Richard Reeves on Political Books
Richard Reeves on political Books I only saw Theodore White on the road once during the 1976 presidential campaign. He said that he wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do about the...
...What keeps the Grand Old Party' alive is state election laws-contracts between the two parties to keep others outand a fond hope that Democrats will screw up...
...What there was, though, was some revealing insight into the thinking of Ford's managers and, by projection, an argument that good 01' Jerry could very well be the last Republican President of the United States...
...The Republicans may be really finished, not because of Watergate or Richard Nixon, but because a solid majority of the voting nation, working people and poor people, simply believes that , Republicans have been and are opposed to its basic interests...
...The proceedings, by prior agreement, were off-the-record until publication of the book...
...Durirlg~'th.e...
...Republicans can only hope that the opposition will always nominate George McGovern or run campaigns as lousy as Jimmy Carter's general ejection effort...
...If Jimmy Carter is unpopular in 1980, why should Jerry Brown or Teddy Kennedy stand by and leave the only challenge to a Republican cipher...
...Bold, but not successful...
...There were no startling revelations as Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell Richard Reeves is the author of Convention...
...of the Carter campaign sat around a table with their opponents from the Ford campaign and from the short and long campaigns of their Democratic primary opponents...
...race against Carter, accordiIig . .to, Teeter, one of the Republican (7es":' ident's men asked, "What d0we:ha\le~ to do to Carter to move him 'fur' ,enough so that we can win...
...There was no place on the Republican side of that map where we could theoretically plot Ford and win the election...
...Humphrey was the candid~e- :th~: Ford people thought they had, ,'~e best chance of defeating...
...One way to win was to change the voters' attitudes and perceptions' on issues and policies, which was not a practical thing to consider doing over a ten or twelve week period...
...In other words, the only way the RepUblicans could win without an extraordinarily attractive candidate was to trade on distrust of or dissatisfaction with the Democratic candidateI would argue that that is now the general condition of most American politics, national and local...
...So far, the books on the election of Jimmy Carter, good and bad, have added relatively little new information and not much of an overview of what actually happened as Carter stumbled past Gerald Ford into the White House...
...I quote the Republicans on this only because they proved to be smarter...
...Campaign for President-The Managers Look at '76 is the partial transcript of a three-day conference sponsored in December, 1976 by the Institute of Politics of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard...
...He said that he wasn't sure exactly what he was going to do about the election, but that for all pr~ctical purposes The Making of the' President series was at an end...
...The answer was, "The more you ma'ke..JiiiJi~ look like· Hubert Humphrey,',tlie: better off we are...
...Muskie refused...
...People like Teeter and Duval damn near won the election with an inept candidate representing a party that most of the country despises...
...a leader of the draft-Humphreyrnove-' ment, telephoned the Minnesota Sen~ ator and was told: "I talked to Muriel and the kids last night andtbey encouraged me to go on, and I'm going to be a candidate...
...Which has turned out to be a shame because no one seems capable of taking his place...
...At Ita.ro...
...Payl Simon...
...In September of 1975, according: to Robert Keefe, Senator Henry Jackson's campaign manager, Jackson asked Senator Edmund Muskie to tUR' with him as a vice-presidential, candidatea bold move later unknowingly repeated by Ronald: Reagan and Senator Richard Schw,eiker...
...There was also something of a consensus between Republicans and Democrats at the conference that only Ford's chalJenge to debate Carter allowed the 1976 ejection to be contested...
...Why should Democrats stand by and allow RepUblicans to take the White House because the GOP happens to have the only opposing ballot line...
...We needed something that would cause the country to reserve its judgment...
...After Florida, we would either: be on the way or in trouble...
...At 8 a.m., on April 29, 1976, Rep...
...What all this means for the future, ' I think, is that Democratic Presidents, if they are at all unpopular, will be regularly challenged in primary elections...
...in New Hampshire, and then come down to Florida and take on Governor Wallace,and that was about as far as our planning, went...
...In fact, I think I learned the most from a 157-page book to be published this spring by Ballinger Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...Hubert Humphrey did decide;:-at least for a couple of hours-to ,be_ a,: stop~arter candidate...
...His column is a regular feature o[ The Washington Monthly...
...At 1:30, Huiifi· phrey announced he would n0't'cl!ln' paign...
...Michael Raoul-Duval, Ford's special counsel, put it this way: "Our information suggested that, for all practical purposes, the race might be over by the end of September...
...The debates seemed to be the answer...
...Conferences are usually the "Laverne and Shirley" of a political elite, but this one worked-so does the book...
...We, had thought that if we started early, ,',' Jody Powell said, "without a reelection campaign to worry about or any duties of office to worry about, we could do very well...
...If Carter stayed where he was (in voters' perceptions), there was no possible way that we could win...
...The second thing we could do was to nominate the President as a Democrat And the third thing we could do was to change the perception of Governor Carter as well as that of President Ford...
...Simon got a call saying the decisi9n had been reversed...
...We decided that there were three ways we could win," Silid Robert Teeter, Ford's pollster...
...Campaign for President also sets the record straight on a couple of things and adds a few footnotes to 1976, including these: _ -The idea of a comprehensive Carter campaign plan was a post facto myth concocted between the press, and the candidate's staff...
Vol. 10 • March 1978 • No. 1
