THE 1980 CAMPAIGN

...But even here, Germond and Witcover leave out much that is important: the Carter-Caddell-Rafshoon attempt to focus attention on Chappaquiddick, Reagan's conversion to supply-side economics and to a supply-side appeal in his campaign, which surfaced during the crucial New Hampshire primary, and Kennedy's persistent difficulties in assembling a campaign and presenting a coherent economic program...

...They ignore entirely questions of elite support and popular political dynamics...

...Readers who want a different kind of campaign book might look at The Hidden Election, an anthology edited by political scientists Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers (who write a regular column for The Nation...

...Finally, there are the largely unnoticed interactions between the country's elites and the candidates—specifically, how these ties determine campaign contribution levels, shape policy, and influence media coverage...

...In 1980, Ronald Reagan had to maneuver continually to keep his corporate supply-siders and Republican conservatives equally happy, while Jimmy Carter had to win liberal Wall Streeters and labor officials away from Senator Edward Kennedy...

...16.50...

...Since Theodore White wrote his Making of the President, 1960, campaign books have become a quadrennial institution...

...They argue correctly that Carter's failure to cure stagflation and restore American prestige abroad (epitomized by his failure to get back the hostages) left him politically vulnerable and forced him to shift the campaign focus to his opponent and away from himself, but they don't consider why Carter failed...

...If Reagan had not been able to calm the fears of Republican bankers and economists in June 1980, he might have lacked a certain legitimacy and might have found his supply-side economics treated by the press with the same disdain George McGovern's tax and welfare proposals met with in 1972...

...The Hidden Election is by all odds the best book to date on the 1980 campaign...

...Third, there is the mix of program and external conditions that sets the context for an incumbent's attempts at reelection...

...If Jimmy Carter had tried to impose wage-price controls in the spring of 1980 rather than allowing the Federal Reserve to counter inflation with a recession, he might have entered November with a healthier economy and a better reputation...

...The premise of The Hidden Election is the superficiality of books like Blue Smoke & Mirrors...

...at worst, it reduces that process to a reflection of their preferences...

...Their approach recalls Charles Beard's economic determinism...

...They explain the ideological conversion of some liberals to an anti-government, conservative economics (which places the blame for stagflation on government and calls for reduced rather than better government services) as an expression of "pronounced practicality...

...As it was, when Reagan, flanked by Alan Greenspan and Arthur Burns, presented his budgetary proposals in September, accompanied by figures that a sixth-grader could see were preposterous, no one blinked...

...But like other products of American industry in the late Twentieth Century, their quality has steadily declined over the years, while their price has steadily risen...

...As Carl Everett Ladd argues in the spring 1981 issue of Political Science Quarterly, these polls suggest that an immensely volatile electorate, no longer committed to party and capable of changing its mind overnight (as late as October 24, polls showed 25 per cent of the electorate undecided), created numerous "landslides" during the 1980 election, beginning with the September 1979 Kennedy landslide and continuing through the February 1980 Carter landslide (when Carter decisively led all Democratic and Republican challengers), the July 1980 Reagan landslide, the September 1980 Carter landslide, and the November election...

...The Hidden Election also includes an examination by economist Gerald Epstein of the Federal Reserve's role in economic policy-making—essential reading for those who would understand Carter's failures— and several essays on foreign policy, the welfare state, and the role of the media...

...John Judis (John Judis, a contributing editor of The Progressive, covered the 1980 Presidential campaign for In These Times...

...Burnham remains poised between the alternatives: It is possible that a new Reagan coalition will hold on to majority support while excluding growing numbers of Americans from the political process...

...In their narrative, the electorate remains mute, dissatisfied with Carter, but perhaps capable of supporting him had Reagan's campaign been less competent...

...But their conclusion flies in the face of all the polls taken during the campaign...

...There are always several levels of narrative in a political campaign...

...Germond and Witcover largely ignore the shifts in public sentiment among Southern and blue-collar voters...

...Of course, Ladd may be wrong about this and Witcover and Germond right, but the readers of Blue Smoke ? Mirrors will not be in a position to decide the issue for themselves, because Germond and Witcover do not talk about the decline in political parties and the confused state of voter consciousness...

...In Jimmy Carter's case, this included continuing stagflation and the seeming decline of American influence overseas and his growing uncertainty as a policy-maker—his vacillation between hawk and dove positions on foreign policy and his abandonment of economic policy to the Federal Reserve...

...The reader who wonders whether Reagan will succeed where Carter and Ford failed is left without an answer—or even a well-formulated question...

...The 1980 campaign continued this trend, with much of the battle being fought on television through the skills of the candidates' respective political consultants, Patrick Caddell for Jimmy Carter and Richard Wirthlin for Ronald Reagan...

...The only facet of the campaign that Germond and Witcover explore in any depth is the interaction among the media, the campaign staffs, and the candidates...

...The best chapters of Blue Smoke & Mirrors are on Kennedy's interview with Roger Mudd (which the authors vest with greater importance than it deserves), Reagan's dismissal of his first campaign manager, John Sears, and Gerald Ford's televised flirtation through Walter Cronkite with the Vice Presidency on the Republican ticket...

...Ferguson and Rogers's own contribution traces the development of the Reagan coalition within the corporate and financial elite...

...In the 1980 campaign, there were several dramatic developments worth noting: the growth of Republican sentiment in the South, the relegation of liberalism to a regional philosophy of the Northeast, the growing acceptability of conservative economics among blue-collar workers and union members, the importance of certain social issues among blue-collar Catholics, and the continuing trend toward nonpartisan identification and electoral abstention...

...Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover's chronicle of the 1980 election campaign, Blue Smoke ? Mirrors, is a case in point...

...Second, there is the story of the public's interaction with the candidates, which is shaped not merely by their manipulation of the media, but also by the public's developing needs and sensibilities...

...This aspect of the political campaign has been explored by political scientists and journalists like Walter Dean Burnham, Samuel Lubell, Carl Everett Ladd, and Kevin Phillips...

...As such books as Joe McGinniss's The Selling of the President or Sidney Blumenthal's The Permanent Campaign have demonstrated, there is a politics of appearance that, with the decline of the party system and urban machines, has played an increasingly important role in deciding electoral outcomes...

...its essays cover precisely those aspects of the campaign that Germond and Witcover slight or ignore...

...Germond and Witcover, two able, liberal-minded political columnists, have written an eminently readable account in Blue Smoke & Mirrors of the 1980 election, but also an extremely superficial one...

...Any account of why Reagan won would have to deal with all these levels of the campaign...

...In a concluding chapter, Germond and Witcover argue that "Reagan won by a landslide, not because the bottom fell out of Jimmy Carter's credibility as an effective President on the final weekend, but because that credibility had been eroding steadily, and his failure on that final weekend merely completed and confirmed the erosion...

...In another essay, Walter Dean Burnham, the leading theorist of realignment and the man chiefly responsible for the attention political scientists have begun to give to non-voters, poses the question of whether the 1980 election was a "realignment" of the majority coalition 1932-style or a "dealignment" that merely continued the disintegration of the parties and of any stable coalitions...

...At best, it exposes the tremendous influence that bankers and corporate executives have over the political process...