“We cannot meet the future with the tools of the past,” he’d say. “The more we care about keeping our historic commitments and meeting our traditional goals, the more we must innovate, the more we must create.” They’d look at him, these men who carried fifteen, twenty extra years, thirty, forty extra pounds, and some of them would think, What planet is he from? But two or three others would nod and take a brochure when they headed home.
He’d spend his nights in budget motels, hitting the nearby bar if a bigfoot journalist happened to be checking up, schmoozing over a Jameson’s with Germond or Witcover or Wilkie. Then he’d head to his room, carefully unpacking completely, putting away all his clothes, and sprinkling his room with photos, mementos, tchotchkes to remind him of home, settling in after a long campaign day with a work of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky (“I know I can cut a deal with Russia,” he’d say half jokingly. “I’ve read their books!”).
He’d hit every college and university that would have him, speaking scornfully of nineteenth-century politics in the run-up to the twenty-first century.
“Time,” he would say of the old political leaders, “has made change their enemy. But it is long past time to embrace the change we need.”
He was, as a campaigner, a work in progress, still pushing back against the plea that he loosen up, reveal a little more of himself, share a light moment.
(“You know what a ‘mensch’ is, Gary?” Warren Beatty said to him after viewing a tape of his appearance at Drake University outside of Des Moines, when Hart had walked onto the stage, flipped open a binder, and begun delivering his speech without so much as a “Good evening.” “It’s kind of like ‘good old boy’ or ‘soul brother’ or ‘salt of the earth.’ And it’s what there’s not a hint of in that Drake speech. You had all the warmth of a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles explaining why an application wasn’t filled out right.”)
He was reaching two, three, four at a time—but this was Iowa, this was a caucus, not a primary state, and Hart had learned eight years ago that this was the key to providing a shock to the system. In 1972, the first time anyone had ever bothered to count Presidential preferences in the Iowa caucuses, McGovern had won a quarter of the vote, well behind Ed Muskie and “uncommitted,” but enough to get the conversation going about the long-shot anti-war campaign. Four years later, the “Who the hell is this guy?” Carter campaign had packed the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in the fall of 1975, giving them a surprise win in the straw poll and—more important—front-page attention from the New York Times. Carter’s performance in the caucuses the next year (he’d finished ahead of everyone except “uncommitted”) had sent him on the road to the nomination. As the 1980 campaign approached, everyone knew that Iowa would be the first significant test, but very few reporters or Washington-based campaign operatives understood how it worked, how polls couldn’t really measure much, because what mattered was intensity, whether you could summon your supporters to invest not five minutes in a voting booth but five hours in a high school cafeteria or library or living room arguing for your candidate, swapping votes with others whose candidate didn’t have enough support to be counted. What mattered was carefully, painstakingly gathering those tiny handfuls of Iowa Democrats who would undertake that arduous night’s work and who, under the arcane coding of the process, could be counted on to be “1’s” and “2’s,” those really, really likely to be caucusgoers. Few understood, for that matter, that you could bring hundreds of people to a caucus, but what counted wasn’t raw numbers but a formula of delegate allocation that would tax the brain of a mathematics professor . . . so that supporters in small towns and rural communities packed a lot more weight than those in Iowa’s bigger towns and cities.
“You could almost see it coming,” Elaine Kamarck, one of the Democratic Party’s premier experts in the mind-numbing field of party rules and processes, said much later. “Kennedy’s campaign was treating Iowa as if it was November: turn out numbers, win it all. It was a classic front-runner mistake, one that’s made over and over again. You know that song from The Music Man? ‘You Gotta Know the Territory’? Teddy didn’t.”
You could understand it. Inside Teddy’s inner circle were veterans of the campaigns of Jack and Bobby, campaigns that had taken place when the Iowa caucuses did not even exist as a factor in the nominating process. Indeed, in the dozen years since Bobby had run, the entire nominating process had changed down to the roots, erasing virtually every premise on which the Kennedy campaigns had been built: how many primaries there were, how they were run, how they were financed, how delegates were allocated. Gary Hart had around him people who understood the new rules better than any other team, because they were the very people who had written those rules.
That unfamiliarity would have been trouble in and of itself. As Kennedy prepared to announce his Presidential run, more trouble surfaced—incoming fire from a source that some of his zealous adversaries would have found almost unimaginable.
MEANWHILE, no one in the Republican Party was more determined to deny the Republican nomination to Ronald Reagan in 1980 than President Gerald Ford.
And no one in the Republican Party was more important in Ronald Reagan’s campaign for the nomination than President Gerald Ford.
It was certainly not by choice. Apart from the anger from the 1976 primary fight and from Reagan’s reluctance to campaign in the fall, the Ford White House was certain that a Reagan nomination would doom the party to certain, crushing defeat. They saw the former California governor as little more than “Goldwater with a dye job.” Shortly after the 1978 midterm elections, outgoing White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney gave a speech to a private gathering of major Republican contributors at the Sheraton Resort in Bal Harbor, Florida—a speech made public by a freelance writer for Rolling Stone magazine who had slipped into the dinner with a borrowed busboy’s uniform.
“Nothing is more tempting in these complex times,” Cheney said, “than the siren song of simplistic solutions, clung to by those who remember the ‘good old days,’ but whose vision of the here and now is myopic at best. They cannot grasp the fact that life does not lend itself to Hollywood endings; and in a time when Presidents must deal—literally—with matters of life and death, putting the awesome power of the President in the hands of the purveyors of the politics of platitudes is like putting a loaded gun in the hands of a novice and inviting him to hunt: Someone is likely to get hurt.”
Cheney’s speech drew cheers from the usual circles. A New York Times editorial said, “If the Republican Party wishes to stake a claim as the voice of reason, then it would be wise to heed the words of Dick Cheney as he carries the flag of prudent moderation. We urge the GOP to find a key leadership role for Mr. Cheney in the years ahead.”
Many Republicans in office shared this view: senators like Javits of New York, Schweiker of Pennsylvania, Packwood and Hatfield of Oregon, Matthias of Maryland; congressmen like Broomfield of Michigan, Butler of Maryland; governors like Thompson of Illinois, Milliken of Michigan. So did the centrist opinion makers of Washington, like columnist James Reston of the New York Times and Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post.
The Republican rank and file, however, did not share this view; indeed, it was a rank and file that many of these opinion makers, and many of those elected Republican officials, would not have recognized. They were men and women of the working and middle class who had come to the party by choice, not by genealogy. Some of them had gone into battle for Goldwater; others had been driven from the Democrats by taxes, flag burners, rioters. And they had no affection at all for the centrist, moderate brand of Republicanism practiced by two Republican Presidents who had produced the biggest scandal in political history and the worst economy since the Great Depression.
Moreover, as Americans moved out of the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West, the traditionally liberal power centers of the old Republican Party had been supplanted by the growing numbers of religious conservatives and Sunbelt
libertarians, who were strongest in states with ever-increasing clout. (In 1960, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio had outvoted Florida, Texas, and California in the Electoral College by a 102-66 margin; in November 1980, the three Sunbelt states would outvote their Frostbelt rivals by an 88-83 margin. That disparity was even wider when it came to votes at the convention.)
There was also a more fundamental problem for the moderates, the most fundamental of all: Who would be their alternative to Reagan? President Ford was constitutionally ineligible, having served more than half of Richard Nixon’s second term, and his record-low job approval ratings made him politically ineligible as well. Under other circumstances, Vice President Bob Dole might have been a contender, but his position in the Ford administration would have made his candidacy a hard sell even if he hadn’t dispatched his nascent candidacy with a mortal, self-inflicted wound, courtesy of his acerbic wit.
In November 1979, just after Cardinal Carol Wojtyla had succeeded the one-month papacy of John Paul I, a reporter asked Dole during his weekly press gaggle why the new Pope had chosen the name John Paul II.
“Hey, he’s Polish,” Dole said. “‘John Paul’ is real easy to spell.” It was the kind of wisecrack the Capitol Hill press corps understood was not for publication. Unfortunately for Dole, his office had invited a reporter from Our Sunday Visitor to join the other reporters, as a way of getting Dole attention from the Catholic community. The front-page story brought Dole plenty of attention, enough to end his campaign before it officially began.
Former Texas governor John Connally was a formidable candidate on paper, a six-foot-plus alpha male with a commanding visage, CEO-silver hair, custom-made pin-striped suits, and access to money—lots of it. But his bluff style and swagger reminded voters of the kind of wheeler-dealer tactics that were out of favor in these post-Watergate years. Connally was also wedded to part of his Democratic past; he was given to praising the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, as well as the wage-price controls he had administered as Richard Nixon’s Treasury Secretary. And there was the aura this supremely self-confident man gave off. As conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote, “He looked like the banker who told you he was calling in your loan as he headed out to the country club in his Cadillac for a round of golf.”
There were two Illinois congressmen running, from opposite ideological poles. The highly conservative Phil Crane appeared to be running just in case Ronald Reagan faltered; liberal Republican John Anderson seemed to be searching for that elusive pro-gun control, anti-tax cut Republican voter, who had been spotted slightly less often than the Loch Ness monster.
There had been a time when moderates had put their hopes on Texas Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush, a genuine World War II hero with energy, good looks, and an eminently civilized demeanor. But Bush had lost two races for the U.S. Senate, and had found a home in appointive offices. He was now running the Central Intelligence Agency.
And that left . . . Howard Baker from Tennessee, the fifty-five-year-old Senate Republican leader. Calm of demeanor, placid of voice, Baker had become a national figure during the 1973 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into the Watergate break-in when he asked over and over: “What did the President know and when did he know it?” He had loyally fought for the doomed legislative agenda of Jerry Ford, and had voted to ratify the treaties that ended U.S. sovereignty over the Panama Canal, part of a record that commended him to the right-thinking brunch-and-cocktails world of Washington, but not to the party’s foot soldiers.
Worst of all, Baker was a practicing Washington politician at a time when the Washington wing of the party, exemplified by Jerry Ford, had fallen into widespread disrepute. What had compromise and accommodation gotten us? A Supreme Court that bans prayer and protects abortions . . . a foreign policy that drinks a toast to Mao-tse-Tung . . . an economy that’s killing the American dream.
So Howard Baker launched his 1980 Presidential campaign into a stiff political wind, carrying the message that “Reagan Can’t Win” to a party whose heart and soul Ronald Reagan now owned.
It was a contest that was over almost as soon as it began, a nomination battle that validated the strategy of the man who had been guiding Ronald Reagan toward the White House for more than four years. It was a strategy whose very success that winter and spring would lead to real trouble when the leaves began to fall.
JOHN SEARS CAME to the political big leagues as a twenty-six-year-old lawyer in a New York law firm, where he caught the attention of one of the firm’s partners. Richard Nixon had watched Sears the way a grizzled baseball scout might have watched the warm-up pitches of an eighteen-year-old Nolan Ryan; without question, the kid had it. By mid-1968, Sears was playing a major role in the delegate hunt that led Nixon to the nomination. He might have been a major player in the Nixon White House were it not for the jealousy he aroused in Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and especially John Mitchell. They knew a rival for the king’s ear when they saw one . . . and given what eventually happened to the men who did wind up closest to Nixon’s throne, it may have been the biggest break of the young man’s life.
He practiced law in Washington, but Sears’s driving ambition was to elect a President of the United States, and he found his candidate in Ronald Reagan. The attraction wasn’t ideological; Sears had few if any overarching political beliefs. Reagan was, in Sears’s judgment, “a superb piece of political horseflesh,” and in 1975, defying the conventional wisdom that a sitting President cannot be denied renomination, Sears convinced Reagan to mount a primary challenge, and after a string of early missteps, Reagan almost pulled off the impossible. And among the Gipper’s most devoted followers, a low-grade argument broke out: Was Sears the tactical genius, or had he fumbled away the nomination by mounting a front-loaded strategy, by ignoring the delegate-rich states in the Northeast, by not launching an all-out convention battle for a more conservative platform?
Ronald Reagan had put Sears in charge of his 1980 effort, and from the beginning there was grumbling in the ranks of the true believers. Sears was no conservative; indeed, he disdained ideology, and in his frequent late-night chats with the press over drinks, he almost seemed to disdain Reagan’s core convictions, treating them as something between an inconvenience and an embarrassment. Even more troubling, Sears made it clear that Reagan would run as the nominee-in-waiting. He was, Sears argued, far too prestigious a figure to spend his days at Iowa corn boils and steak fries, shaking hands at factory gates and shopping malls. As for debates . . . it was Ronald Reagan himself who had long ago proclaimed the eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican,” and what was a primary debate but the forum to do just that? The men and women who had been with Reagan from his first days as a candidate for California governor would shake their heads and say Reagan needs to be out there in the arena, it’s his natural turf; he needs to be spelling out how he’s different from the Republican President we have. But Reagan, who hated internal conflicts, followed Sears’s guidance, even as the campaign chief began systematically removing old Reagan allies from the campaign: Lyn Nofziger, Martin Anderson, Mike Deaver.
Under other circumstances, the above-the-fray stance of Reagan would have opened the door for another candidate to deliver an early, paralyzing blow to the front-runner. A Republican equivalent of Gary Hart, moving into Iowa early, organizing from the ground up, might well have been able to shock Reagan in the caucuses, shattering the aura of inevitability. It would have taken a candidate unencumbered by official responsibilities, able to devote weeks to on-the-ground campaigning. (From his office in Langley, Virginia, CIA chief George H. W. Bush found himself musing about what might have happened had he stepped down as Director right after Ford’s reelection.)
That door never opened. John Connally discovered that Iowans did not respond well to candidates showing up at six-girl high school basketball games in thousand-dollar suits, or lecturing Kiwanis club grocery store owners about the intricacies of floating currencies. John
Anderson and Phil Crane had no money, no organization, no presence. And Senator Howard Baker had heavy responsibilities back in Washington, as his party’s leader. When he did manage to come to Iowa, he was peppered with complaints about the economy, and the inability of Washington to improve it. He and the other candidates aimed their fire at Reagan’s refusal to engage in debates; their television commercials implicitly raised the issue of Reagan’s age and mental acuity (“Ready on Day One,” said Connally’s commercials; “A President We Won’t Have to Train,” said Baker’s).
All to no avail. Reagan barely touched down in Iowa, gliding through appearances before friendly audiences, like the increasingly powerful Iowa Evangelical Assembly, here he demonstrated his brand of humor when the public address system failed. Placing his hands over the podium, Reagan said with a big grin, “at the risk of offending anyone here from the American Civil Liberties Union, I am praying for this microphone.”
On January 21, Reagan received 48 percent of the votes in the straw polls taken at the precinct caucuses; Baker was a distant second with 19 percent. No one else managed more than 10 percent.
And for some of Reagan’s old hands, the victory was very bad news.
“A lot of us were convinced that what Reagan needed was a swift kick in the butt,” Mike Deaver reflected later, “an early warning shot to get him onto the playing field, to shock him out of that cautious, hold-the-ball-and-don’t-shoot campaign that Sears was running. But when Reagan won so big in Iowa, it seemed to prove that Sears was right. It meant that the campaign would stay in the hands of a man who did not believe what Reagan believed, and who did not hold his own candidate in high regard.”
Then Everything Changed Page 41