Rick Perlstein - Reaganland: Americas Right Turn 1976-1980

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To JHC

I met a Californian who would

Talk Californiaa state so blessed,

He said, in climate none had ever died there

A natural death.

ROBERT FROST

RONALD REAGAN INSISTED THAT IT wasnt his fault.

In July of 1976, Jimmy Carter emerged from the Democratic National Convention ahead in the polls against President Gerald Ford by a record thirty-three percentage points. By November, Ford had staged a monumental comeback. But it was not monumental enough. Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States with 50.08 percent of the popular vote, and 55 percent of the electoral college.

What had stopped Ford just shy of the prize? In newspaper columns, radio commentaries, and interviews all through the rest of 1976 and into 1977, Reagan blamed factors like the Democrat-controlled Congress, for allegedly holding back matching funds owed to Fords campaign. And All the Presidents Men, the hit Watergate movie from spring, which Warner Bros. had rebooked into six hundred theaters two weeks before the election, for reminding voters of the incumbents unpopular act of pardoning Richard Nixon after Watergate. And even the United Auto Workers, for calling a strike that autumn against the Ford Motor Companysabotaging the economy to boost Jimmy Carter, Reagan claimed.

Ronald Reagan blamed everyone and everything, that is, except the factor many commentators said was most responsible for the tickets defeat: Ronald Reagan.

He had challenged Ford for the nomination all the way through the convention, something unprecedented in the history of the Republican Party. Then, critics charged, he sat on his hands rather than seriously campaign for the ticket in the fall. If Ford had pulled in but 64,510 more votes in Texas and 7,232 more in Mississippi, he would have won the electoral college; or 137,984 more in Kentucky and West Virginia plus 35,473 from Missouri; or if he had won Ohio, where he came but 5,559 short, while adding either Louisiana, Alabama, or Mississippi, which Ford lost by less than two pointsall of these states where Reagan had droves of passionate fans. But according to one top Republican operative, the only effective campaign work done by Reagan was for Carter, whose ads featured Reagans primary attacks against Ford. Former Gov. Ronald Reagan has succeeded in running out the election campaign without being drawn into full, direct support for President Ford, the New York Times had concludedin order, the cognoscenti whispered, to preserve his own chances for 1980 should Gerald Ford lose.

Reagan howled his defense: No defeated candidate for the nomination has ever campaigned that hard for the nominee, but there had been a curtain of silence around my activities. This was not true. They were covered widelyunder headlines like Reagan Shuns Role in Fords Campaign.

Now they said his political career was over. The Boston Globes Washington columnist joked that Richard Nixon was a more likely presidential prospect in 1980. About Reagan, the Times said, At 65, he is considered by some as too old to make another run for the presidency. Even right-wingers agreedscouring the horizon, one columnist noted, for a bright, tough young conservative whom Reagan might groom for the GOP nomination in 1980. The Times also said that political professionals of both major parties believed the GOP was closer to extinction than ever before in its 122-year history: they controlled only twelve governorships, and according to Fords pollster Robert Teeter, the loyalty of only 18 percent of Americans voters. Clearly, the Newspaper of Record concluded, if the Republican Party is to rebuild it must entrust its future to younger men.

And less conservative ones. John Rhodes, the House minority leader, was a disciple of conservative hero Barry Goldwater. His tiny caucus of 143 would face a wall of 292 Democrats when the 95th Congress convened in January. After the election, he rued that we give the impression of not caring, the worst possible image a political party can have. The American Conservative Union, chartered in 1964 to keep the faith after Goldwaters presidential loss that year as the Republican nominee, felt so unwelcome in the party that they met in Chicago the weekend after the election to consider chartering a new one. Reagan himself entertained the idea, until one of his biggest donors threatened to cut him off if he persistedthough Reagan did suggest that perhaps a name change for the Grand Old Party was in order. You know, in the business I used to be in, we discovered that very often the title of a picture was very important as to whether people went to see it or not. Even so, he had no suggestion what that should be.

THE DEMOCRATS, ON THE OTHER hand, appeared to be in clover. After Watergate, America longed for redemption. They met Jimmy Carter, and fell in love.

One day that summer, the advertising man hired to make Gerald Fords TV commercials turned on the radio. Jimmy Carters mother, whod joined the Peace Corps ten years earlier at the age of sixty-eight, whom an adoring nation called Miz Lillian, dialed in to a sports talk show to gab about her favorite professional wrestlers. I was spellbound, Malcolm MacDougall wrote. One little phone call and 100,000 avid Boston sports fans had undoubtedly fallen in love with Jimmy Carters mother.

He flipped on the TV. A Washington socialite was being interviewed by Johnny Carson. She didnt want to talk about her new book. She wanted to talk about her trip to Plains, Georgia. In the beginning she wasnt a believer, she said. No, sir. She had been just as cynical as a lot of us liberals. But shed talked with Jimmy Carter for hours. Just sat there on the porch, the two of them, talking about life and government and religion. And now she was a believer. Jimmy Carter was real, she said. He is going to save our country. He is going to make us all better people.

MacDougall traveled to Bostons Logan Airport to fly to the Republican convention. At the newsstand, Jimmy Carters face was staring at me from dozens of magazines. And, from the covers of paperback books with titles like The Miracle of Jimmy Carter. He turned around: a stack of T-shirts with peanuts on the front, and the words, THE GRIN WILL WIN. This wasnt a clothing store.

Even so, 70 percent of the electorate told pollsters they had no intention of voting in November at all. One of them, a rabbi, wrote a New York Times op-ed. I was one of the millions who rejected Barry Goldwaters foreign policy, voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson, and then got Mr. Goldwaters foreign policy anyway. I, too, voted for law and order and got Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew. And now I think of the man who promised Congress that he would not interfere with the judicial process, and then pardoned Mr. Nixon as almost his first official act. So: no more voting. If Pericles were alive today, he might be inclined to join me.

The epidemic of political apathy spread particularly thick among the young. During the insurgent 1960s, the notion of universities as a seedbed of idealism was accepted as a political truism for all time. No longer. A university provost explained that he was seeing a new breed of student who is thinking more about jobs, money, and the futurejust not