Ronnie and Nancy_ Their Path to the White House - Bob Colacello [311]
On August 30, the Reagan team gathered at Wexford. In addition to Casey, Meese, Wirthlin, Nofziger, Anderson, Allen, and Deaver, there was a new face: James Baker, who was put in charge of debates. With Deaver’s encouragement, the suave, impeccably groomed, fourth-generation Houston lawyer had managed to win over Nancy, despite his closeness to the Bushes. As Nancy Reynolds told me, “Jim Baker really had a great sense of humor, and he could kid her in a nice way. If you could kid her, that was a big plus.”138 Baker was also seen as a pragmatist who would bolster the basic campaign strategy of keeping the focus on Carter’s “failure of leadership” while at the same time helping Reagan moderate his positions in order to broaden his appeal, particularly to ethnic and blue-collar voters in the big industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest. A tricky balance would have to be maintained, however, for if Reagan came across as abandoning his conservative principles, he would forfeit his hopes of making significant inroads into Carter’s native South.
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Ronnie and Nancy: Their Path to the White House
“Peace through strength” was the new Reagan slogan. In essence, this was a Sears campaign without Sears.
The three candidates went into action on Labor Day: Anderson at a parade in Calumet City, Illinois, his home state; Carter at a picnic in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in the Baptist heart of the South; and Reagan at an
“ethnic festival” in Jersey City, New Jersey. With the Statue of Liberty looming in the background and the flags of Eastern European countries flanking him, Reagan took off his jacket and tie in the sweltering heat and launched into his familiar criticism of Carter’s handling of the economy, which was languishing from 13 percent inflation, 8 percent unemployment, and 12 percent interest rates.139 At the end of the speech, Reagan was joined on the stage by the father of Lech Walesa, the Polish union leader who had defied his country’s Communist regime by taking his shipyard workers out on strike.
A day that started out so well, however, ended in near disaster at Reagan’s last stop, the Michigan State Fair, where he told a predominantly black audience how happy he was to be there “while [Carter] is opening his campaign down there in the city that gave birth to and is the parent body of the Ku Klux Klan.” The crowd gasped, and Reagan knew he had made a major mistake. Not only were his facts wrong—Tuscumbia was neither the Klan’s birthplace nor its headquarters—but his remark came across as an incredibly cheap shot. The next day Carter assailed him for insulting the South, and although Reagan had already rushed to apologize to the governor of Alabama, six other Southern Democratic governors, including Bill Clinton of Arkansas, publicly denounced him.140
Lyn Nofziger, who had supplied Reagan with the erroneous information, persisted in telling reporters that they were making a mountain out of a molehill, which only made the situation worse. Since this fracas came right on top of the Taiwan brouhaha, Nancy realized that there was no one in the top staff who could handle her husband with the subtlety and candor required. The sixty-seven-year-old Casey, who was called “Spacey” behind his back, had never run a national campaign, and while Baker had done a good job for Ford in 1976 and for Bush in the primaries, he wasn’t familiar with Reagan’s idiosyncrasies. Nancy was aware that Deaver had patched things up with his old mentor, Stu Spencer, and while she and Ronnie hadn’t spoken to Spencer in four years, she asked Deaver to see if he would come back.
Spencer agreed and came aboard as national political director three days after the Labor Day fiasco.141 “I started flying with Reagan again,” he told me.
Reagan vs. Carter: 1977–1980
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“I let him vent his spleen on me about going with Ford in ’76. He had a good time, and from then on it was like the way it was before.”142
That weekend, in another sign of the campaign’s tilt to the center, Reagan invited Henry Kissinger to lunch