They saw the delegates give a prolonged standing ovation to Senator Ted Kennedy’s embrace of the party platform, and heard NBC’s Tom Brokaw observe drily, “nobody writes a better concession speech than a Democratic speechwriter. After all, they’ve had a lot of practice.” They watched Hart’s name placed in nomination by ex-representative Barbara Jordan, whose rich-timbered voice echoed her classic keynote speech from 1976.
“This November,” Jordan said, “two men of the West will compete for the most powerful office in the world. One clings to the past, to old, weary ideas that time has passed by; one young man beckons us to a future with energy and vision, and fresh ideas. Is there any doubt which path this vibrant, still-young nation will choose?”
And they watched with some unease as Gary Hart chose his running mate. In three consecutive elections, Presidential nominees had chosen a Vice Presidential candidate who’d proved a serious weight on the ticket. In 1968, Spiro Agnew had become so much a laughingstock that the Humphrey campaign cut a TV ad that simply showed the words “President Agnew?” as hysterical laughter played in the background. In 1972, George McGovern’s campaign imploded after he learned that Senator Tom Eagleton had been repeatedly hospitalized for emotional ills and so had to be dumped from the ticket. In 1976, Senator Robert Dole’s invocation of “Democrat Wars” had scarred the Ford campaign, foreshadowing his essay into Papal humor that had ruled him out as a Presidential contender. Hart’s June primary triumphs had spared him a convention battle for the nomination and given him a month to weigh his choice. He’d toyed with the prospect of a woman on the ticket, but there were none with real Presidential credentials (Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso would have worked, but she was ill with cancer). He looked hard for a Catholic, as a gesture to the Kennedy wing of the party; there were plenty to choose from, including Kennedy himself, New York Governor Hugh Carey, even Representative Lindy Boggs of Louisiana, whose faith and gender made her a genuine twofer.
On the Saturday before the convention opened, Hart made his choice by picking up the telephone.
“Since you’re the one who got me into this,” he said, “it’s time for payback.”
“Well,” said the voice on the other end, “I’m thinking of Lincoln’s story about the man who was ridden out of town on a rail, and said, ‘If it weren’t for the honor, I’d just as soon walk.’”
“You’re riding with me,” Hart said.
“Well, then, I’ll take one for the team,” said Dale Bumpers. “But let me check with our illustrious governor, and make sure Bill can get the legislature to let me run for senator as well . . . just in case. You may be crazy enough to risk a Senate seat, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying fender-benders in Franklin County.”
The Bumpers choice told Republicans that Hart had learned a lesson many Democrats had come to ignore since the upheaval of 1968: Values trump programs. You could talk all you want about your eight-point health care plan, and your fifteen-point jobs-and-education plans, but voters possessed an extraordinarily well-calibrated bullshit detector. If they thought you had no respect for their region, their beliefs, their accents, they would not give you the time of day. Few understood that better than Dale Bumpers.
And Republicans heard Gary Hart give an acceptance speech that encapsulated his campaign’s theme. While never mentioning Ronald Reagan’s age, it relentlessly hammered the idea by indirection.
“John Kennedy reminded us that ‘change is the law of life. Those who live only for the past or the present are certain to miss the future.’ We are the only nation on earth whose very creation was born out of the faith that free men and women could shape that future. We dare not abandon that faith in these troubled times.”
He spent little time on the compulsory denunciation of the Ford administration, because, he said, “The record is clear beyond measure: inflation that steals a family’s life savings and shadows a trip to the supermarket with anxiety; an industrial depression that shatters the dreams of families from Pittsburgh to Akron to Macomb; interest rates that make the bedrock goals of a middle-class life—a home, a college education, a small business—beyond the reach of all but the most favored. But much as we would wish to put the blame on the Republicans, and much as they must be held accountable for their failures, these afflictions stem from fundamental changes in the economy of America and the world—and America must choose leadership that understands these challenges, and can master them.”
With the Democratic convention as prologue, there was no false illusion among the Republicans as they filed into Dallas’s brand-new Reunion Arena. They were trying for a fourth consecutive Presidential victory (something only FDR had managed to achieve, and that was in the middle of a World War); their incumbent President was hugely unpopular; the economy was in dire straits; and the Democrats were unified. As former National Chair Rogers Morton acknowledged to ABC, “We are sailing into the wind this year.” And the opening of the convention was shadowed by another development: John Anderson had decided to abandon his Independent campaign for the White House. In a race with Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, he told a press conference, “I could have occupied the sensible center. But Senator Hart’s nomination has given the Democrats a candidate who is making a sharp break with the past, offering many of the same proposals I would have brought to the campaign.” Anderson denied he was endorsing Hart, but the impact of his withdrawal was clear: Anderson would have taken far more votes from Hart than from Reagan.
Still, they were about to nominate a formidable campaigner in Ronald Reagan, and one who could persuasively argue that he had very different ideas from those that had governed Washington under both Republicans and Democrats. He had made that clear throughout his campaign.
And there was something else about Reagan: His instinct for the bold gesture was as sharp as his instinct for the right turn of phrase. He knew that in the political climate of 1980, he had to make the convention a stage for something unprecedented, wholly unexpected, that would make it impossible for voters to see him as a candidate of the past.
And by Wednesday, when he would be formally nominated, he had decided exactly what that would be . . .
WHEN THE MAJOR TELEVISION networks came on the air Wednesday evening, committed to live coverage of a suspense-free Presidential nomination, the only topic of conversation was the likely identity of Ronald Reagan’s running mate. With the help of carefully constructed misdirection from the Reagan campaign, many of the best-known, highest-paid anchors, correspondents, and analysts exchanged the same nuggets of misinformation, all rooted in the certainty that Reagan would “move to the center” in an effort to shape a ticket that would appeal to moderates as well as conservatives. This is what winning nominees had always done, whether it was FDR picking Southern conservative John Nance Garner in ’32, or liberal Republican Tom Dewey picking isolationist Ohio Senator John Bricker in ’44, or Ike picking Nixon in ’52 or JFK turning to LBJ in ’60. Reagan himself had followed the pattern four years earlier—in a last-ditch effort to seize the nomination from President Ford, he had announced that he would pick liberal Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker as his running mate (it had been a ploy designed to force Ford to declare his own running mate, thus alienating whatever wing of the party he rejected. The failure of the convention to adopt such a mandatory declaration ended Reagan’s hopes for victory).
Surely, the speculation went, Reagan would do the same, most likely turning to his vanquished primary opponent Howard Baker of Tennessee, the Republican Senate leader.
“The parallel with John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson is as striking as it is appealing,” wrote the New York Times’s James Reston, who had touted Baker as “far more reasonable, far more seasoned, far more electable than the movie star turned political star. It would reassure those thoughtful Republicans troubled by the often myopic world view of the ex-governor that perhaps he agrees the world is round after all.”
And maybe Reagan would hav
e done just that had he been running against an incumbent Democrat as unpopular as Ford had become. Under those circumstances, a sense of reassurance was all the electorate might have needed to turn to a challenger. Four years of Gerald Ford, however, had radically changed the equation. There was nothing “reassuring” about a Washington Republican who had spent four years carrying water for a President who had lost the confidence of the people. Fairly or not, they were seen as the folks who had driven America straight into the ditch. No, Baker would signal “business as usual” when the country was hungry for a sharp, clean break with “business as usual.” A choice that in other years might have seemed ideal could well be seen this year as a confession of resignation.
Reagan, unlike so many more conventional politicians, was secure enough in his own beliefs, comfortable enough in his own skin, to recognize his potential liabilities. His age, his invocations of traditional American values and heroes, made him vulnerable to the charge that he was out of touch, that he did not understand the newer currents in American life (“Reagan spent years,” one wisecrack had it, “working in Hollywood, for Eighteenth Century Fox”). More than anything else, Reagan was looking to signal with his Vice Presidential choice that he was making a bold choice that embraced the America of 1980, not 1880. And so he asked his aides to cast the widest possible net.
“If you think of someone who seems too radical, too offbeat, make sure that name goes on the list,” he said.
So when Reagan, Sears, Meese, and the others in the inner circle met in Reagan’s suite on the sixteenth floor of the Loew’s Anatole Hotel on the Tuesday night of the convention, the “safe” choices quickly fell out of the running. They turned to the wild cards beginning with . . . Democrats. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, from Washington State, was an ardent hawk on defense spending, and was far closer to Reagan than to Hart on the use of American might abroad. But on domestic issues, he was an equally ardent liberal, a favorite of the AFL-CIO, and would likely cause insurrection on the convention floor. Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, a recognized expert on defense, had battled for years against the peace wing of his own party; back in ’72, he’d openly backed Nixon’s reelection, and might well be unhappy now that McGovern’s campaign manager was the Democratic Presidential nominee. Nunn, however, had Presidential aspirations of his own down the line, and would almost certainly turn the offer down. “We’ll keep him in mind for Defense Secretary, though,” Meese said.
And then he said, “Governor? If you’re really serious about someone from left field . . . and you want someone who shows that you’re serious about bringing power back to the states . . . and you want someone who came up the hard way, even to overcome discrimination, served in every branch of state government . . .”
“Sounds like a possibility,” Reagan said. “Who is he?”
“Well,” Meese said, with a broad smile, “that’s the other thing . . .”
IT WAS RICHARD WIRTHLIN, Reagan’s longtime pollster, who’d said it weeks ago.
“If only we could get a woman.”
“Never thought I’d hear that from a devout Mormon,” said Reagan. “Still waters run deep.”
But they all knew what Wirthlin was pointing to. In every poll, Reagan ran well behind Gary Hart among women, while men slightly preferred Reagan to Hart. “The gender gap,” the press was starting to call it. Never before in American politics had the genders split so dramatically; evidence that Reagan’s firmness, or truculence, on foreign policy was troubling women, and evidence as well that the Republican Party’s retreat from supporting the Equal Rights Amendment was costing it.
There was, Wirthlin argued, a deeper dimension to the idea of a woman on the ticket. It was a gesture that, in a single stroke, would dispel any lingering sense that Reagan was a man wedded to the old ways, unwilling to strike out in a bold, new direction. The question, of course, was which woman.
There was one only woman Republican in the U.S. Senate, Nancy Kassebaum from Kansas, but she had long ago told the Reagan campaign that she would reject the offer, feeling she lacked the qualifications to be President. There was Anne Armstrong, former Ambassador to France, former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Four years earlier, she’d been on Ford’s short list for the Vice Presidential spot before he’d chosen Dole. There was Carla Hills, Ford’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, but there was no love lost between Carla and Rod Hills and the Reagans. Now Ed Meese was suggesting someone none of them had ever heard of to stand a sixty-nine-year-old heartbeat away from the Oval Office.
After Meese put the biographical details of his choice on the table, the resistance was instant and heated: We’re talking nuclear weapons, Ed. Armageddon, mushroom clouds. No question she sounds like prime goods, but . . .
“I think we should remember Ed’s point,” Reagan said. “Washington experience hasn’t exactly paid off in the last . . . oh, thirty, forty years, and particularly not recently. And I have to tell you, when I think about the folks who got to the White House who didn’t come from Washington—like Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt—I could have some fun with that in a debate . . .”
“There’s something else to think about,” Meese said. “Think about what it would do to the Democrats. Their convention adopted a formal rule that no campaign help will go to any Democratic candidate who doesn’t support the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s the only issue where a candidate’ll lose support if you don’t toe the line. You can be for an end to Social Security, abolition of the minimum wage—but not the ERA. The women were pushing Hart very hard to name a woman running mate, even threatened a floor fight, which they did not, unfortunately for us, get. A woman nominee would certainly put them in a box . . . damn if I’m not starting to like the idea. But, Governor, this is going to be a genuine shock to the system. If you announce this on Thursday at noon, the delegates will only have a few hours to absorb it before they file into the arena.”
“You’re right, Ed,” Reagan said. “I’ve been trying to think of a way to break with tradition—you know, Roosevelt flying to Chicago for his acceptance speech, Kennedy giving his outdoors. So here’s what I think . . .”
IT WAS CBS’S LESLEY STAHL who broke the story, twenty seconds ahead of NBC’s Chris Wallace.
“Walter!” she said, simultaneously talking to the network anchor and her source at the other end of a telephone. “We’ve just learned that Governor Reagan has left his suite and . . . am I getting this right, Jim? . . . yes? . . . Walter, Governor Reagan is on his way to the Reunion Arena here to speak to the convention, and will apparently announce his choice for Vice President in just a few moments! We’re being told that this is the first time ever that a Presidential nominee has declared his choice this way.” Minutes later, Reagan, resplendent in a blue suit, red-striped tie, white handkerchief in his breast pocket, bounded onto the stage, waving and smiling through a five-minute ovation.
“I’m sorry to be interrupting your party, which I’ve been enjoying back in my hotel, but I’ve never forgotten that it isn’t the candidates who are in charge of a convention, it’s you, the duly elected delegates [prolonged cheers], and I wanted to be sure that when I made my choice for Vice President, before the news was leaked to the good ladies and gentlemen of the press, you would be the first to know [sustained applause and cheers].
“As you may imagine, I’ve gotten a lot of advice over the last several weeks, including a letter from an eight-year-old boy in Perkinsville, Ohio, named Bobby Warren, who suggested that I pick someone ‘who would scare the bad guys into behaving themselves.’ I hate to tell you this, Bobby, if you’re up this late, but Clint Eastwood turned me down [laughter and applause]!
“But there’s one piece of advice I did not take—and that was to follow the old, familiar path of choosing someone from inside the corridors of power of Washington, D.C. [prolonged ovation]. There are many fine public servants in the Capitol [mild booing]. No, please, there are. But I have long believed that there’s something about that t
own—maybe it’s in the air or water—that keeps people’s minds locked into the same narrow limits. Besides, if the voters want the same old Washington ways, why, they can just look to our Democratic friends, who’ve picked both of their candidates from Washington, D.C.
“The choice I will recommend to you has taken a very different path to distinction and achievement”—and now the huge hall began to still—“and in doing so has overcome barriers that would have defeated someone of lesser strength and conviction.
“Born and educated in Texas, raised on a cattle farm, my nominee attained academic distinction at one of the finest universities in the land, Stanford University and Stanford Law School. . . . But because of the prejudices of the times, was denied the chance to work. But perseverance, and dedication to public service, earned my choice high positions as an assistant attorney general . . . and then the highest leadership post the state legislature can provide . . . and then a significant role in the judiciary . . . serving, in other words, in every branch of state government.”
(From his perch in the anchor booth high above the arena, NBC co-anchor David Brinkley turned a pair of binoculars toward the floor and said, “Chet, I don’t know exactly what this means, but the Arizona delegation is going nuts!”)
“At the risk of immodesty,” Reagan said, “I am prepared to say that my choice has demonstrated a blend of background, experience, and judgment that can stand with any Vice Presidential nominee of either major party. Oh,” he added, and the camera caught the twinkle in his eye and the smile that was almost playful. “One more thing I almost forgot to mention: After listening to the other party talk about how much they cared about opening the doors of opportunity, I thought it was about time that someone actually did it. Fellow Republicans, fellow Americans, I proudly offer you my choice as our candidate for Vice President of the United States—the Honorable Sandra Day O’Connor.”
Then Everything Changed Page 45