In My Time - Dick Cheney [55]
WE LEFT KANSAS CITY on Friday, August 20, feeling pretty good, although with not much of a postconvention “bounce.” On the strength of his untainted, outsider image—and with Watergate and the Nixon pardon still fresh enough to exploit—Jimmy Carter led in the Gallup poll 50 percent to 37 percent. For us that spread was actually an improvement over what we’d seen following the Democratic convention in mid-July, when Ford trailed Carter by 33 points.
When you’re that far down in the polls, at least you can assume you’ve established a floor. Any movement at all is likely to be in your direction. Being way down can also give a campaign a certain spark and provide the candidate the fighting edge he needs. In this case, the underdog was a fellow who had never ended a competition in any place but first. As friendly and easygoing as Jerry Ford was known to be, on the field of political battle he was focused, intense, and accustomed to winning. Whatever the pollsters had to say about the general election, he had just bested the former governor of California and felt he could handle the former governor of Georgia.
As it turned out, he almost did. In the electoral count, the Carter-Ford election of 1976 ended up closer than any other presidential election since 1916, when Woodrow Wilson edged out Charles Evans Hughes. And America wouldn’t see another contest so tight until the Bush-Gore race in 2000.
Having had a stake in both the Ford and George W. Bush campaigns, I’m struck by how much the map changed in the quarter century between them. For one thing, in ’76 the Democrats counted on and got the entire South, excluding only Virginia. Most of those states have rarely gone Democratic since. It was a race in which the Democrat took Texas and Missouri, the Republican took New Jersey and most of New England, and California was still reasonably solid Republican territory. The layout in 2000, when I found myself on the ticket, presented a different world. The lesson I draw is never to pay much heed to any talk of a party having a “lock” on one or another state or region. In the space of a generation, a political map can be practically inverted. When you hear any presidential election outcome described as “transformational,” altering the political world forever, you can put that analysis down as true and valid for exactly four years.
In the general election campaign of 1976, of course, our goal wasn’t to “transform” anything except the very depressing poll numbers in front of us. It took everything we had just to stay in the game. Week after week, Ford slogged away, and little by little he closed in on his opponent. We knew we were gaining ground on Carter, who was also in his first national campaign and making a few mistakes of his own. But it was slow going across a big field. My nagging fear throughout was that in the end the clock would beat us.
A campaign plan drafted by Mike Duval, Foster Chanock, Bob Teeter, and Jerry Jones recommended that the president engage Carter in a series of debates. The president liked the idea of going on the offense and issued the debate challenge in his convention speech. It was a bolder move than it might sound today, when presidential debates are a given and even the running mates are expected to square off. There hadn’t been any debates since Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, and no sitting president had ever agreed to, much less proposed, a joint televised appearance with his opponent.
The Ford-Carter debates are remembered now for one exchange that cost us dearly. It seems almost beside the point