ON THE MORNING of Sunday, October 19, tens of thousands of Americans, tethered to the Democratic Party by ties of family, ideological preference, economic interest, or campaign wager, awoke with a common question: Is it really possible we’re going to lose another Presidential election?
The Republican recovery had begun nine weeks earlier, in the first moments after Ronald Reagan stunned the delegates, the press, and the country with his choice of Sandra Day O’Connor.
“As obscure a choice as any Presidential nominee has made in the modern history of the Republic,” campaign chronicler Teddy White had pronounced on NBC.
Nor were movement conservatives exactly thrilled.
“In my youth,” columnist/author/TV host William F. Buckley, Jr., said on ABC, “I once noted that I would rather be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard. It appears that Governor Reagan has thrust his hand into the Phoenix, Arizona, telephone book and plucked out a nominee by random choice.” A clutch of longtime stalwarts of the right, led by Phyllis Schlafly, threatened a floor fight when they learned that O’Connor’s anti-abortion credentials were suspect.
The mood changed dramatically when Sandra Day O’Connor, a handsome fifty-year-old blonde, strode onto the Reunion Arena stage, her simple light blue dress playing off the deep blue half-circle stage flanked by red and white carnations, and delivered what John Chancellor called “a knockout of an acceptance speech.”
“I’ve heard it said that we Republicans are making history tonight,” she began, “and there is no denying a sense of pride in this hall that the party of the Emancipation Proclamation and the guarantees of liberty and equal protection enshrined in our Constitution is now the party that has opened the door to real political power for half the population of the United States. And that will be the first legacy of our next President, Ronald Reagan.
“But I have to confess to you that after listening to some of the comments from the media, I had a moment or two of real doubt. Maybe those of us who have worked closer to the people just aren’t prepared to live and work in the world of Washington.
“After all, in the world where Ronald Reagan and I come from . . . if you don’t have the money . . . you can’t spend the money.
“In the world Ronald Reagan and I come from . . . if someone threatens your safety, or your family, or your well-being . . . you make damn sure you are strong enough to protect yourself—and you don’t apologize for it.
“So maybe Ronald Reagan and I don’t belong in Washington. Or maybe”—she let the laughter and applause build—“maybe it’s time for people like you to send people like us to remind people like Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy and George McGovern what it means to be a public servant.”
Then it was Ronald Reagan’s turn; and after a brief joking reference to his earlier career (“If you keep cheering, you’re going to push me out of prime time!”), he used fresh words to strike familiar themes of biography and optimism.
“I’ve seen America,” he said, “from the stadium press box as a sportscaster, as an actor, officer of my labor union, soldier, officeholder, and as both Democrat and Republican. I’ve lived in an America where those who often had too little to eat outnumbered those who had enough. There have been four wars in my lifetime and I’ve seen our country face financial ruin in Depression. I have also seen the great strength of this nation as it pulled itself up from that ruin to become the dominant force in the world.
“There are those in our land today, however, who would have us believe that the United States, like other great civilizations of the past, has reached the zenith of its power; that we are weak and fearful, reduced to bickering with each other and no longer possessed of the will to cope with our problems.
“Much of this talk has come from would-be leaders who claim that our problems are too difficult to handle. We are supposed to meekly accept their failures as the most which humanly can be done. They tell us we must learn to live with less, and teach our children that their lives will be less full and prosperous than ours have been; that the America of the coming years will be a place where—because of our past excesses—it will be impossible to dream and make those dreams come true.
“I don’t believe that. And, I don’t believe you do, either.”
He mentioned President Ford only once, to argue that “even those with good intentions, like Jerry Ford, have found their efforts to curb the size and scope of the federal government frustrated by a Congress which, like an infant, has an unlimited appetite at one end and no control over the other.
“That is why, once and for all, we must put an end to the arrogance of a federal establishment which accepts no blame for our condition, cannot be relied upon to give us a fair estimate of our situation and utterly refuses to live within its means. I will not accept the supposed ‘wisdom’ which has it that the federal bureaucracy has become so powerful that it can no longer be changed or controlled by any administration. As President, I would use every power at my command to make the federal establishment respond to the will and the collective wishes of the people.”
And he ended by invoking two of his favorite themes:
“A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and—above all—responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.
“I believe that you and I together can keep this rendezvous with destiny.”
In a sense, the speech of Ronald Reagan—and his pick of Sandra Day O’Connor—defined how the Republican ticket managed to stay competitive with Gary Hart and Dale Bumpers. Every public opinion survey showed the country was overwhelmingly in favor of change; but the public was almost evenly divided about whether Hart or Reagan represented “the change America needs.” As Reagan campaign chief John Sears put it: “Politics are always played against a cultural perspective. From FDR on, the cultural perspective has always been with Democrats. That is no longer the case.”
Sears was talking about matters beyond the economic. For millions, the tectonic shifts in the cultural landscape were at least as unsettling as the weakening of the dollar or the erosion of America’s manufacturing base. The upheavals of the late 1960s may have taken place a decade earlier, but the aftershocks were still rippling through the terrain of 1980. Visions of long hair, burning flags, tribes of the naked young ingesting illegal drugs, the banning of prayer in school, struck at the deepest convictions of millions. For these voters, Gary Hart’s “new ideas” campaign carried with it an implicit rejection of their ideas, their convictions. And no one better affirmed the vitality of those convictions better than Ronald Reagan.
There was a geographic dimension to all this: In 1976, Jimmy Carter’s victories in all but two Southern states had brought him within two electoral votes of the Presidency. His strength in the Old Confederacy came in part from his Georgia roots, and in part from his open proclamation of his born-again faith, which had won him the implicit backing of such influential figures as Pat Robertson. Now it was Ronald Reagan who was winning their hearts and minds, telling a gathering of religious broadcasters, “I know you can’t endorse me, but I can endorse you.” And while Reagan pledged to enforce the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts—“at the point of a bayonet if need be”—his longtime embrace of states’ rights and his former opposition to those civil rights laws was bringing conservative Democrats firmly into his camp. Hart’s campaign could take solace from its prospects among longtime moderate and liberal Republicans in New England and the Northeast, but as Mississippi-born Boston Globe columnist Curtis Wilkie wrote, “You do not need a degree from MIT to figure out that swapping 100 electoral votes from the land of grits and fatback for twenty or so votes from the land of beans and chowder does not make for a happy Democratic Party on Election Day.”
And yet ... the same strengths that Reagan brought to the
campaign illustrated why Gary Hart may well have been the Democrats’ best choice for 1980. If traditional liberalism as represented by Ted Kennedy was in disrepute, Hart had spent his six years in the Senate separating himself from that tradition, embracing a far more entrepreneurial, far less bureaucratic version of progressive politics. If older, socially conservative Democrats were drawn to Reagan, then younger, socially liberal Republicans and independents found in Hart a candidate who seemed much like themselves.
There was a geographic dimension to Hart’s appeal as well. One of the least-attended facts of Presidential politics by 1980 was that the West had become a wasteland for Democrats. With the exception of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 landslide, Democrats had been all but shut out of the Mountain West (Kennedy had—barely—won Nevada and New Mexico in 1960). Those eight states added up to thirty-one electoral votes, more than any state save New York and California; and Gary Hart, out of Colorado, with his Lucchese boots and snap-button shirts and lean, cowboy looks, with his disaffection with Washington’s ways, had a connection to the West no other Democrat—certainly not Jimmy Carter or Ted Kennedy—could match. Hart’s nomination also put the fifteen electoral votes of Oregon and Washington in play, and some optimists around Hart also argued that he might even force Reagan to devote time and resources to his home state of California, a state that had gone Republican in every election but one for the last thirty years.
Yet as the New York Times’s Johnny Apple noted, “For all of the potential altering of Presidential geography—a Republican strong in the South, a Democrat with appeal in the West—this election will almost surely be decided in the familiar battleground of the industrial heartland: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin. But here, too, the candidates will be seeking votes in regions that have traditionally voted with the other party.”
In early September, Ronald Reagan returned to Milwaukee’s Serb Hall, a thirty-year-old community center off West Oklahoma Avenue that was a magnet not just for Serbs, but for Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, whose ties to the Democratic Party of Roosevelt, Truman, and John Kennedy had been frayed by the decades-long tensions over war, race, crime, welfare. He had drawn thousands of onetime Democrats into the Republican primary in the spring, and he was reaching out to them now with familiar lines.
“For those of you who may feel uncomfortable about voting for me . . . well, I used to be a Democrat myself. I didn’t leave the party, the party left me.” He pledged a foreign policy that would permit “no more Vietnams—never again will we ask American boys to fight and die in a war we’re not prepared to win, never again will we permit a small nation to be driven into a godless Communist tyranny by our weakness and indecision.”
As Reagan was seeking traditionally Democratic votes, Gary Hart was speaking to a large crowd at Royal Oak High School, an upper-middle-income suburb of Detroit. The audience was well dressed, well heeled, well bred, the kind of college-educated citizens who could be found at the Town Hall lecture series, on the board of the United Fund, in the ranks of the League of Women Voters. They were “DNA Republicans,” more or less genetically inclined to the party, but they had voted for Howard Baker in the primary, and they were both unsettled by much of Reagan’s agenda, and drawn to a new kind of Democrat who seemed very different from the New Deal-Great Society model.
And Hart was playing on those impulses.
“What kind of ‘conservative,’ ” he asked, “would turn our land and water over to the despoilers, squandering the most precious legacy we can leave to our children?
“What kind of a ‘conservative’ would bring the criminal powers of the federal government to bear on a pregnant sixteen-year-old girl, forcing her to bear her rapist’s child?
“What kind of ‘conservative’ would risk another nuclear confrontation by threatening an illegal blockade against Cuba as a diplomatic tool?
“What kind of ‘conservative’ wants to spend tens of billions of dollars on gold-plated weaponry that may well break down in actual combat, putting our men in fatal danger, leaving us less able to fight and win the conflicts of the future?
“And what kind of ‘conservative’ would attack America’s fiscal integrity by exploding our deficit by enriching the most comfortable among us, and leaving the least among us unschooled, unfed, unhoused?”
Without question, Reagan’s choice of Sandra Day O’Connor was giving him protective cover from the charge that he was too old, too mired in the past. Look at who he put on the ticket; there’s never been a bolder choice. And O’Connor’s low-key, thoughtful demeanor, on display in a series of interviews with network anchors Cronkite, Chancellor, and Reynolds, helped ease the doubts of voters worried over so unknown a choice. As Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger said, “It’s not as if she’s stuck for an answer when you ask her what she reads.” The choice also helped heal, or at least paper over, some very hard feelings in the Ford White House. The President had announced the day after the Republican Convention that “as a loyal Republican, I am of course supporting the ticket, and Betty and I are delighted that we will have the opportunity to elect the first woman Vice President.” (“Why didn’t Ford mention Reagan’s name?” Lesley Stahl asked press secretary Ron Nessen. “Because he chokes on it,” Nessen said.) Secretary of State Kissinger had ceased sharing his contemptuous views of Ronald Reagan’s knowledge and wisdom in late-night phone calls with reporters and columnists, perhaps because he was sending clear signals to the Reagan campaign that he would be willing to continue on as Secretary of State.
In a larger sense, it was the White House that was indeed the heaviest weight on the Reagan campaign. A Republican was campaigning to succeed a Republican when the economic fortunes of America were as bleak as they had been in half a century. For all that Ronald Reagan was arguing for a “sharp break with the failed policies of both parties,” the impulse of voters when confronted with hard times was to toss out the people who’d been in charge and turn to the other guys. If the mid-October polls were right, the voters were inclined to follow this practice; Hart’s lead in the Gallup, Harris, CBS, and NBC polls was somewhere between three and seven points.
So why, on this morning of October 19, were so many Democrats so nervous? Because at 9:30 p.m., Reagan and Hart would meet onstage in Cleveland’s Music Hall for the first and only Presidential debate. And no one, but no one, was a more effective political debater than Ronald Reagan.
He had reluctantly followed the advice of John Sears and stayed out of the primary debates until his nomination was assured, but in those three encounters he’d presented an amiable, gracious, often humorous personality. When asked about age and price controls just before the Ohio primary, Reagan had noted that they had failed when Emperor Diocletian had imposed them 1,700 years ago.
“And I’m the only one here old enough to remember that,” he’d said.
“People tuned into these debates having read or heard that Reagan was some kind of right-wing zealot, ready to throw women and children into the street and start lobbing nukes at the Kremlin,” Wirthlin said to reporters at a breakfast a day before the first October debate. “What they saw was an assured, unpretentious man comfortable in his own skin, fully engaged in the give-and-take of ideas. As for Hart? He’s obviously smart, but there’s something grim, something . . . intense about the guy, almost as if he can’t wait to prove he’s the smartest guy in the room and tell you how complicated and difficult everything is.”
That was precisely the specter that was haunting more than a few in the inner circle of the Hart campaign.
“Gary loves intellectual thrust-and-parry,” one of them said. “He drills down into the subsurface of ideas. But in a debate format, do you really win by talking about accelerated depreciation schedules versus a tax-based incomes policy? And then there’s the atmospherics; if anyone tries to remind Gary to smile during a debate, he’ll go ballistic. But if we get a stone-faced Hart spewing statistics up against genial Uncle Ron . . .” He gave a brief shudder.
&
nbsp; At eleven a.m., the Hart campaign team assembled in the living room of the candidate’s suite in the sixty-two-year-old Cleveland Hotel. Hart’s debate preparation consisted of absorbing reams of information and strategy memos, then batting around questions thrown at him by his researchers and strategists. (Reagan, by contrast, had prepped with full-blown rehearsals conducted in the garage of his Wexford, Virginia, campaign retreat, complete with a mock stage and a stand-in Hart, played by Congressman David Stockman.) The living room was cluttered with coffee cups, half-eaten muffins, congealing strips of bacon, and two dozen staff members who were convinced that the Presidency hung on their presence in the inner circle. When Hart walked in, he looked for the one face he did not see.
“Where’s Warren?” he asked.
“Said he was flying in this morning,” Billy Shore said. “Said he was bringing a surprise.”
There was a collective groan. While Warren Beatty was no stereotypical Hollywood celebrity, while he was well grounded in substance and tactics, the same obsessive impulses that could lead to seventy-five takes for a simple reaction shot, or to the relentless bedding of every conscious female in a three-mile radius, could also bog a strategy session down for hours in haggling over a singe phrase, a single word. So when Beatty said he’d bring a “surprise” to the debate prep, no one could imagine what that might be.
Certainly no one imagined that it would turn out to be a five-foot eight-inch fireplug of a man, who stalked into the room with a scowl on his face, took a thin, malodorous cigar out of is mouth, jabbed it at Hart, and said, “Hi, Senator—you ready to stop fucking around and win this goddamn campaign?”
Then Everything Changed Page 46