Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (88 page)

It was now clear that Anderson and Lucey would run as unreconstructed liberals, the left of Carter. Paul Corbin's plan was coming together. With Carter battling Anderson for liberal votes, Reagan, with conservatives in his hip pocket, could move toward the middle.

In yet a third press conference, Ted Kennedy emerged from a one-hour meeting at the White House with Carter. The Carter White House had tried since the end of the convention to get a meeting with Kennedy to put on a show of unity. Teddy finally agreed, having nothing to gain at this point by being seen as a poor loser. He did his best to talk up Carter, but the skeptical White House press corps wasn't buying it.
⁵⁴

W
ITH THE
R
EAGAN CAMPAIGN
still happy to include Anderson in three-way debates, Carter tried to get ahead of the story by accepting an invitation from the National Press Club—which his White House had generated—to debate Reagan one-on-one. Carter also accepted the offer of
Ladies' Home Journal
to debate Reagan, again without Anderson.
⁵⁵
Jim Baker, representing Reagan in preliminary negotiations on debates, defended Anderson's right to debate because he was a viable candidate. The Carter debate proposal would not work because it excluded
the ladies of the League of Women Voters, “Gentleman Jim” added with a straight face.
⁵⁶

Reagan headed for Ohio, where he spoke to the Teamsters. Labor unions traditionally did not endorse Republicans, but the Teamsters had supported Nixon over George McGovern in 1972 as part of the deal to release Jimmy Hoffa early from prison, so there was an outside chance they would support Reagan as well.
⁵⁷

Reagan attended a private lunch with Teamster officials including William Presser, who had been convicted of bilking employees; his son Jackie Presser, who was under constant investigation over his handling of the pension fund; and Roy Williams, who only the day before had “taken the Fifth” before the Senate Investigations Committee.
⁵⁸
Press reports did not indicate whether the union officials' parole officers accompanied them. Reagan aides could only shrug their shoulders about the Teamsters' choices of luncheon guests and the poor advance work.

Reagan's speech before the Teamsters rank and file was warmly received, however. He charged that Carter had created a “depression” and that American families were “suffering more than at any time since the Great Depression of the thirties.”
⁵⁹
Reagan was knocked for using the term “depression,” but the head of his Economic Advisory Group, Alan Greenspan, came to his defense, saying, “The facts are that the economy is in terrible shape and what you choose to call it is a terribly secondary question.”
⁶⁰

Carter responded to Reagan's rhetoric about the awful economy by proposing his own tax cuts for businesses and individuals, as well as a new bureaucracy to deal with the recession. Carter made clear that while the government must defend the American people when it came to the economy, Washington was not the generator of jobs—the marketplace was. Washington's job was to be the referee and help business and labor, he said. It wasn't quite Adam Smith, especially since he also called for $4 billion in stimulus spending, but it was to the right of liberals such as Kennedy.
⁶¹
The president was sometimes more moderate on economic issues than many others in his own party. In fact, his tax-cut pitch was in direct violation of the Democratic platform.
⁶²

Still, Reagan blasted Carter's economic proposal. Because Carter's tax-cut plan was linked to an increase in Social Security taxes, the Reagan campaign slammed it as “the pickpocket theory.” The Reaganites produced a report showing that for a worker making $15,000 a year, Carter's tax cut was almost entirely wiped out by the Social Security tax increase. Over the course of a year the worker would end up netting
two dollars
. Reagan warned that the president's proposal would have “only delayed the day of reckoning in Social Security.”
⁶³

The Carter proposal was small-bore—a little here, a little there, a distillation of Carter's minimalist approach to problems. The plan was not easily understood, as Reagan's was. It was not bold, and it did not go over well.

Carter then proposed a 9 percent pay hike for all federal employees, higher than what Congress was considering.
⁶⁴
Reagan watched Carter's speech on television and dismissed the proposal out of hand, commenting, “[He] seems to be saying more government will solve the problems government itself has caused.”
⁶⁵

A
NDERSON'S CAMPAIGN STRUGGLED TO
get on track. He was in debt, despite having created an impressive mailing list, and he had not received any federal funds, as had Reagan and Carter.
⁶⁶
The White House was pressuring the Federal Election Commission not to release any funds to Anderson. This became just another reason for Anderson to despise Carter.

Garry Trudeau's popular political cartoon strip, “Doonesbury,” had taken lighthearted jabs at the kids running the Anderson campaign, and it obviously bothered the candidate. Anderson defensively said his operation was not a “Doonesbury campaign.” To show how serious he was, he handed his campaign over to New York political consultant David Garth—a feared and reviled figure. Garth was so despised that when Anderson announced that he was taking over, three top aides promptly resigned and several volunteers broke into tears.
⁶⁷

Reagan also worried about the quality of his campaign operation. “To get his faltering presidential campaign back on track,” as Jack Germond reported, Reagan called an emergency all-hands-on-deck meeting at his rental home, Wexford, in the Virginia countryside.
⁶⁸
Attending the meeting were Bill Casey, Ed Meese, Lyn Nofziger, Dick Wirthlin, Bill Timmons, Mike Deaver, Drew Lewis, Jim Baker, and Dean Burch. (Stu Spencer hadn't been invited to the meeting and Nancy Reagan was furious when she found out.)
⁶⁹
Reagan wanted to know why he was not being properly briefed on the trail, why he couldn't shake bad media coverage, and why the campaign plane was coordinating so poorly with the national office in Virginia.
⁷⁰
Also, leaks had become a big problem again, for the first time since John Sears had been fired. Indeed, all the major media reported on this supposedly top-secret, hush-hush meeting.
⁷¹

The gathering ended inconclusively, with no major changes instituted, though shortly thereafter, Meese and Spencer asked Ken Khachigian, a Nixon vet, to come aboard the plane to help with speechwriting. Khachigian, short, swarthy, and affable, agreed, met the plane in Los Angeles, and then didn't get off for five weeks, writing nearly all of Reagan's day-to-day speeches. Doug Bandow worked on research, assisting the speechwriters as they huddled in a little corner of the
plane. Khachigian had to come up with new content every day in order to keep the press satisfied.
⁷²

Reagan and his aides certainly weren't satisfied with what had happened to their lead. A new poll released by the Roper organization confirmed the earlier numbers: Reagan was at 38 percent, Carter at 37, and Anderson at 17.
⁷³
Morale was low at the Reagan campaign, and the Republican's top advisers were “clearly apprehensive about the general election outlook,” as the
Washington Star
reported. One Reaganite was even more blunt, saying, “The way things are going now, we are going to lose.”
⁷⁴

Once again, Reagan had been coasting. The campaign had made too many mistakes since Detroit and had squandered his lead. Reagan had wasted August, to the delight of the Carter campaign.

I
N PREPARATION FOR THE
Labor Day campaign kickoff, President Carter retreated to Camp David. He wanted to rest and, more importantly, to work on his speeches. Carter's chief speechwriters—Rick Hertzberg and Chris Matthews—were generally regarded as good writers. The problem was that Carter could not stop tinkering and then inviting everybody else to tinker with his speeches, which they were more than happy to do. Tribute for White House staffers is often measured in small, even petty ways. Nothing gets attention in a Washington saloon after work more quickly than for a staffer to say, “Well, as I told the president today,” or “That draft speech was a piece of shit until I cleaned it up.” Such were the rewards for the unctuous factotums who sniffed power in Washington.

The Carterites may have been mediocre at governing, but at politics they excelled. Once Labor Day rolled around, they would be able to focus on what they did best. As one of Carter's men said of the upcoming campaign kickoff, “Starting Monday, the blow torch is on.”
⁷⁵

“
Doubts about him are growing, his lead is shrinking, and more and more people are wondering whether he's up for the job. If this impression hardens, he'll be out of the race.
”

O
nly sixty-five days remained until the election. From here on, the staffs of both campaigns were required to focus all their attention on the task at hand. Staffers were expected to work 24/7, and most ailments to be handled by taking two aspirin. Going to the emergency room or staying home sick were options of last resort. You had better know, as pro athletes did, the difference between pain and injury. What couldn't be fixed with something out of the campaign's medicine cabinet—or coffee, alcohol, or tobacco—would have to wait until after the election.

Arriving at the campaign office late, say after 7
A.M.
, or leaving early, say before 10
P.M.
, was not only frowned upon, it could get you fired. There were people who would give their eyeteeth to work on a presidential campaign for little money. Both campaigns had filing cabinets bulging with résumés of eager, passionate, young supplicants willing to be treated like dirt as long as they got a start in politics.

If you were on the road, tardiness meant the plane or motorcade would simply leave you behind. You'd have to catch up on your own, then sheepishly explain how you had screwed up. Toward the end of the campaign, clean underwear became an option for young men. Some simply and repeatedly turned theirs inside out. It was all splendidly ludicrous.

In Michigan, the Republican nominee in the seventeenth congressional district, Alfred L. Patterson, was released from a psychiatric hospital in order to campaign in the fall election.
¹
His condition only proved what everybody in politics already knew: you had to be crazy to be in this business.

A
S
J
IMMY
C
ARTER KICKED
off his fall campaign, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill was telling fellow Democrats that a “smell of victory” was in the air.
²
After all, Carter was on the verge of surging into the lead over Ronald Reagan, and his single-mindedness, especially in electoral politics, was legendary. But some of Carter's aides felt that the president performed better as an underdog and worried that the focus might now shift from Reagan's mistakes to Carter's ineffectiveness. In the parlance of the era, they did not want to “peak too soon.”

Carter began his fall drive at a Labor Day picnic in Tuscumbia, Alabama. The
Los Angeles Times
reported that Tuscumbia was the “national headquarters of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”
³
Twenty thousand people attended the event despite the ninety-plus-degree heat. Perspiring heavily, the president said, “It's good to be home!” and got a generous round of applause from the sweltering crowd. He joked, “I just want to say how great it is to be with folks who don't talk with an accent.”

On the dais with Carter was former Alabama governor George Wallace, permanently confined to a wheelchair after being shot while competing for the Democratic nomination in 1972. Carter wheeled Wallace forward and hugged him; then the president's daughter, Amy, kissed the old segregationist on the cheek.
⁴
Wallace was the only Democratic politician so singled out by President Carter, though many others were present.

Carter also singled out the Ku Klux Klan. Sixty Klansmen had marched to the park where Carter was speaking. Clad in heavy white robes and hoods (anyone who added unnecessary clothing in the heat and humidity of the day had to be nuts), the Klansmen came in time to hear the president attack them. “As a southerner,” Carter declared, “it makes me feel angry when I see them use the Confederate battle flag.”
⁵

Carter told the crowd, “We southerners believe in the nobility of courage on the battlefield. And because we understand the costs of war, we also believe in the nobility of peace.”
⁶

In the entire speech Carter never mentioned Ronald Reagan's name. This was not an augury of things to come: soon he would begin bashing his opponent with glee.

The president jetted back to Washington on a smaller-than-normal Air Force One in order to save the campaign some cash, as the trip to Alabama was overtly political. Back at the White House, he entertained a thousand labor leaders and their families on the South Lawn, wooing them with barbecue and whiskey.
⁷
Carter was eager to patch up his relationship with Big Labor, especially since Reagan was making a play for the blue-collar vote.