Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [280]
The reference to big business was the idea of John Sears, who quite brilliantly realized that Reagan could appeal to traditionally Democratic blue-collar workers in the Rust Belt as well as to his base of affluent Sun Belt suburbanites. It did not endear Sears to Tuttle, Dart, and the rest of 4 4 8
Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House the Kitchen Cabinet, though they had to marvel at the efficiency with which he launched the new Reagan campaign. Immediately following the press conference, the Reagans, accompanied by a large contingent from the national media, boarded a chartered 727 for a two-day blitz of the four key early-primary states: New Hampshire, Florida, Illinois, and North Carolina. The Secret Service attached to the Reagans assigned the couple the code names that would follow them the rest of their lives: his was Rawhide, hers Rainbow.71
At every stop, Sears had organized well-planned, well-controlled, and well-timed-for-TV events. For a brief frightening moment, however, at the first stop in Miami, a rally outside a Ramada Inn near the airport, things went awry when a young man waving a toy pistol was wrestled to the ground by the Secret Service as the Reagans stepped off the platform.
A terrified Nancy blamed Ronnie for not precisely following the Secret Service’s instructions. “From now on,” she told him, “if the Secret Service tells you to turn to the left, turn left! Do what they tell you to do!”72
Nancy’s hysteria was somewhat justified. In September two assassination attempts with real guns had been made on President Ford’s life. The first, in Sacramento, was by Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a member of the Charles Manson Family; the second, in San Francisco, was by Sara Jane Moore, a prisoners’ rights fanatic.
Three weeks after Reagan announced, the latest Gallup Poll had him at 40
percent, Ford at 32 percent—numbers that boded well for Sears’s blitzkrieg strategy of knocking the President out of the race with quick wins in New Hampshire in February and Florida in March. By the end of the year, the Reagan campaign had raised $2 million, against $1.7 million raised for Ford.73 After spending Christmas Eve at the home of Charles and Mary Jane Wick—the start of another Reagan ritual—and New Year’s Eve at the Annenbergs’, the Reagans headed for New Hampshire.
On his first day in the Granite State, wearing two sweaters and a ski jacket in 7-degree weather, Reagan told three hundred residents of Moul-tonborough that détente with the Soviet Union had become a “one-way street.” He continued, “I think it’s time for us to straighten up and eyeball them, and say, ‘Hey, fellas, let’s get this back on the track where it’s something for something, not all one way.’” If he were president, he added, he would tell the Russians for starters to get out of Angola, where they were Reagan vs. Ford: 1975–1976
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backing the pro-Communist side in a civil war—“or you’re going to have to deal with us.” The next day New York Times columnist James Reston wrote,
“The more bonnie Ronnie talks, the better President Ford looks. . . . For del-icacy of language and precision of policy, [Reagan] makes Mr. Ford’s statements on détente and Angola seem almost eloquent and statesmanlike.”74
On a second trip to New Hampshire, Reagan went after the welfare system. “There’s a woman in Chicago,” he said. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and is collecting veterans’ benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.” His listeners, however, kept bringing up his proposal to save the federal government $90 billion annually by transferring most of its welfare and social service programs to the states.