Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign that Changed America (94 page)

Morale in the Reagan campaign was rising.

T
HE DECISION FOR
R
EAGAN
to debate Anderson had been, in retrospect, more critical than anyone knew at the time. Since Detroit, Reagan had been reduced to a one-dimensional figure by his own mistakes and the Carter battering. Coming out of the debate, he began to climb back into contention. Carter had slipped and Anderson, despite what the media thought of his performance, had gone backwards. Was it possible that the “Anderson Difference” was just warmed-over liberalism? Most reporters and sages settled in with the idea that the election would be very close, as in 1960, 1968, and 1976.

Carter's men—as well as Reagan's—thought that sooner or later there would be a debate between the two antagonists. Indeed, Carter was preparing for such an eventuality even at the time of the Anderson–Reagan debate. As
Newsweek
reported, the president was “studying a thick, black, 200-page notebook entitled ‘Reagan Information’ and divided into chapters detailing Reagan's past and present stands on critical issues.”
⁸⁶
Everybody seemed to know about the
Carter debate book, contents of which became the worst-kept secret in Washington.

Now the League of Women Voters abruptly altered plans and offered to sponsor a two-man debate between Reagan and Carter, to be followed by a three-way debate. Carter accepted the invitation for a one-on-one debate. Anderson naturally objected to the new offering. Reagan, too, rejected the offer.
⁸⁷
He would not go back on his word by excluding Anderson.

Besides, the new setup meant that Reagan would have to debate three times and the other two men only twice. With his campaign nearly righted and Reagan hitting his stride on the road, Reagan's team saw no need for any more debates, though it meant he might lose the high-road argument.

Bizarrely, the league called on the public to whip up a grassroots campaign to pressure Reagan and Anderson to accept the new parameters.
⁸⁸

A Mondale–Bush debate had also been kicked around. In fact, shortly after accepting the GOP's vice-presidential nomination, George Bush had been in Kennebunkport relaxing when he received—and accepted in principle—an invitation from Vice President Mondale to debate.
⁸⁹
Later, when more formal discussions began, Bush said no to the idea of debating, and now, that confrontation was off the table. In interviews years later, Bush recalled, incorrectly, that no debate had been planned at all, while Mondale recalled accurately that one had been in the works.
⁹⁰
The Reagan team must have breathed a sigh of relief when the VP debate idea was shelved. Bush had a shaky debate record, and Mondale was such a pro that he had whipped Bob Dole in 1976. (In 1984 Mondale would become the only person to defeat Ronald Reagan in open debate.)

R
EAGAN PICKED UP THE
endorsement of an old liberal antagonist from California, Republican congressman Pete McCloskey. He'd been a burr under Reagan's saddle for years, having opposed every campaign of the Gipper's. Reagan once jokingly said that McCloskey's district ought to be moved to the San Andreas Fault.
⁹¹
In one of the weirder media events of the campaign, aides pushed McCloskey's ancient Volkswagen Bug onto the tarmac where Reagan's plane awaited. In front of the Gipper, McCloskey put a Reagan bumper sticker on his jalopy and then saluted the sticker, Marine-style.
⁹²

Another old rival, Jerry Ford, was campaigning aggressively for Reagan—though some Reagan aides thought it more than coincidence that the former president seemed to stump near every championship golf course in America. Ford zapped Carter over the “misery index.” Carter had employed the cockamamie phrase in 1976 to refer to the combination of unemployment and inflation. Back then the
index had stood at around 15 percent. Unfortunately for Carter and even more so for the average American, by 1980 it had rocketed up to over 21 percent.
⁹³

The Carter team had taken a calculated risk in making the warmonger charge against Reagan, and the president had endured his share of criticism for making the allegation. Still, Carter's campaign remained convinced that Reagan was vulnerable on issues of war and peace. Confirming their strategy, a new poll by NBC News and the Associated Press showed that 41 percent of Americans thought Carter would do the best job at keeping the country out of war; only 16 percent said Reagan. The same poll revealed that voters believed Reagan would do a better job on the economy.
⁹⁴
Carter's men needed to keep attention on the issues which benefited them, and Team Reagan likewise.

Unfortunately for the Reagan campaign, the media were still picking up on the divisions between the Ford/Bush insiders and Reagan's Californian outsiders. Stories in the
New York Times
and the
Los Angeles Times
quoted campaign officials citing chapter and verse against the conservatives while making the former Ford and Bush operatives look smooth and debonair. The biggest target was Lyn Nofziger, who was taken to task for his demeanor, his rumpled clothing, and his inability to kiss the media's asses. Nofziger, as always, had the last word, even in the story: “I see certain people here who were for Ford, certain who were for George Bush and other people I don't like. This is the way I feel: I'll love you until November 4, and then, I'll be out to get you.”
⁹⁵
Not for a moment did anyone doubt Nofziger, who had been a contributor to Richard Nixon's notorious “Enemies List.” It was for this and a million other reasons that Nofziger was simultaneously beloved and feared.

Fortunately for the candidate, such distractions were more than offset by his strong performance in Baltimore and his recent successful stumping. Polls showed that Reagan's fortunes had rebounded somewhat. The
New York Times
, which before the debate had had him down to Carter, 40–36, now had him up, 40–35, and a new NBC–Associated Press poll showed that he had regained the lead over Carter by a wider margin, 42–33.
⁹⁶

Still, Reagan's team felt the need to step things up. Specifically, longtime Reagan aides such as Jeff Bell worried that the campaign needed to do more than simply convince Americans that Carter needed to get kicked out of office. If Reagan won, he would need a mandate to do things. Gauzy, nonspecific ads were finally scrapped near the end of September in favor of more issue-oriented messages offering bold solutions to the ailments of America.

Conservatives did not want another empty win, as in 1972. They wanted this election to stand for something.

“
Americans might be separated, black from white, Jew from Christian, North from South, rural from urban.
”

A
lthough Ronald Reagan had moved slightly ahead of Jimmy Carter in the national polls in late September, his lead was within the margin of error. And while a new Associated Press survey showed Reagan ahead in states with 236 electoral votes, 34 short of the 270 needed, his campaign described his lead in many of these states as “shaky.”
¹
Gerald Ford, the Reaganites reminded themselves, had topped out at 240 electoral votes four years earlier. More telling was the
Washington Post
's in-depth polling in seven battleground states, which showed Carter ahead in New York, Reagan ahead in California, and the race dead even in the other five states, including Texas, Michigan, and New Jersey.
²

Some voters were slowly migrating away from either John Anderson or Carter, because they were coming to believe that one was unelectable and the other was unacceptable. But just as Jeff Bell and other conservatives feared, these voters weren't embracing Reagan because of his ideas, at least not yet; they were simply dubious about the other two candidates and were now in the undecided column.
³

Even Reagan's alma mater, Eureka College in downstate Illinois, seemed ambivalent about him. Reagan was clearly Eureka's most famous alumnus, and if he became president it would rain attention and much-needed endowments onto the sleepy, perpetually cash-strapped school. Still, there were no outward signs of support for Reagan at Eureka. The tiny school did not even bother to display the rare items and documents he had donated over the years. The material instead was stored in the basement of one of the institution's six red brick buildings.

In the 1940s Reagan and his then-wife, Jane Wyman, had approached the school about funding a performing arts center named after the two of them. The school excitedly said yes and Reagan wrote out a sizable check. But in the intervening time, Reagan and Wyman entered into divorce proceedings (at her insistence) and thus Wyman's check never arrived at the school. The plans for the center were quietly shelved by the school's administration.
⁴

Reagan's hometown was less circumspect than his alma mater. Dixon's city fathers, having bought the old Reagan homestead, took out ads in the
New York Times
and other major newspapers touting their new book,
Reagan's Dixon
. “Before you vote,” the ad urged, “this should be must reading for you.”
⁵

There was little more than a month to go before Election Day, and voters were still trying to figure out who Ronald Reagan was.

Reporters would have liked to supply their own answers, but the Reagan campaign continued to curtail media access to the candidate. Many of the hard and often boiled gentlemen of the press sat at the back of the plane, sucking on adult beverages and cigarettes, with little to do except sulk and complain to each other and the staff.

Carter's campaign remained intent on defining Reagan for voters. Not only was the president going hard after the Republican in speeches, but the campaign had also rolled out attack ads “designed to stir questions about Ronald Reagan's ability, at the age of 69, to handle the job,” as the
New York Times
reported.
⁶
One “man on the street” ad featured an American saying, “Reagan scares me,” and another commercial pointed out that while governor, Reagan acted as if California had its own foreign policy.
⁷

Pat Caddell, the president's pollster, saw nothing to dissuade Carter from savaging Reagan. Citing polls showing that Anderson was falling, Caddell believed that the independent would soon be below 10 percent and that Anderson's wandering sheep would eventually rejoin Carter's flock.
⁸

But Caddell's Republican counterpart, Dick Wirthlin, had detected signs in his surveys that Carter's harsh attacks were no longer working. The president, he believed, was playing with fire by continuing to go after Reagan so viciously. Even some White House aides leaked to the press their concerns that the president had “gone overboard” and had “overstated” his arguments against the GOP nominee.
⁹

In a column on Carter's attack apparatus, Tom Wicker of the
New York Times
concluded: “He may win re-election by exaggerations, distortions and innuendo designed to ‘reinforce’ public fear of Mr. Reagan, as well as by clever exploitation of a short public memory for his own promises and pretensions. But next year, when the bands have been stilled and the lights dimmed, what Adlai Stevenson
called ‘the stark problem of governing’ will remain. And Jimmy Carter, in a second term so won, may find himself less admired, less trusted, therefore even less able to lead and achieve than he was in his first. Think of that.”
¹⁰

Carter was not thinking about the long-term implications of this election. In a confidential memo written months earlier, one of his campaign aides, Karl Struble, had bluntly assessed the situation. “The electorate is more volatile and less committed to a presidential candidate … since World War II,” Struble incisively wrote. “Every 30–40 years, the United States has experienced a realigning election (1828, 1860, 1896, 1932).… The last realigning election occurred in 1932. Similar unstable economic conditions and the inability of the dominant party to cast off obsolete ideology, made the ‘New Deal Coalition’ possible. Historically, we are overdue for another realigning election.”

Struble continued: “There is mounting evidence that blue collar workers, urban white ethnics and Southern Democrats are slowly disintegrating as cornerstones of a Democratic majority.… Reagan … could become the lightning rod which realigns our political parties.”
¹¹

T
HE
R
EAGAN CAMPAIGN'S PUBLIC
position at this point was that there would be no new debates. Jody Powell accused Reagan of “duplicity” for refusing to debate without Anderson.
¹²
In truth, there was no clear consensus inside Reagan Central on whether the Gipper should debate again. Indeed, a dispute had broken out among Reagan's inner circle on the subject.

On one side of the divide were the pro-debate “hawks,” including Ed Meese and Bill Casey, who argued for a one-on-one debate with Carter and abandoning the campaign's position that Anderson needed to be included. On the other side were the anti-debate “doves,” such as Bill Timmons, Lyn Nofziger, and Dick Wirthlin, who felt that a debate gaffe would halt the momentum Reagan had recently been building. One dove anonymously told the
New York Times
, “Debates are tough. You're rolling the dice every time you go out.”
¹³

Before the internal debate over debates was over, individuals would shift sides more than once. Three people had yet to really be heard from: Nancy Reagan, Jim Baker, and the Gipper himself.