going to rue the day you were born.”
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The Reagan campaign was looking ahead to the Republican convention. There would be headaches from dealing with strident conservatives who wanted to tear
the GOP platform apart and include all manner of proposals, such as “repealing the Panama Canal treaties, breaking diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, or pulling out of the United Nations,” according to the
Wall Street Journal
. Fights were anticipated over abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.
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Reagan's men agonized that their conservative supporters might want to hold show trials and symbolic beheadings of moderate and liberal Republicans to avenge past offenses.

The city of Detroit was preparing for the convention as well. City fathers saw the opportunity to showcase Detroit, so to forestall anything like the riots between leftist protesters and cops in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Detroit officials designated several protest sites far from where the Republicans were to meet. Protesters had to make reservations to use the sites. To hold a spontaneous protest, applicants were asked to write a certified letter of request to the city council and specify the time, the number of protesters, and what they were protesting. So far, only the Citizens Reacting Against a Sick Society and the Irish National Caucus had made spontaneous-protest reservations.
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U
NLIKE
RNC
CHAIR
B
ILL
Brock, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee showed no reluctance in calling a winner. John C. White proclaimed the fight between President Carter and Ted Kennedy “resolved.” Though respected on both sides of the aisle and in the media, White had been handpicked by Carter, and Kennedy aides called for his resignation.
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Still, Carter's advisers were already looking ahead to the fall campaign, just like Reagan's team. Carter maintained a huge advantage over Reagan on the “war and peace” issue, even among Republicans, who by better than 2–1 thought Carter more likely than Reagan to keep the country at peace.
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Carterites felt this would be the issue the campaign would ultimately turn on, as voters would forgive Carter for the bad economy as long as he could keep the world from blowing up.

What worried Carter's strategists was the recent phenomenal growth of the Sun Belt across the South, from Carter's beloved Georgia to Reagan's adopted California. Lower taxes, a lower cost of living, open space, plentiful sunshine, less government interference, and other inducements brought jobs and prosperity to this conservative and increasingly Republican region. During the economic upheavals of the 1970s, the Sun Belt suffered less, at least in terms of unemployment, than did the Rust Belt and other regions. For the first time in American history, according to the Census Bureau, more Americans lived in the South and the West than in the rest of the country.
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Texas had passed Pennsylvania in the 1970s to become the third most populous state in the Union.
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In 1976 Carter had only narrowly won several states in his native South against Gerald Ford. It was an inherently conservative region where Reagan had far greater appeal than Ford ever did. Reagan was counting on sweeping the West, knowing that Carter was unlikely to make a dent there, with the possible exceptions of Oregon and Washington, two western states that represented an unpredictable blend of frontier conservatism and liberal urbanism. Reagan could pin Carter down, forcing him to defend his Democratic stronghold of the Northeast, the upper Midwest, and some states in the South. Reagan's initial campaign plan called for picking off a couple of states in the South while grabbing the swing state of Ohio, which Carter had won narrowly four years earlier. The goal was 302 electoral votes, just 32 more than needed to win the presidency.
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Even New York was now in Reagan's crosshairs. Reagan had strong appeal with ethnic voters, and the state, though Carter had also carried it narrowly in 1976, always held the Georgian at arm's length. The state GOP was falling in line behind Reagan. Even the Republican machine boss of Nassau County, Joe Margiotta, opened his arms to a candidate for whom he had previously no use; Reagan ended up raising untold dollars for the county organization. The Gipper was being ably assisted in New York by one of the most streetwise of operators, Mike Long, a leader in the conservative party, who by day owned a liquor store in Queens and had the dubious honor of once being shot by a would-be robber.
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Reagan would run in the Empire State on the Republican line along with the Conservative line and the Right-to-Life line.
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Carter might appear only on the Democratic line, as the Liberal Party was playing footsie with John Anderson.
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R
EAGAN MATCHED UP WELL
with Carter in one important regard that was difficult to measure but too obvious to overlook: happiness. As the new decade of the 1980s got under way, people in the South and Southwest seemed—on the surface, anyway—to be friendlier, more garrulous, and more confident. All one had to do was drive across the Mason-Dixon Line and go into a coffee shop. In the North, if you asked for a second cup of joe, you might get a resentful stare instead. In the South and West, you'd get a bottomless cup, and with a smile, too. Reagan's optimistic outlook was clearly appealing to these folks. Their attitude seemed to match the limitless horizon of the skies in the West. In contrast, “Carter has almost no positive-issue profile in the West that makes Westerners comfortable with him,” said Earl deBerge, a Phoenix-based pollster.
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Reagan sat down for an unusually introspective interview with Howell Raines of the
New York Times
. Raines found a man who loved the crowds and loved the stage, but who, paradoxically, was deeply committed to his own private world, a
world that no one entered except for Nancy. Reagan illustrated for the journalist how zealously he guarded his privacy. As a boy, his brother had once asked their father how much money he made. Jack Reagan turned on his two young sons: “That's a question you don't ever ask anyone. That's a private question that belongs to the individual.”
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It was a revealing peek into Reagan's personal and political philosophy. His refined conservative worldview included a deep respect for individual rights and privacy.

Reagan also chortled to the reporter that his heavy campaigning had tuckered everybody else out, but he was still raring to go. In another burst of Socratic insight (“Know thyself”), he said, “Maybe one of the reasons that the fellows in the back of the plane are astonished that I'm not in a state of collapse … with the schedule we keep, is maybe there is something that is stimulating to me about having that contact.”
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B
IG
L
ABOR HAD NEVER
been a big fan of Jimmy Carter's. Labor leaders from the North regarded Carter as an odd duck and they'd had a long love affair with Ted Kennedy. Yet Carter was the incumbent and had done labor a few favors. As it appeared more and more likely that Carter would be renominated, labor leaders faced an uncomfortable situation. Their cultural animosity toward the president ran strong. One of the more aggressive and liberal union heads, Jerry Wurf of AFSCME, a Kennedy acolyte, was asked whether he would support Carter if and when Kennedy faltered. He replied, “I'll jump off of that bridge if I get there.”
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