Reagan's Revolution (30 page)

At one point in the Florida effort, David Keene, took it upon himself to less than diplomatically tell the Governor of his concerns about his genteel style of campaigning. Standing in the wings before a speech in Tallahassee with the candidate and Mrs. Reagan, Reagan asked Keene what he should say to the awaiting crowd. Keene replied, “Well, Governor, you have two options: You can go out there and follow the Eleventh Commandment and lose your ass, or you can kick the s— out of Jerry Ford and win this thing.”
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Nancy Reagan was impressed with Keene’s combative attitude and told him so. According to Keene, she said, “That’s what I like to hear.” Reagan did indeed begin to pound on Ford, Kissinger, and company.
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Ford was aiming for a knockout blow over Reagan in Florida. The bigger the margin, the more likely it would be that Reagan would be forced to drop out of the race. The Ford campaign began to dream about a 60 percent to 40 percent thumping of the Gipper.

Reagan’s strategy had always been the two-state knockout punch of New Hampshire and Florida, expecting Ford to roll over and quit sometime before Illinois, but Tom Wicker summarized the Reagan campaign’s predicament, writing for the
New York Times,

Whatever the underlying truth of this psychological warfare, Mr. Reagan did not score a victory in New Hampshire. Now even if he does win in Florida, he cannot project the kind of winner’s aura he had hoped to derive from back-to-back triumphs in the first two primaries. Nor will anything other than a landslide defeat here make Mr. Ford look like such a loser that the Republicans should chance the embarrassment of refusing to nominate an incumbent President who has governed in their name for two years.
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Wicker pointed out that Reagan had one lone hope: to prove by winning early that he, and not Ford, could win in the fall against the Democratic candidate. Now, the strategy had crumbled. In fact, Ford’s exit polls surfaced in Massachusetts showing that GOP voters thought that Ford, not Reagan, was more electable against a Democrat in the fall.
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Reagan finally hit paydirt for the first time in several weeks when he sharpened his attacks on the Ford Administration by charging that it had secretly agreed to turning over the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government, which the State Department asserted was untrue. However, Reagan’s message was starting to reach the voters, as evidenced by the Ford Administration’s denial. Returning to the state on March 4, Reagan assailed the “failures” of the Ford Administration in a press conference in Orlando.

Though he had collapsed in the Florida polls immediately after New Hampshire, he was beginning to recover, yet too slowly for the nerves of Reagan’s senior staff. They talked about “Scenario Number Two,” where Reagan would lose the early primaries—but not badly enough to force him out of the race—until he came into more favorable terrain in the western and southern primaries in April, May, and June. For Reagan to stay in the campaign, under this back-up plan, the campaign would have to keep the coffers filled with contributions, which proved difficult for a candidate losing one primary after another. Although it was true that the primaries of Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Montana, Nevada, and California looked like the Promised Land for Reagan and his team, they had to wander through a desert to get there. Reagan would soon discover how hazardous it could be. Sears, bloodied but unbowed, sustained his consistent and unrelenting manipulation of the national media by subtly streaming Reagan’s message and story into print and onto the evening news, while keeping the press well-informed of the inner-workings of the Reagan campaign.

The same day Reagan ripped Ford in Orlando, all the campaigns that qualified received their last matching funds from the Federal Election Commission, as Congress was rewriting the act and then would send it to Ford’s desk for his signature. Reagan received $175,375, raising his total so far to $1.43 million and eventually the FEC approved $284,000 for Ford, bringing him up to $1.3 million.
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Having been alerted by the Reagan campaign to his March 4 press conference in Orlando to challenge Ford directly, the press turnout was heavy, and several local television and radio stations broadcast the conference live. It was essentially the same speech he had given in New Hampshire. But this time, the audience was not a group of squirming young boys but the Florida and national media.

Reagan unloaded on Ford, saying he and his Secretary of State must be held accountable to history for permitting the United States to slip behind the Russians in terms of military power.

Despite Mr. Ford’s evident decency, honor and patriotism, he has shown neither the vision nor the leadership necessary to halt and reverse the diplomatic and military decline of the United States. That is the truth, and even those of us who like Gerald Ford as a person know it is the truth. . . .

All I can see is what other nations the world over see: collapse of the American will and retreat of American power. There is little doubt in my mind that the Soviet Union will not stop taking advantage of détente until it sees that the American people have elected a new President and appointed a new Secretary of State.

Last year and this, the Soviet Union, using Castro’s mercenaries, intervened decisively in the Angola civil war and routed the pro-Western forces. Yet, Messrs. Ford and Kissinger continue to tell us that we must not let this interfere with détente.
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He also described détente as the Administration’s attempt to make “preemptive concessions,” elaborating,

We have given the Soviets our trade and technology. At Kissinger’s insistence, Mr. Ford snubbed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, one of the great moral leaders of our time. . . . Mr. Ford and Dr. Kissinger ask us to trust their leadership. I confess I find that more and more difficult to do. Henry Kissinger’s stewardship of United States foreign policy has coincided precisely with the loss of United States military supremacy.
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Reporters asked Reagan if he was violating his “Eleventh Commandment,” but Reagan posited that he was attacking Mr. Ford’s policies and not his personality. In the question-and-answer session with reporters, Reagan let loose with another hot blast, saying “I fear for my country when I see White House indifference to the decline in our military position.”
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Ford’s camp had a coordinated nonchalant reaction to the Reagan counteroffensive in Orlando on Ford’s foreign policy. Both Ron Nessen and Bo Callaway were publicly dismissive. But they, along with Dick Cheney, had known all along that Ford was vulnerable over the foreign policy he had inherited from Richard Nixon in the form of Henry Kissinger. “There’s nothing fundamentally new in it. It’s the kind of thing you read in every right-wing magazine in the last five years,” Callaway scoffed to the
New York Times
. Nessen told reporters, “The President’s record and leadership in keeping the national defense second to none is so well known that I really don’t think any response is necessary.”
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But Reagan continued to hold the interest of the White House, as Ford aides in Florida held telephones up to radios and televisions to enable Ford campaign and White House officials at the other end of the line to hear the speech.

Vindicating the distrust with which many regarded the official “ho-hum” reaction of the Ford campaign was the critical fact that Ford had dropped the use of the word “détente” earlier used to describe his foreign policy. This was the most striking concession and proof that Reagan was scoring successful hits on Ford’s foreign policy. Ford also pledged to begin to use the phrase, “peace through strength,” which was Barry Goldwater’s old slogan.

Furthermore, Callaway’s comments about “right-wing” magazines missed the point.
National Review
,
Human Events,
and others were reporting on these foreign policy issues because their readers were troubled about America’s position of strength in the world. For the first time in the campaign, Reagan was now speaking directly to those concerns.

The President Ford Committee knew that Reagan’s newest attack was dangerous to the health of the Ford Administration. While millions in monthly checks were going out en route to Florida’s elderly, the Ford campaign again raised suspicions that Reagan wanted to cancel Social Security.

It all started innocently enough for Reagan, when he said in a speech at an earlier campaign swing through Florida that it was “unfair” for Social Security recipients to have to sacrifice their monthly checks if they were between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-two and earned income of more than $2,700 per year.
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A reporter asked Reagan how he would pay for the cost of the “additional” benefits and he replied, “One of the failures of Social Security as a pension program is that the funds do not grow. They are not invested as they could be in the industrial might of America.” Reporters pressed Reagan, and he replied, “Some economists have proposed that this kind of investment be made.” Reagan had not advocated any fundamental change to the ailing program. He was only musing publicly about solving the system, but it was enough for the Ford campaign to once again make Reagan’s life miserable for a couple of weeks, this time leading up to the Florida primary on March 9.
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Ford pressed the issue. In a live press conference, Ford had been asked if he thought Reagan was too conservative to be elected President, and he replied in the affirmative. Expanding on his differences with Reagan, Ford said, “Let’s take the issue of Social Security. He has suggested from time to time that it ought to be voluntary, not mandatory as it is under the existing law. He has suggested that maybe the funds from the Social Security program ought to be invested in the stock market. I disagree with both of those proposals.”
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In fact, Reagan had suggested in 1964 that Social Security be made voluntary. But he later switched his position. Reagan was simply expressing his concern for the health of the program. In a state like Florida, with millions of retirees, including many from the Midwest and thus predisposed to support fellow Midwesterner Jerry Ford, the controversy helped to renew their doubts about Reagan. Tommy Thomas conceded his concerns to the
New York Times
, saying, “It hurt Reagan,” but he also made it clear that he was “highly distressed over what the Ford campaign has done to distort what Governor Reagan has said about Social Security.”
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In fact, the Social Security trust fund did grow ever so slowly as it was invested in government bonds. But Congress’s constant tinkering with the system and desire to patronize voters by increasing benefits and recipients had removed the system from its sound actuarial basis. Reagan was wrong about the growth of the investments, but he was right about the fundamental problems with the system.

Reagan did not support raising the FICA tax from its 5.85 percent level to 6.15 percent, as Ford did. But he did propose a “blue ribbon” commission to study the plan if he was elected President. Once again, as in New Hampshire, Ford had effectively knocked Reagan off his stride and his message. Reagan had not stepped on the banana peel, per se, but the Ford campaign was doing everything it could trying to throw one under his wingtips.

The elderly vote in Florida in 1976 could not be underestimated. According to surveys, the average age of Republicans in the state was fifty-six, and more than 37 percent were over the age of sixty-five. And the old codgers voted.

A statewide poll conducted in January, long before the New Hampshire primary might have tipped the scales, showed Ford comfortably ahead with older Republican voters. Furthermore, a poll conducted for the
St. Petersburg Times
showed Ford beating Reagan by three-to-one among the elderly voters in Pinellas County. The previous week in Massachusetts, Ford had smashed Reagan among the elderly, 81 to 15 percent, according to one exit survey.
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The tricky thing was
why.

Pro-Ford tallies among seniors baffled pollsters, because, as the
New York
Times
reported, “Virtually all surveys taken in recent years show the elderly in Florida to be more conservative than the norm.” That should have helped Reagan. Results were similar in New Hampshire where Reagan had just lost. “The
New York Times
/
CBS News
surveys in New Hampshire found older voters less favorable toward government job guarantees than are those younger, more opposed to détente with the Soviet Union, more against legalized abortion and more likely to believe that the government was giving too much aid to blacks. In other words, on campaign issues, the elderly tend to side with Mr. Reagan.” Furthermore, the survey showed significantly more seniors believed Reagan had “the personality a President ought to have” and was better suited to “end the nation’s economic difficulties.”
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Ford’s deceptive strength with seniors was due to the fact that seniors were more comfortable with the status quo. Like Ford, many of them were also from the Midwest. Also, much more attention had been given to Reagan’s age, though he was only two years Ford’s senior. Seniors who felt their age believed Reagan must be feeling his too, and this opened up questions about his vitality to be President.

Campaigning in Venice, Reagan addressed enthusiastic crowds of supporters in shopping malls and retirement communities, rhetorically suggesting that some people thought he should get out of the race. The adoring crowds shouted, “No! No!” The stunt was designed for the media, who were beginning to wonder when Reagan would give it up, especially if he lost in Florida. Reagan and his campaigners were trying to get the media to take the long view on this campaign. Reagan told supporters, “I’m not folding my tent and stealing away. I’ll be in Kansas City in August.”
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