Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (62 page)

The real question was who would be hurt more by Anderson's continued presence, Reagan or Carter? Anderson did not shy away from attacking Reagan. In a speech before the New York Stock Exchange, Anderson made several nasty references to Reagan's age. “I wasn't old enough, maybe he was, to remember what things were like in 1923 and 1924, but it isn't appropriate for the problems we have to face in 1980.” Some of the brokers booed Anderson.
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But much of Anderson's impact would hinge on how Reagan campaigned. If Reagan ran a typical Republican race, then Anderson, the Republican, would take votes away from him. If, however, Reagan ran a conservative race, then Anderson, the liberal, would take votes away from Carter.

The independent posed a threat to Carter in another way: The dour Anderson was working the same “woe-is-us” patch of earth that Carter had been hoeing for the previous four years. In the words of
Newsweek
, Anderson specialized in “brooding, son-of-malaise sermons everywhere about the decline of American optimism and the need for discipline and sacrifice.”
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In addition to worrying about Anderson, the Carter campaign still had to deal with Kennedy. Although the Democratic nomination was now out of his reach, Kennedy refused to go away. He went so far as to hint that he might not campaign for the president's reelection. Carter was losing much of his essential constituency in the South, with blue-collar workers, Catholics, and evangelicals, but it remained to be seen whether the Republicans could get out of their own way and take advantage of his problems. Carter's men understood this. “Carter may not be able to win this election, but Reagan sure can lose it,” one said. Their plan was simple: to “scare the hell out of them with Ronald Reagan.”
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Most polls over the spring of 1980 had the race close, swinging back and forth between Carter and Reagan. In the states, it was just as close. Carter was ahead in sixteen states and the District of Columbia with 154 electoral votes, and Reagan was ahead in twenty-two states with 160 votes. Twelve states with 224 electoral votes were too close to call.
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With the stakes so high and with Carter's campaign struggling, the president's chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, took a leave of absence from the White House and assumed command of the reelection committee. Jordan knew what Carter needed to do. He needed to slice and dice Reagan before the Gipper could get going in earnest with his own national campaign. As the
Wall Street Journal
noted at the time in an editorial, “Dr. Jimmy Carter is fixing to carve up Mr. Reagan and show the voters he hasn't got what it takes to be President.”
²⁹

A
S
J
ORDAN BEGAN TO
make his battle preparations, the Republicans held the first of a series of “unity dinners.” The $500-per-plate dinner in Beverly Hills featured Reagan alongside his six former challengers. The event was designed to pay off the fallen challengers' campaign debts. Not surprisingly, then, love was in the air. George Bush called Reagan an “honorable, honest, decent man.” Bob Dole, the stand-up comic of the GOP, said his own campaign was “such a secret that nobody noticed it.” Reagan spoke last and said of his former rivals, “You have seen six examples of real class, real dignity, real sportsmanship.”
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The event raised $550,000, but as it turned out, little would go to retire campaign debts after all. A bait-and-switch was employed. The money would pay for a national television broadcast in which donations would be solicited. If money came in from this, only then would it go toward the various candidates' debts.
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The extravaganza was broadcast on CBS the following Saturday at 10:30
P.M.
eastern time.

Reagan had the backing of most of his family members as well as former opponents. Son Michael and daughter Maureen enthusiastically participated in
their father's campaign. Mike had even played a role in the dismissal of John Sears. When his father called him in frustration from New Hampshire, Michael had advised Reagan to fire Sears.
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Maureen, meanwhile, was an active campaigner, giving well-received stump speeches. She was a natural politician, some said even more so than her father.

The other two children, son Ron and daughter Patti Davis, were not involved to any great extent, pursuing their own lives and interests. Ron had dropped out of Yale and in 1980 was trying out for the Joffrey Ballet. The campaign was worried about the image of a ballet-dancing son of a rugged movie hero but decided to leave well enough alone. Reagan was asked about his son and, like any protective father, replied that he was “all man.” Patti was a struggling actress. She took her mother's maiden name for the stage and grew up a typical California flower child, pursuing fads, partying with rock stars, and generally irritating her parents. She loathed her father's conservatism.

Reagan did get a boost from Republicans in Congress. Working in harmony with the Reagan campaign, the GOP members introduced an immediate across-the-board 10 percent tax cut, a down payment on the 30 percent being proposed by their presumptive nominee.
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The ploy forced Carter and the Democrats to go on record opposing Reagan's proposal. On permanent offense, the Republicans kept attaching tax-cut legislation to bill after bill, compelling the Democrats to oppose them over and over.

C
ARTER'S MEN WERE LOOKING
for inspiration and they turned to Harry Truman, just as Gerald Ford had four years earlier. A new book had been released on Truman, and circulated in Democratic circles was a 1948 memo about Truman's campaign written by the longtime Washington insider Clifford Case.
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Democrats needed all the help they could get, because in a new poll released at the end of June, Reagan for the first time had broken into a healthy lead over Carter. The New York Times/CBS survey had Reagan out in front, 47–37, and even with Anderson in the mix, Reagan still led with 41 percent to 30 percent for Carter and 18 percent for the independent candidate. Reagan also got high ratings on leadership and—defying the pundits—the voters said that Reagan was as smart as Carter. College graduates supported Reagan over Carter by a larger margin, 48–35, than non–college graduates, 47–37.
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A poll by
News-week
showed a similar strengthening of Reagan's position with the American people.
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Nothing monumental had occurred in the past several weeks to turn the tide. Reagan had, of course, won the nomination, but he had made few speeches during
that time. Simply, Carter was floundering, and the voters were tiring of the president. They were willing to look at Reagan's solutions, no matter how radical they might seem.

R
EAGAN'S SELECTION TEAM HAD
narrowed the number of prospective running mates down to eight. All were asked for, and submitted, extensive medical, personal, and financial documents. They included Howard Baker, George Bush, Jack Kemp, Don Rumsfeld, Richard Lugar, Paul Laxalt, and one surprise, Congressman Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan.
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Vander Jagt was of indistinct ideology but had done a yeoman's job retooling the National Republican Congressional Committee. He was not only charming but also one of the best orators in politics. He never used a prepared text or teleprompter. Instead, he memorized his speeches, some of them extensive.

Conservatives heaved a sigh of relief that Gerald Ford was not on the list. Yet they worried because the list indicated that the Reagan campaign was searching for someone more “moderate” than Reagan, despite his oft-repeated comments that his running mate would have to be of the same ideological stock. Conservatives complained about Howard Baker the most. Baker didn't help his cause when he went on CBS's
Face the Nation
and said what the country needed in a president was “not necessarily the most cerebral, the most intellectual person.” Implying that Reagan lacked a first-rate intellect was not a way to win over the Reagan campaign, Nancy Reagan, or conservatives.
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For good measure, Baker and poor George Bush got the virtual kiss of death from the liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits, who said he supported either as Reagan's running mate.
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A
T THE BEGINNING OF
July, a new report on the TV networks' political coverage confirmed what everybody knew: CBS, NBC, and ABC were slobbering all over John Anderson. The Media Analysis Project, generated by George Washington University, said that “Anderson is an articulate, liberal spokesman and … the press also regards itself as articulate and liberal.” One interesting finding was that Carter was getting even worse coverage than Reagan. But it was not as if the Republican was receiving good media, just less bad than Carter. Stories about Reagan on the networks ran 6–1 unfavorable to favorable.
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To bypass the networks, Reagan's campaign began buying broadcast time on national radio networks. Reagan had been comfortable in front of the microphone for almost fifty years, going back to his days on WHO in Des Moines. In his addresses, he urged the American people to avoid the “trust me” government of Carter, because it bestowed too much on one man, which was contrary to the
republican form of government created by the Founding Fathers. Explaining his view of “not only the power but the limits of the presidency,” Reagan made clear his sophisticated understanding of the American federalist system.
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On the campaign trail, Reagan reinforced the message about federalism and his desire to scale back federal power. In the 1970s the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion had erupted in the American West, where the federal government controlled huge swaths of land—an incredible 544 million acres in twelve states—that were off-limits to any form of use or access. Groups had organized to fight for a return of the lands to the states. The “rebellion” had been going on for years, but Reagan took the opportunity to endorse their position. “Count me in as a rebel,” he told a cheering crowd of ranchers, miners, and oilmen in Salt Lake City.
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Reagan wasn't the only one on the attack. President Carter went into Reaganland, traveling to Los Angeles to speak to the annual gathering of the National Education Association. Eight thousand (mostly women) teachers chanted Carter's name over and over. Carter ripped Reagan's tax-cut proposal, labeling it a “free lunch,” which was mildly amusing since that is what Republicans had charged the Democrats with for years.
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He also warned the crowd about Reagan's supposed extremism, saying that if elected, the Republican would choose conservative judges. Finally, he defended his administration's actions against the Soviets over their invasion of Afghanistan as “effective” but “peaceful in nature.”
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Carter then got nasty in a speech that had been billed as “nonpolitical.” He said, “We cannot allow nostalgia built on an incorrect memory to blind us to what life is like when government did nothing to protect minorities, the working people, or the poor.”
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It was a foreshadowing of the coming fight.

W
ORK WAS PROCEEDING APACE
in Detroit on the convention. Political conventions had changed greatly over the years and not altogether for the better. As television dominated the gatherings more and more, the political consultants took control and squeezed tension, emotion, and drama out of the quadrennial gatherings, reducing them to infomercials and the delegates to a one-dimensional caricature of their former selves.

Once, delegates had been the muscle of the party. In 1952 Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, “Mr. Republican” himself, arrived at the Philadelphia convention with 530 delegates, well ahead of Dwight D. Eisenhower and just 74 short of a first-ballot nomination. Delegates maneuvering for Ike's eleventh-hour bid, along with a typical underhanded assist from Senator Richard Nixon, helped rob Taft of the nomination.

That same year, when the Democrats gathered, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois had next to nothing in delegate strength, only 41, while Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had 248, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia had 121, and Governor Averell Harriman of New York, 108.
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Yet it was Stevenson who left Chicago as his party's nominee.

The delegates had also been responsible for writing their parties' platforms. For years the conventions had been preceded by “Platform Week,” in which delegates gathered in committees and subcommittees to work out their party's position on a host of issues, ranging from social policy to economics, national defense, and foreign policy. Delegates in their committees would hear testimony from elected officials, philosophers, economists, labor leaders, and foreign-policy experts. After endless debate and discussion, these delegates—housewives, small businessmen, religious leaders, retired military, a cross section of America—wrote impressive documents setting a philosophical and ideological direction for their political party, all without the interference of self-inflating political consultants. Over the years issues from nullification to slavery to prohibition to suffrage to war and peace were endlessly debated and discussed. What a party stood for at these affairs was just as important as the man it nominated. Notably, the media covered these weeklong events just as enthusiastically as the nomination week itself.

Those days were quickly passing into history, but the platform remained a crucial document for the political parties. And for the GOP in 1980—a party at a crossroads—the debate over the platform would be especially important. Reagan's point man at the 1980 platform hearings was Marty Anderson, his longtime policy adviser. As well as anyone, Anderson knew the political, cultural, and governing philosophy of Ronald Reagan.