Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (98 page)

The ERA protesters appearing at every rally were getting under Reagan's skin. He became defensive over the issue of women's rights. In an attempt to address the matter and regain his waning momentum, Reagan announced at a rare press conference—his first in a month—that if elected, he would fill one of the first openings on the Supreme Court with a woman.
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The move did nothing to help his faltering effort. Indeed, it only invited conservatives to criticize him and liberals to doubt him. A spokeswoman for the National Women's Political Caucus said, “It won't do him much good.” She said he could help himself only by changing his position on abortion and the ERA.
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The press saw the announcement of a woman on the Supreme Court as gimmicky and pandering. Reporters who had not had the opportunity to cross-examine Reagan for a month peppered him with questions, such as whether a female appointee
would be pro-life. He dodged the question. Photos of the event showed an unhappy candidate.

Carter hit Reagan from the right, saying it was inappropriate to hold a slot on the court “for a particular kind of American.”
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Paul Conrad, the political cartoonist for the
Los Angeles Times
, had been another ruthless burr to Reagan for years. On this matter, he depicted Reagan as a sleazy lounge lizard trying to pick up an equally sleazy girl in a disco. “Haven't we met before? Do you come here often? Can I buy you a drink? How about a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court?” The cartoon was widely reprinted.
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Conrad was but one of hundreds of political cartoonists in America, many being very good even as they were overtly liberal in their perspective. The
Washington Post
's Herbert Block was considered the dean of the fraternity along with Bill Mauldin of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, who was beloved by World War II vets for his depiction of two dogfaces, “Willie and Joe.” The funnier, up-and-coming cartoonists included Mike Peters of the
Dayton Daily News
, Pat Oliphant of the
Washington Star
, and the favorite of conservatives, the irrepressible Jeff MacNelly of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
. Since all were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers, millions saw their handiwork. MacNelly, a college dropout, had already won two Pulitzers despite his rightward tilt. Like most cartoonists, MacNelly had started out drawing Carter as normal-sized. As the president diminished in the polls, however, the cartoon versions of Carter shrank as well, and in most depictions, he was comically small, always looking up at people and events. Herblock, Oliphant, and MacNelly were not in high favor in the Carter White House for their depictions of the president.

Reagan, like Carter, had evolved coming out of the inkwell. For years, most cartoonists had emphasized the wrinkles under the Gipper's jaw line, but as he began winning—and maybe fearful of a backlash with seniors—cartoonists began making Reagan appear younger, emphasizing his pompadour instead. Cartoonists fretted that Reagan was hard to characterize because, complained Paul Szep of the
Boston Globe
, “he is still a very good-looking man.”
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N
OW ON THE DEFENSIVE
, Reagan jetted off for a couple of days of campaigning in South Dakota and Idaho—two more states that he should have locked up already. Meanwhile Carter took wing on Air Force One through New York, Missouri, and Illinois. In the Land of Lincoln, he spoke to sooty-faced coal miners and told them how their coal would one day replace oil from the Middle East.
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In many of his appearances, Carter held town hall meetings with American citizens. He excelled in these forums, asking for the questioners' first names and
then using the names and answering their questions with great flourish and detail. Sometimes too much. At Hofstra University on Long Island, a thirteen-year-old girl stood up to ask Carter a question and when he was finished, he said, “Thank you, sweetheart. I love you.” Later, a young man said to the president, “I voted for you and it's the biggest mistake I ever made.”
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Carter continued to have difficulty with New York City's mayor, the colorful Ed Koch, who often complained about the president's stance toward Israel. At one point, Koch had refused to appear on the same dais with Carter in the Big Apple. To tweak Carter, Koch invited Reagan to Gracie Mansion for a meeting and then held a widely covered photo op.
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Reagan was only too happy to take advantage of Koch's gesture, but the Carter campaign made sure New Yorkers didn't forget what Reagan had once said about federal aid to their city. Carter was running billboard ads quoting Reagan as having said, “I have included in my morning and evening prayers every day the prayer that the federal government not bail out New York.”
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“R
ONALD
R
EAGAN'S PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
may be running out of steam.” So wrote two of the
Wall Street Journal
's top political reporters, Al Hunt and James Perry, in a lead story published on October 16. The story detailed gloomy assessments of the Reagan campaign, including those offered by Democrat Peter Hart and Republican Bob Teeter. Confidence in the Carter campaign was “surging,” according to the journalists.
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Polling confirmed that Reagan's campaign had ground to a halt. Bob Strauss crowed to journalists that Pat Caddell's surveys showed Carter “pulling ahead, or at least even, in all of the key industrial states.”
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More telling, an ABC News poll released a few days later showed that Reagan had slid backwards in the Electoral College tally, and that the growing mass of toss-up states now accounted for 182 electoral votes.
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Then a New York Times–CBS poll revealed that Carter had pulled out to a nine-point lead over Reagan in the state of New York, 38–29 percent. Anderson was at 10 percent and 23 percent were undecided.
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Anderson concluded that he was nearing the end of the road. Though his bank account was heavily in the red, reporters noted a devil-may-care attitude in the candidate aboard his plane,
Rocinante
, named for Don Quixote's horse. He was telling jokes on the stump, mostly at Carter's expense, referring to Reagan as “Ronnie,” and generally having a good time. He confided to a reporter, “I'm loosening up. It's almost over.”
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After months, Anderson was finally relaxing.

Reagan was anything but relaxed. Desperate to turn things around, he flew to Flint, Michigan, where he was greeted warmly by 1,200 out-of-work autoworkers.
The city's unemployment rate was over 20 percent and the state's jobless rate was over 12 percent. Reagan hit Carter hard on importation of foreign automobiles, as the U.S. government levied certain taxes on American-made cars—in the range of $200 to over $500 per vehicle—but not on Japanese-manufactured cars sold in America. Reagan issued one of his better lines: “You remember when they promised us two cars in every garage? We've got them now—both Japanese and out of gas.”
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While in Michigan, Reagan received unexpected endorsements from two legendary civil-rights leaders, Ralph Abernathy and Hosea Williams. Both men were important lieutenants of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and both were high officials in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Abernathy spoke to the congregation of the St. John's Christian Methodist and Episcopal Church in Birmingham, outside of Detroit. Referring to Carter, he said, “We don't need this doctor anymore, because we as the patients are getting sicker. We need to change doctors.” Reagan was deeply touched by the decision of Abernathy and Williams: “I just didn't realize such a thing could happen. I was overwhelmed.” Black leaders including Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain civil-rights icon, roundly denounced the two men.
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African Americans, who had provided the margin of victory for Carter in seven states in 1976, were expected to heavily support the Democrat again.

Stepping up the pressure, Carter yet again called on Reagan to meet him in a one-on-one debate. Just as in the Reagan camp, a hotly argued debate had been going on among Carter's men over a debate. Pat Caddell, in particular, argued vociferously against any debates now. The pollster knew that undecided voters had broken for the incumbent in the closing days of every presidential election since World War II, with the exception “the big landslides in '64 and '72, which were locked in very early.” More important, Carter was surging and Reagan was faltering. A debate at this point was an unnecessary wild card, with Carter in danger of losing more than he would gain. “I kept saying no, no, no,” Caddell later remembered. But Bob Strauss and Hamilton Jordan were “unwilling to shut the door” on the debate negotiations after the Reagan-Anderson debate, Caddell said.

There was another, even more important factor: the president himself wanted to debate. Carter was contemptuous of Reagan and wanted the chance to make mince meat of his conservative opponent. Caddell later said, “I don't think the president … felt Ronald Reagan was well informed. I think that's a nice way to put it.”
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Caddell was overruled by Carter and the hierarchy.

The Reagan campaign was unsurprisingly uncoordinated in its response
to Carter's challenge. Bill Casey agreed in principle that the voters would find a debate between the two men useful, and Ed Meese said such a meeting was “highly possible,” but Reagan told ABC News that he was still opposed to excluding Anderson.
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Inside the campaign, the hawks and doves were going at it over whether to debate. Speaking for the doves, Stu Spencer said, “We don't need a debate.”
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Others were dubious. One Reagan aide said on background, “If the guy can't debate Jimmy Carter for one hour, maybe we're all making a mistake.”
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The Democrats, meanwhile, pressed the advantage. Strauss told reporters, “Carter does not need the debate. Reagan needs the debate.”
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The editorialists who had praised Reagan only a short time earlier for bravely wanting to include Anderson in the fall debates now hotly denounced him for “ducking” a two-man confrontation, especially since the wind was going out of Anderson's sails.

Surprisingly, however, these editorial pages were supporting Reagan by a healthy margin over Carter.
Editor & Publisher
magazine surveyed hundreds of newspapers and as of the third week of October, 221 newspapers had endorsed the Gipper while only 59 supported Carter. The survey did not take into account the size or circulation of the publications or that 303 papers had yet to announce their decision, but it did defy the notion that the editorial pages were overwhelmingly liberal or biased against Reagan.
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Reagan got some more welcomed news when he received the endorsements of the National Association of Police Organizations, the largest police union in the country, and of the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association.
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Beat cops had always liked Reagan.

But even with those small advances, Reagan wasn't slowing Carter down. The president got still another boost in the form of new government reports showing that the dead economy might slowly be coming to life. In September, production increased 1 percent, the first increase since May 1979, and personal income likewise moved up nearly 1 percent.
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Detroit and the housing industry, too, were slowly getting off the mat. Inflation, interest rates, and unemployment remained terribly high, but Carter welcomed any good economic news.

I
T REMAINED UNCLEAR WHETHER
Reagan and Carter would ever participate in a one-on-one debate, but they engaged in a showdown of sorts at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner in New York City. The white-tie charity event had become practically a command performance for presidential candidates, who were expected to entertain the dinner guests with irreverent and self-deprecating humor. The foundation had been created back in the 1940s to honor the
memory of Al Smith, the New York governor who in 1928 became both the first Catholic and the first Irish American to win the presidential nomination of a major party. The Democrat was pummeled by Republican Herbert Hoover, but in that election Smith began to pull together the seemingly disparate groups of ethnic voters, city workers, blacks, rural folks, Roman Catholics, and southerners who, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, would become the foundations of the modern Democratic Party. Carter had skillfully rebuilt this coalition in 1976, and now he needed to do so again.

But Carter stumbled badly as he addressed the crowd at the Al Smith event. The president did not help himself by blowing off the dinner and only arriving afterward to make his comments. Reagan, as was his custom, was there for the entire event, meeting people and taking the temperature of his audience before speaking. Carter goofed again when he told several jokes at Reagan's expense; at best they fell flat and at worst were booed—and this by an overwhelmingly Democratic crowd. Nancy Reagan fixed an icy cold gaze on Carter. The president's speech went downhill from there, as he then lectured the audience about religious tolerance in America. “I've studied the Bible all my life. But nowhere in the Bible, Old or New Testament, are there instructions on how to balance the budget or how to choose between the B1 bomber and the air-launched cruise missile.”
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The audience groaned loudly at Carter's sanctimonious remarks.

Reagan clearly understood the mood of the event much better than his opponent did. His speech was lighter, his jokes self-deprecating. Reagan led off with a yarn about a recent phone conversation he had supposedly had with Carter. In Reagan's tale, Carter said with amazement (here Reagan put on a mock southern accent), “Ronnie, how come you look younger every time I see a picture of you riding a horse?” To which Reagan said he responded, “It's easy, Jimmy. I just keep riding older horses.”
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Reagan played off the age issue again when he quipped that there was no truth to the “rumor that I was present at the original Al Smith dinner.”
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Then Reagan took note of Al Smith's first career: “What a president he would have made! He started out as an actor.”
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The audience roared.