In My Time - Dick Cheney [41]
With no political traction or public support, the WIN campaign was quietly abandoned. The buttons and “lick your plate clean” lived on only as inside jokes among the staff and the press. Before long, President Ford was good-natured enough to take a little teasing about them. I’d nearly forgotten about the WIN campaign until Inauguration Day in 1977. President Ford had come over to say goodbye and take one last look around the Oval Office. After he returned to the residence, where the Carters would soon be arriving for coffee before driving to the Capitol, I stayed behind to help gather the last of his personal effects. I opened one of the drawers in his desk and found it filled with red and white WIN buttons as fresh as the day they had been minted at the very beginning of the administration.
The WIN embarrassment was only one of the burdens we carried into the 1974 congressional elections. The greatest, by far, was Watergate and President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. But there was also a growing view in the press that Jerry Ford, though he might be a very decent and well-meaning man, just wasn’t up to the job of president.
Unfortunately, Ford’s easygoing manner and casual demeanor supplied some ammunition for this attitude. After a campaign stop in Grand Junction, Colorado, press attacks on the issue of competence took on a new edge. The president, at the end of a long and grueling campaign swing, crowned the homecoming queen of La Mesa Junior College and bestowed presidential kisses on her and her court. Finding that task a pleasant one, he kissed all the young women again and then delivered a rambling speech. This shaky performance inspired a snide piece in New York magazine, with Ford depicted on the cover as Bozo the Clown.
The November elections dealt us a big setback. The Democrats ultimately picked up forty-nine House seats and four in the Senate, adding to their already decisive majorities in both chambers. This left the new president with a tough hand to play. As a man whose experience on Capitol Hill reached back to 1949, he knew better than any of us that legislative successes were going to be few and far between.
It was in the wake of our loss that Don Rumsfeld and I had dinner one night at the Two Continents restaurant in the Hotel Washington with economist Art Laffer, a creative guy who certainly captured my imagination with a curve he drew on the back of my napkin. What it showed was that you can raise taxes only so high before people become disinclined to work. On the other hand, it’s possible to create incentive—and economic growth—with tax cuts. The Laffer Curve subsequently became one of the hallmarks of supply-side economics. I wish I had known how historic my napkin would become so that I could have saved it.
The idea of cutting taxes certainly suited the times, because the country was now heading into a recession. The president called his economic team together for a two-day meeting in Vail, Colorado, where he was spending his Christmas holidays with the family. The team at the time included assistant for economic affairs Bill Seidman, Treasury Secretary William E. Simon, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Alan Greenspan, who was fast becoming first among those equals. Alan combined economic expertise with an appreciation of practical politics. No less important, he had a real knack for capturing large and complicated ideas in a few well-chosen words. The president liked him and put a lot of stock in his judgment. After I became chief of staff, I would take Alan into the Oval Office, as Don had before me, for lengthy discussions of economic policy.
The Vail meeting generated many of the policies