Reagan's Revolution (19 page)

As if that were not enough, the crushing weight of central government has distorted our federal system and altered the relationship between the levels of government, threatening the freedom of individuals and families. The states and local communities have been demeaned into little more than administrative districts, bureaucratic subdivisions of Big Brother government in Washington, with programs, spending priorities, and tax policies badly warped or dictated by federal overseers. . . .

What I propose is nothing less that a systematic transfer of authority and resources to the states—a program of creative federalism for America’s third century. Federal authority has clearly failed to do the job. Indeed, it has created more problems in welfare, education, housing, food stamps, Medicaid, community and regional development, and revenue sharing to name a few. The sums involved and the potential savings to the taxpayer are large. Transfer of authority in whole or part in all these areas would reduce the outlay of the federal government by more than ninety billion dollars, using the spending levels of fiscal 1976.

To support the proposals of the speech, Bell had prepared reams of background briefing material for Reagan, including endless sample questions and suggested answers. Bell had done the same for Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon preferred paper to people and relied heavily on the briefing books his staff had prepared, constantly asking for updates and new information. It followed therefore—at least in the minds of Sears and Bell—that Reagan should behave likewise.

But remembering one occasion, Bell recounted, “Reagan wouldn’t read the briefing books. It was the first time I’d seen Reagan and Sears fight because John was constantly on him to read the book. And he’d say, ‘Governor, you don’t know anything and Stu Spencer is going to kick us in the ass if you don’t.’ Reagan would say he’d ‘get around to it,’ but they would go back and forth about it whenever Reagan was in the office.”
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Bell further explained the reason for the tension between Reagan and Sears: “Sears was concerned that Reagan didn’t know enough. And Sears’s skepticism is repeated throughout Reagan’s career. Nixon had no ideology. . . . Reagan had a worldview. Because he had a framework, everything always came back to his worldview. Nixon needed the briefing book because he wanted the individual answer. But Reagan was a genius at being able to bring everything back to his worldview. He may stumble on a few facts, but you knew he was operating within a framework.”
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By the 1980s, Republican orthodoxy would become dominated by the federalism he inspired, complete with the mantra of “less government, more freedom.” It is unconscionable to think that any modern Republican would aggressively or gleefully embrace the growth of government or oppose the decentralization of power in Washington. But in 1975, Reagan’s proposal was nothing short of revolutionary.

Federalism was but one of the new paradigms Reagan was reintroducing to the Republican Party and American political thought. Unfortunately for his campaign, his aides did not know how to manage it to his advantage or the political ramifications of the controversy that would ensue.

The speech received scant attention when it was delivered. Reagan’s appearance was only covered by two reporters: a stringer for the
Washington Post
and Martin Schram of
Newsday
, who was writing a “will he or won’t he run?” piece for his newspaper. In his book
Marathon,
Jules Witcover would later write of the speech, “Reagan went on, moving now to his favorite culprit. . . . Reagan was humming now, deeply into his view of the world of federal oppression. . . . Now Reagan the clean broom was ready to offer his magic cleansing power.”
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While this description betrayed Witcover’s liberal sensibilities, his newspaper reportage for the
Washington Post
throughout the campaign was professional and unbiased. Reagan and conservatives were sometimes forced to deal with media bias in the 1970s. Ted Kennedy and other Democrats rarely encountered skepticism from a reporter for a major metropolitan newspaper. But for Reagan and company, it happened more frequently—though not as often as they sometimes imagined.

In his book,
The Reagans
, Hannaford observed, “I heard one of Reagan’s advisers say with a sigh that he suspected that the news media hold Republicans to a higher standard of conduct than they do Democrats and that they hold Ronald Reagan to a higher standard than other Republicans.”
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While reporters ignored the speech, it did gain the attention of Stuart Spencer, a California-based Republican political consultant. Spencer and his partner, Bill Roberts, had masterminded the Reagan gubernatorial campaign of 1966 and his re-election of 1970. Spencer was like much of the new breed of professional political consultants in that issues and ideology were a bore for them. The game was the campaign itself. Like a floating poker game, you bet, you bluffed, you won and lost, and you owed your allegiance to no candidate or issue—just yourself and your cronies in the media and the political industry. Politicians were simply vehicles through which to have fun and make profits.

In 1964, Spencer had handled the California primary for Nelson Rockefeller against Barry Goldwater. Goldwater prevailed and won the Republican nomination, but Spencer acquitted himself well enough to gain Reagan’s and his team’s attention in 1966.

Spencer’s “on again, off again” relationship with Reagan was off again by 1975. Spencer complained about being left out of the early planning of the Reagan effort and he blamed some around Reagan for costing him business. Another report at the time quoted Spencer confiding to an associate, “It’s one thing to elect that right-winger as Governor, it’s another to elect him as President.”
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In any case Spencer arrived “bearing a grudge” according to Cannon:

Spencer was contemptuous of Reagan’s relaxed work habits, saying openly that the former Governor was “lazy.” But he was appalled by the underestimation of Reagan he found in the Ford camp. “Hell, they were asking me if he was going to run at a time Sears had organized New Hampshire and Reagan had set an announcement date,” Spencer once told me. He knew that Reagan was a far superior political candidate than the President, particularly on television. Savvy and combative, Spencer realized from the outset that Ford’s hope of winning the nomination depended on discrediting Reagan.
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With Spencer available, Cheney took note of his anger toward the Reagan operation and signed him up for Ford in October of 1975. Spencer arrived with a big ego, but his credentials and ideas backed it up. The Ford forces had also recruited the legendary Cliff White, architect of Goldwater’s stunning nomination in 1964. White had also been left out of the Reagan effort despite a long and close friendship with the Governor and Mrs. Reagan. These were but two of many ironies that would occur over the course of the campaign.

Spencer was one of the few around the Ford campaign who knew Reagan, knew his people and knew their weaknesses. He took Reagan’s speech and immediately showed it to President Ford Committee staffers, led by Research Director Fred Slight. He also asked economists at the Office of Management and Budget to do a cost analysis of Reagan’s proposals. Ford scribbled a note to James T. Lynn, the Director of the OMB, asking “1) Ron R’s speech on Federal Budget. Gave it in Chicago about month ago. Q – Have we analyzed it?” Lynn personally authored a detailed three-page memo for Ford, reviewing the Reagan speech. Lynn attached a column critical of the speech by Reagan supporter Pat Buchanan.
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Spencer wasn’t thinking about what Reagan would eventually call “New Federalism” or conservative ideology. He was thinking about the upcoming New Hampshire primary, a state where no politician could survive advocating either a state income tax or a state sales tax. Spencer figured, accurately as it would turn out, that he could put Reagan on the defensive in New Hampshire if the Ford campaign could convince the voters there that Reagan’s proposal would mean an unheard of tax increase for them. Spencer’s plan was to tie the issue around Reagan’s neck like a millstone and drown the threat of the Californian.

In the wake of Reagan’s eventual loss, Bell would unfairly be hung with the “goat” label as the national media took it upon themselves to pick the winners and losers and heroes and goats of 1976. Bell was following orders and Reagan’s later problems in New Hampshire over the speech were less a result of its content than a result of the campaign’s inability to handle the controversy. In fact, Dick Wirthlin had polling information showing the Reagan decentralization plan to be politically popular. Ironically, it was the Bell speech that would become the essence of the “New Federalism” proposal Reagan launched during his first year as President in 1981.

Part of the sticky wicket were the conflicting stories and memories about the addendum to the speech in which Bell listed specific targets in the federal budget destined to be returned to the states. While Bell says he had clearance to attach it to the speech, others refuted his claim, saying it was not part of the original speech sent to Los Angeles for review and only showed up attached to the handouts for the media in Chicago. In retrospect, and to his credit, Sears took partial blame for the “$90 billion” speech. “We didn’t have our antenna up. We weren’t thinking how it would be taken in New Hampshire. It was wrong,” he said. “The trouble was not the idea but what it could do to the states.”
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Sears would not worry for long about the speech. He and Jim Lake were busily organizing New Hampshire while Keene was working the South and Black the Midwest.

Eddie Mahe had once quipped that a campaign was “garbage moving in the right direction,”
⁴⁰
and that harsh but accurate description seemed to summarize both the Reagan and Ford efforts in the summer and fall of 1975. Both were riddled with bad judgment, bad timing, and bad luck. It would take a long shakedown period for each campaign to right itself and start talking to the voters instead of just leaking stories to the media about the infighting. The leaks never stopped entirely, especially in Ford’s operation. But the primary season forced both camps to focus on what was most important: winning the nomination.

The animosity between Reagan and Ford and their staffs continued unabated. Most of Ford’s White House and campaign staff could not seem to fathom or understand Reagan, but in the wake of Ford’s problems and low approval numbers, word was drifting back to Washington from Sacramento in late August that Reagan would indeed challenge the beleaguered Chief Executive.

The Ford White House, which finally came to grips with the fact that Reagan was about to formally enter the race, shifted tactics from mocking or ignoring Reagan and began attempting to minimize the differences between the two men. Ford told CBS’s Walter Cronkite “I don’t believe there’s any serious philosophical differences between Governor Reagan and myself.”
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But while Ford was attempting to narrow the ideological gap between himself and his erstwhile conservative challenger, Citizens for Reagan was humming with activity and the planning for a mid-November announcement. Hannaford wrote,

In mid-October, Reagan gave his permission for plans to go forward for a late-November Presidential announcement, probably during the week of the seventeenth. Several of us M Group members met October 17 in Washington to review assignments and plans. Meanwhile, Reagan’s schedule of radio tapings for his program, his newspaper column, and his speeches continued unchanged.
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The news media suggested that a split existed between Reagan’s Washington and California supporters about whether or not he should enter the race. In reality, the only disagreement between the two camps was timing. The Washington crowd, led by Sears and Walker, wanted an early announcement and the Californians, led by Hannaford and Deaver, opted for a later announcement.

Finally, in September, the committee sent a nationwide mailing trumpeting, “The Reagan Presidential campaign is underway.” Nofziger remembered that Sears wanted to announce on November 22 until Nofziger reminded him that it was the anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.

But before Reagan could take center stage, however, there were still several more political bombshells that would drop in Washington: a major shake-up of the Ford Cabinet and, even more stunning, Nelson Rockefeller’s announcement that he would take himself out of consideration for Vice President in 1976.

5
SETTING THE STAGE

“Not the candidate of kooks.”

R
onald Reagan rated live network television coverage of his Washington press conference announcing his decision to challenge Gerald Ford in the Republican primaries, which spoke volumes about the national media’s curiosity about Reagan’s appeal. Many did not understand Reagan’s allure, most could not explain it, and some did not like it. But they had seen his ability to move adoring audiences since 1964 and knew Ford was in for trouble from the conservative riding in from the West. As R.W. “Johnny” Apple wrote for the
New York
Times,

Mr. Reagan begins his campaign without having to silence the snickers that greeted the challenges of the late Estes Kefauver in 1952 or Eugene McCarthy in 1968. This is a considerable accomplishment, made possible by the unusual nature of President Ford’s ascension to power and by Mr. Reagan’s national following and to his sharp sense of timing.
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Certainly the addition of John Sears as Campaign Manager to the Reagan team helped increase the media’s respect for the former California Governor’s bid for the White House. They had known Sears and liked him. They happily wrote stories based on his “leaks.” They ate with him, drank with him, and played poker with him. They reasoned that there must be something special about Reagan, or he could have never landed Sears as his manager.